Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [127]
Lip service is of course paid to such non-quantifiable measures of well-being, but the admiration and respect of the status quo, including many churches, is nonetheless reserved for the financially "successful." Those who aren't wealthy are marginalized in a Darwinian metric derived entirely from financial statistics.
This is not accidental. Water and food in their natural forms simply aren't profitable, and a low-energy intensive lifestyle is equally devoid of profit potential.
If we state that the most valuable possession one can have is personal integrity, this is essentially meaningless in financial terms and therefore it is valueless in the current consumerist frame of reference.
Our integrated understanding is that unprofitable concepts, experiences and objects are derealized in favor of services and goods which can be sold at enormous profit via pervasive mass media marketing.
Thus personal integrity is derealized and tap water is filtered and sold at a stupendous premium in plastic bottles with a brand attached. Real food plucked from the earth is derealized in favor of packaged food loaded with an engineered mix of salt, sugar and fat that is carefully designed to trigger the "reward" centers of the human brain even as it causes chronic disease and deranges the mind.
The goal of the mass marketing/propaganda system is to create what I term an imaginary causal connection between an internal state of satiation/satisfaction (in the adolescent framework the system has established as "obvious," this passes for "happiness") and the purchase of profitable goods and services.
The imaginary/fantasy character of advertising/marketing is well-known but less well known is the divergence between the initial causal connection--buying this brand of brandy causes the consumer to experience a sense of coveted elitism sorely lacking in the rest of his/her life--and the quick degradation of this initial reaction into the background insecurity of ennui (boredom)/dissatisfaction/deprivation/pain.
The sad irony is that the marketing/consumerist version of happiness is actually only a facsimile of true happiness.
The "consumer" experiences happiness only for the fleeting moments of selection and purchase. The inner poverty of this simulacrum remains, gnawing away at whatever fulfillment is left to the incurably insecure "consumer."
This simulacrum of happiness has been distilled down by the marketing/advertising complex to a simplistic, superficial formula:
1. You are a consumer
2. A consumer's worth is measured externally by what is owned, worn, displayed, and by what high-status markers are certified by authority (diploma, elite membership, etc.) or the mass media (desirable avatar, high profile, etc.)
3. Self-worth results from the acquisition of goods and external markers
4. The internal state of consuming/owning scarcity-valued goods and high-status markers is happiness
What is left unspoken is the motivation for this formula:
5. The purpose of this formula is to profitably sell the insecure consumer an unnecessary good or marker which has an entirely imaginary connection to self-worth and happiness.
Being social mammals, humans' reproductive success depends to some degree on the level of status, power and material wealth each individual reaches; thus some 8% of the men in a wide swath of Asia carry genes which trace back to the extraordinarily prolific conqueror Genghis Khan.
But to equate high social status with happiness is to confuse two complex issues: higher status may well provide more access to material sources of well-being, but happiness--a state of mind, an understanding, a practice and a process--cannot be reduced to material ownership.
Indeed, numerous studies of