I feel like most people, including myself, my friends and everyone I know, live like sheep in a herd guided by a Shepherd. We are all kept in the dark and we are fed misinformation and lies in order to keep us quiet and obedient. Our attention is directed, under the supervision of the Sheperd, to subjects that are not important, interesting or of real value. Subjects that the Sheperd considers to be safe for us, and at the same time for himself, so that he can continue to control us with ease.
We are encouraged to live simple, ordinary, meaningless, boring, predictable, and safe to those in power, lives. And we are supposed to be performing two important and lifelong activities: produce and consume. And this is because the operation of this strange Machine that represents our economy must continue forever without any problems. And certainly, without any annoying or dangerous questions being asked. Because we are not allowed to ask important questions. Only questions which have to do with these two meaningless activities.
We produce stuff made for consumption and regardless of their purpose and necessity. Then we consume them because we need to make sure that the Machine continues its operation. If it stops, our economy will collapse and then our whole society will suffer.
This planet we all share, struggles to feed and support us. We have spread everywhere like a deadly virus destroying Nature so that the rich can get richer. And as a consequence of that, the poor become poorer and more desperate. We keep on consuming with an ever-growing hunger all the resources available on our planet. And we do that not only for survival, for the food, water and materials we need for a comfortable life. We waste valuable resources making useless products or variants of what we already have so that the cycle of production and consumption keeps on going to generate profits. Our entire illogical and wasteful economy is based on the uninterrupted operation of this Machine with a continuous increase of production and consumption of products even if that makes no sense since we live on an already overpopulated planet with diminishing resources.
We spent a lot of effort and hours every single day in order to produce mostly badly designed and manufactured products from cheap materials and with a short lifespan, which we then have to buy, throw away the old which no longer works and therefore waste further materials and energy in order to keep the Machine operating and therefore ensure our economy does not collapse. So that life as we know it continues, so that people keep on making money i.e. little pieces of coloured paper with numbers on them or just numbers in a computer that mean nothing and have no intrinsic value other than the value we have all agreed to give them. So that the economy works and so that people can still hope and believe that one day they can also become rich and have a nice and comfortable life.
In the meantime, our planet is stripped of its limited resources, Nature is polluted, forests are burnt, animals become extinct, natural habitats are destroyed, our limited fuel resources are reduced, the water we drink gets dirty, the air we breathe gets contaminated, but the Machine keeps on working.
We all serve the Machine and do our best to ensure that it still works and that it keeps on running with the fear of a global economic collapse if something breaks down and the cycle of production and consumption is ever compromised. So, we produce and consume like our survival as a species depends on this, forgetting the fact that this is an artificial and meaningless construct of our own, not some kind of natural process we cannot possibly ignore. You see, there is a profound difference between a man who dies because he has no money to afford medical care and a man who dies from a virus we cannot currently treat by medicine. The former is an artificial problem created by the insanity of our society which could have been avoided if we cared enough. The latter is a real problem because it comes from Nature and we are unable to handle.
There is an enormous difference between a person who loses his house because he is unable to pay his debt and a person who loses his house because a tornado hit it. The former person becomes homeless for no real and important reason but an artificial one based on the conventions and systems we have all agreed to use for our economy. The latter person becomes homeless for a real reason, an attack from Nature, a problem that we must address.
Again, in a well designed and functioning society and economy, a man should never lose his home and suffer from some artificial problem that we have all agreed to accept. It just doesn’t make sense. An animal will never die from starvation in the jungle when there is food available to eat. But a man, the most intelligent species on the planet, will die from starvation if he has no little coloured papers with printed numbers in his pocket to use, even if there is plenty of food all around him. Is this a sign of intelligence? Is this a well thought out economic system and society we should be proud of? Clearly, the animals in the jungle are in a much better situation because they only deal with real problems not fake ones.
So, it looks to me like we are all prisoners and slaves of this bizarre economic system we have created, slaves of the Machine we built under the delusion that this is for our benefit, that the Machine is actually serving us. But the Machine never served us. Instead, we serve the Machine. The Machine never worked for us. We work for the Machine. This Machine has become the purpose of our lives and it is so intricately linked to our survival that its destruction will result in our own death as well. We are not free people anymore. We are not free like the animals which live in the wild. We are slaves trying to understand who our masters are, struggling to survive the Machine. We are passengers of an airplane with no pilots, blindly following its course to an inevitable crash.
A great amount of effort is dedicated by those in power, our masters, to persuade us that we are indeed free and that our freedom and well-being is derived from the continuous operation of the Machine. They tell us that we are free because we can choose what we want to produce and what we want to consume. They tell us that the more we work the more we can consume, as if these two activities have anything to do with a meaningful life. And they tell us that this is a wonderful and free way of living, as long as the Machine keeps on running. It is the operation of the Machine that is used as the primary measure of success and prosperity of any society. It is the amount of stuff we consume that is used as a measurement for the quality of our lives and our level of success and position in society. And so, the primary concern of all nations is to ensure the good operation of the Machine while avoiding any embarrassing questions regarding the purpose or the insanity of our economic system.
Do people look forward to having children in this insane world, when they know that they will also become slaves of the Machine?
When people complain, it is about things that do not really matter because they’re not important. These are small and artificial problems. People want more money not only because they need it to survive but also because they want to be able to consume more. They feel happy, safe, and of course successful when they consume more. And that makes the Machine happy.
Produce and consume. This is the true meaning and purpose of life in our world. All other things we do are just illusions of purpose to make us feel happy, important and make us believe that we can have meaningful lives. To trick us, to delude us so that we don’t ask too many tough questions. We are all coggles of the Machine to be replaced by other stronger ones when we are unable or too old to function as we are supposed to.
This is life on Earth in the beginning of the 21st century.
Prometheus Unbound 