![Aldous Huxley [courtesy Google Images]](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/72/726252/the-risk-of-being-a-consumer-L-2Hr6I2.jpeg "The risk of being a “consumer”")
Aldous Huxley
[courtesy Google Images]
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Here’s a video of the sort of “Black Friday” store riots that we’ve seen in the past and can expect to see again this Thanksgiving and on the following “Black Friday”. People are running wild for the privilege of purchasing a few scraps of colored plastic and bits of electronic circuitry.
I suspect these videos are of the kind of people who already “love their servitude“. If so, Huxley’s prediction is already coming to pass.
You gotta admit, these “riots” look like fun. They’re certainly funny to see.
But they’re also unnerving. These people are no better behaved than a pack of baboons on Monkey Island. You can almost imagine the rich and powerful throwing some plastic trinkets down into the midst of the “Black Friday rioters” and laughing among themselves at how funny it is to see the “consumers” scramble for bits of trash like baboons squabbling for marshmallows on Monkey Island.
There’s something disturbingly Pavlovian about the way these “rioters” respond when the store’s doors are opened. What do they suppose they’ll find in those stores besides junk that they won’t even want by next Christmas?
These people are scary. I think they already “love their servitude”.
What do these people–these “consumers“–do besides eat,sleep, drink, fornicate, reproduce, and shop for cheap junk? Do these people do anything with their lives that has meaning other than survive? What do they produce? How many truly fit the description of “useless eaters” provided by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger?
There was a time when this world needed these people. Our civilization was sufficiently crude that we needed people who weren’t all that intelligent, educated or motivated to push brooms, stack boxes in warehouses, and shovel dirt out of ditches. But, thanks to machines, automation and robots, we no longer really need many of these “Black Friday rioters”. Worse, there’s not much they can do in this level of civilization to support themselves on their own other than rob and predate on others. They’ve become a dependent class who probably can’t survive in the modern world without welfare, government subsidies and “entitlements”.
But, what really “entitles” a man who won’t or can’t work to eat, and have a car, a home and a family? What entitles a man to reproduce who can’t support himself? What entitles a man (or woman) who can’t work enough to support himself, to nevertheless reproduce children who will likely be even less able to support themselves?
And what “entitles” a “consumer” who can’t produce enough to support himself and his family to claim the wealth of another man who is a “producer”?
My answer is that all of us were made in God’s image and we therefore have an obligation to help and support each other. That’s a cliche’ that’s easily said and hard to do–but that’s my answer.
But I suspect that some people in the “producer” class–especially the super-rich–are not impressed by my answer. The producers are asking, Why should they be required to support all of the “consumers”? They’re asking what do we need all the consumers for other than to produce more plastic gee-gaws to purchase, give each other at Christmas, and then pile up in their garages?
These questions may be morally dangerous, but they’re not irrational.
Why should those who are productive be forced to support those who are, at best, only reproductive? Why should “producers” continue to tear up the world in order to support a mass of “consumers” who are unable to produce anything other than more “consumers”?
We are fast approaching a time when automation and robots will render much of the population not only unproductive but also unnecessary. Inevitably, we will ask Why should we support consumers who are, themselves, unnecessary?
And inevitably, people who ask some of these questions will begin to ask another–if only silently: Why shouldn’t the “herd” be culled to remove most of the consumers and “Black Friday rioters”?
I guarantee that the richest 1% of this nation and the world are talking among themselves about the “consumer problem”. I guarantee that they’re preparing themselves for a time when a huge number of “consumers” will be openly killed or perhaps merely allowed to die due to political circumstances.
Do we need concentration camps to kill of the bottom 20% of this society? Or do we merely need a severe and prolonged economic collapse?
Do we need guillotines or gas chambers to kill the non-productive? Or can we achieve the same result by merely shutting down the power grid for a month or two? Or maybe by instituting Obamacare, complete with “death panels”?
To be clear, I’m not advocating that “consumers” be “culled”. However, I am warning that if you can read this article and understand it, you should recognize that forces are mounting that will inevitably seek to exterminate many of the “consumers”. If you want to survive in the coming years, you’d better find a way to produce more than you consume. That means you either work very hard and very smart so you can produce a lot more than you consume–or you must find a way to live on less than whatever you do produce. But you’d better learn to produce something. And you’d better learn to produce more than you consume.
If you don’t join the producer class, your chances of being exterminated over the coming years will only grow.
I’m not advocating that government stop providing welfare or subsidies (at least not here). But, I am advocating that as a matter of personal survival, you need to stop taking the government’s hand-outs. You need to change your mindset and that of your family and friends to recognize the psychological danger of becoming a dependent/consumer. You need to find a way to live on less than your produce–even that means you leave your $250,000 house to move into a two-bedroom, one bath apartment.
We all consume. Even someone in a coma is a consumer. If you have a pulse, you’re a consumer.
Most of us also produce–at least during the prime of our lives.
Whether you’re a consumer or a producer depends on whether you consume more than you produce or produce more than you consume.
I believe that we’re coming to a time when it’s going to be extremely dangerous to be a “consumer”–someone who consumes more than he or she produces.
And I’m not talking five or ten years from now. Parts of this country are already over-populated by “consumers”–those who consume more than they produce. Much of Detroit is overwhelmed by its consumers and they live lives characterized by violence, disease, criminality, robbery and shortened life expectancy. East L.A. is probably much the same. In the end, community poverty is simply the result of too many consumers and too few producers.
The poverty that’s obvious among Blacks and Hispanics is increasingly also shared by Whites and even Asians. The way out of poverty is not merely having wealth (in the sense that you can receive hand-outs from the government, liar’s loans from the banks, or Master Cards to pay off your Visas). The way out of poverty is by persistently producing more wealth than you consume.
You don’t have to produce $1 billion per year to be a “producer”. If you produce just $10,000 a year, but live on $8,000–you’re a “producer”.
If you’d like avoid winding up in the “ghettos” among masses of consumers, you don’t need a Mc Mansion. You need a modest home you can actually afford without much stress. You need a job or a business where you can continue to produce more than you consume. You need to become a producer–not just in fact, but in your mind.
If you’re going to rely on welfare, subsidies, “entitlements” or credit to survive–even if you can legally claim them–you are diminishing yourself in a way that will will render you vulnerable and perhaps defenseless when the consumers are inevitably “culled”.
We’re coming to a time when reason will challenge and probably overcome the moral and spiritual obligations to help each other. It will be a terrible time marked by a terrible choice: Should we continue to support the ungrateful louts who who can’t support themselves–or should we just let the “consumers” die?
The consequences of that choice will not only affect others’ survival.
It’ll also affect our own chances for salvation.
