Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” You can have everything and have nothing. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
In my town, the corporate throngs travel almost in unison every morning and every night, making their way from the manicured suburbs to the shiny central city and then back again.
They’re not particularly bad people, you understand. In fact, many of them are pleasant and smart. But they’re being slowly digested into the body of a larger host: the 21st Century Mega-Corp Network.
They wake up each morning in their quiet bedrooms, go through the usual preliminaries, and climb into their modern cars. They turn on the backseat video to anesthetize their kids, drive on inoffensive streets to well-guarded schools, drop the kids off, and head to their quaint train stations. At those stations, their semi-elite status is confirmed by all the other mega-corp employees who live precisely the same way.
As scheduled, the train shows up, and they take their seats. Here, a bit of individuality shows up: One will get predigested “safe facts” from his or her newspaper. Another, his or her gossip from People magazine. The more up to date will watch a show on a brand-new smartphone. Perhaps one or two will plug in to a shiny new iGadget, submerge any thoughts in songs provided by the entertainment corps, and recline, semi-comatose, till they arrive at the city center.
Then they emerge from the trains into a brilliant, cavernous station with wall-to-wall advertising: Buy the newer, faster phone! Take a vacation to a pristine beach, with happy, beautiful people frolicking in their swimsuits! Give your spouse a new car for Christmas!
Omni Consumer Products loves you. (OCP)
Refer to Big Pharmakeia division if you are unhappy or feeling unwell.
Buy more now, be happy.
Let us be most grateful for progress.
Sportsball AKA the local sports collective is available on weekends.
Drive your SUX 9000 in the lane and don’t drive too fast.
Remember Big Telescreen is watching.
Enjoy Lakes Forest Lanes or three things that were destroyed in order to build the subdivision.
And these people will fight tooth and nail for it but what happens when they actually have to with no train on time, no electricity, or groceries, no fast food, empty shelves and armed enemies at the gates?
May they show that same determination to survive?
This just in from Carpathian Forest:
Warlord Of Misanthropy