When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism. Modern capitalist consumer-life commoditizes people and "educates" them to become human products. A culture that raises and grooms people to be human resource products in a marketplace cultivates non-individuals who experience life through materialism. When people are treated as creators versus products, materialism diminishes. This is because the way people see themselves changes. We see the world as we are, and also as we are treated and seen by others, and by our environmental situation. With rare exceptions, the people who work in corporations, like those working on assembly-lines, are not producers — they are products. This is a distinction that is often overlooked. Human products see the world as a grand carnival of products. Being a human product, versus a producer, makes people feel powerless as ultimately disposable commodities. In consumer life we become what we produce and consume — disposable junk to be used and thrown away.
We predictably to buy the trash we are sold (through conditioning), while turning away from the life-sustaining majesty of real food and towards illusionary, counterfeit foods, which fill us with pesticides, drugs, chemicals, dyes, sweeteners, and brain-altering excitotoxins. We eat from a chemical cauldron of witch-KRAFT, or any non-food in a box with pretty, lying images on the package. There is a disappointing, recurring promise we continue to see, where advertisers avow to deliver meaning and joy to the consumer, but ultimately they only deliver illness and misery. The truth is there is no happiness outside of ourselves. These institutions are criminal enterprises of deceit and ill-intent because they harm people and erode the gift of life and freedom. All of these misdirections, and clever marketing tricks keep us from realizing that the sources of real value come from nature and human resources, both of which we already possess. The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.
One bank hijacks the orange as a marketing symbol and has the audacity to suggest we put our money in their bank, because according to their ad, money does not grow on trees. Of course the exact opposite is true. Wealth does not grow in banks, other than fiat funny-money, but real wealth most certainly does grow on trees. The food, fruit, nuts, oxygen, shade, shelter and habitat of trees have intrinsic, everlasting and real value to human beings. No matter what economic system comes or goes, food and oxygen will always be worth more than gold or any other fiat currency. Money and true wealth do grow on trees. Beautiful food and health are priceless.
Credit card companies, pharmaceutical pushers, automobile advertisers, fast food hawkers, grocery stores and banks all market us solutions, which promise us we will be happier and freer if we contract with them through their offerings. Auto corporations portray their customers exhilaratingly perched on top of a mountain, rather than the reality of being buried under a mountain of debt. They seduce us with visual dreams of being free, and we end up surrendering our precious freedom for a fool's paradise. The master illusionists use these powerful psychological triggers to prey on the deep emotional longings for safety, happiness and freedom we all have. We see it with credit card commercials that promise to protect us from marauding barbarians, but they are the pillaging, new robber-barons themselves — a psychological sleight-of-hand to hide their crime in plain sight. In reality though, it is just more lies.
Real life is imperfect and shows differences and variety, characteristics which are not favored in monocultures. The coveted perfect life is a created standard, which is purposely unattainable. The deceptive, glossy media images of faces, bodies and lifestyles, make us hate ourselves so we will buy a solution to love ourselves once again. The conditioning advertisements make us ashamed of our blemishes, imperfections and flaws, but these so-called flaws are really our strengths and gifts. These images, idols and fixations on conformity and unattainable perfection make us illusion-prisoners. The very brands that promise us relief and personal freedom deliver the opposite of freedom; instead turning us into material junkies. They are using us, and in the process convince us to trade our originality and personal freedom for lives of economic slavery and dependency.
The monocultural corrals-of-thought are forms of enforcement which create class-stratification through brand self-identification. Television and media act as corporate slogan madrasas that indoctrinate and collate future product disciples into obedient purchasing-classes. Oddly, the lower-class buyers see the "big brands" as more sophisticated, not realizing that locally-crafted products often possess the hallmark of real sophistication the higher-class shoppers crave. There is nothing higher-class than real craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands. A craftsperson's hands create authenticity and truth, honesty containing blemishes and imperfections. These inconsistencies are a signature of great beauty; they are unique and defining. Artisan variation is beautiful to the unique eye of the beholder. In contrast, franchises and machines create identical uniformity for equally indistinguishable buyers.
Wake-up! Think for yourself, be yourself and return to what is real. Free your mind and free yourself from brand slavery. We are not safer or more culturally enriched working at big corporations (for health insurance), buying the same products, drinking the same coffee, eating the same devitalized and poisoned foods, and swallowing the same political, entertainment and marketing propaganda. By bombarding each person with hundreds of thousands of commercial messages per year, and through generations of cradle-to-grave consumer conditioning and lifelong intra-cerebral media drips, consumers have bought into the notion that monocultures provide more choice. "Diversity" as a hallowed slogan repeated by minions of mono-consumers is Orwellian Doublespeak like, "war is peace" but which says, "conformity is choice."
We should expand our senses and reason to make wiser choices that bring us in closer, yet more respectful contact with natural life. We must release control. Control is not humble; control is arrogant. We must heal the Earth with sustainable, biodynamic, organic farming, and reject the unnatural, monoculture plant concentration camps of the industrial era of force and control. All monoculture is inherently vulnerable; from plants in gardens to people in urban centers. When you unnaturally crowd animals, including people, into overpopulated and tight quarters, the incidences of diseases will rise. This has been incontrovertibly documented. Taking any plant or animal out of its natural, dynamic, and diverse surroundings increases the number of pests. This happens because the number of pests also become concentrated, as the number of natural pest predators diminish, ultimately requiring more fertilizers, pesticides or antibiotics to forcefully sustain the health of the unnatural monoculture. The simple fact is that livestocks and gardens become stressed and weak as a monoculture. The same can be said of humans, in regards to stress and mental health as it pertains to social mind-cultures. Social mind-diseases arise out of crowding people into limited choice-spaces of artificially homogenized environments. When you narrow people's choices to a limited subset of mass produced experiences, by removing them from the village of natural community life, and put them into monocultures of control, things start to break down. Unhealthy, degenerate and self-destructive viral memes start to breakout, commonplace depression begins to reach a low-boil, and anger and resentment fester like an infection that will not go away. People crowded onto corporate and social conveyor belts, like animals in the slaughter-chutes of factory-farms, are all part of the same big massacre of natural joy.
The inextricable entanglement of the total sphere of life as one entity demands we treat it with a level of respect we could only term, self-respect. There is no environment existing as a separate system outside of ourselves; we are a part of the environment, and the environment is a part of us. The biosphere is in a state of homeostatic balance, and its processes contain the distilled intelligence of billions of years of delicate interactions that serve all life. When we try to alter and control nature, we upset those internal regulatory processes and disturb the equilibrium. There are potentially dangerous consequences for irresponsible use of force and control. These concepts are just as true in the sociopolitical ecosystems as they are in the natural world. We must be kind and gentle gardeners with people and nature.
We need to be respectful and careful with nature and the environment. Environmentalism goes beyond corporate green-marketing gimmicks, beyond debates over global warming and beyond the irrefutable molecular pollution of the biosphere. Environmentalism is about life itself, because the environment is the space where all life happens. From the microcosm to the macrocosm, there is a total symbiosis between the environment and all its diverse inhabitants representing an inseparable physical interdependence. From the fungi and billions of microorganisms in a handful of living soil, to intestinal microflora forming the endosymbiotic relationships enabling human digestion, immunity systems, and vitamin synthesis— no part of human life is possible without the total environment. One could say that from the tiny microbes, to higher-order multicellular organisms, we are all in this thing together.
