Corporations spend $250 billion per year brainwashing sheeple. For that sum, they expect a substantial return on investment. And they get one. The Lonely Crowd long ago anticipated the rise of a mindless corporate Borg wholly incapable of thinking for themselves. Competitive consumption addicts drifting unmoored in a sea of nihilism, evaluating right and wrong based upon what every other competitive moron is doing. A school of minnows, easy prey for sociopathic sharks.
My futile goal while in the grocery store is to avoid being monetized by a multinational food processor for fun and profit. Have you ever noticed that the healthy items in the store are never on sale, and the boxed crap always gives a discount at checkout? We live in a country that incentivizes unhealthy lifestyles while at the same time making healthcare less and less affordable to the people who can't afford healthy food.
Think about it. Those who do the back breaking work in this country have the least healthy diets and the least access to healthcare. Hiding exploitation behind a facade of superficial corporate generosity has become an overriding marketing theme in this country. It's not "virtue signaling" as the alt-right claims, it's far worse, it's token virtue. Token acts of kindness to ignore the chasmic gaps in the safety net, that are swallowing families whole. Charitable spectacle. And it's just as much the modus operandi on the far right, as it is on the far left.
The story of this week was a guy who refused to wear a mask in Costco. He claimed he "woke up in a free country". Woke is an interesting choice of words, because that's what alt-right nutjobs call outraged libtards, "Woke". It's a synonym for virtue signaling, intended to denote someone with a superficial concern for right and wrong. It speaks volumes that the alt-right automatically presumes that everyone is equally debased. The term cynical itself means to assume that everyone is equally debauched. Who has more motive to assume that everyone is equally corrupt than those who are profoundly corrupt?
Nevertheless, this drone in Costco didn't wake up in a free country. He woke up in a country controlled by corporations. Opinions on social media were largely in favour of the store manager who turfed the unmasked bandit from the store. However, plenty of people sympathized with his plight. I see both sides: A man fighting back against de facto mob oppression. And a man who is somehow unaware of the fact that he was long ago assimilated by the corporate Borg. From the machine's perspective this guy was no more interesting than a dying trout flopping around on the dock.
Zooming out to the historical perspective, none of this COVID theater of the absurd is a conspiracy, and none of it is going according to "plan".
The human species has always had a need to play god and thereby to pretend to exert control over the incalculable numbers of variables that affect our lives. It works for a while - if only because ANYTHING can work for a while. And then it all explodes. The greater the illusion of control, the larger the meltdown. Nassim Taleb wrote an entire book about "fragility" and the apparent inability of humans to control universal chaos. He concluded that the end result of ever-encroaching sclerotic control is a society wholly unable to handle adversity, creating a veil of Potemkin fragility that is ultimately pierced and then shattered. Voila.
I can condense Taleb's entire book down to one sentence:
We are not God.
I've said it before, this COVID pandemonium could have been avoided if we had a healthy population, but we don't. Toxic frankenfood has poisoned the human race. Add in vaping, binge drinking, xbox addiction, porn addiction, TV addiction, social media addiction, opioids, and big pharma to round out the myriad of toxic corporate vectors that have made this virus lethal.
We live in a human toxic waste dump.
And we can't save those who are addicted to corporate servitude.
Freedom is a choice.