The Future Is Bright The Future Is One
Too often, money is used to control and dominate because this important human technology is another way to prop up and facilitate a consumer society. Mass consumption is a consequence of the mass overproduction from a corporate industrial complex whose imperative has become its economic survival at the expense of community and not in service to society. Consequently, its organisational methods, socially, financially and technically, have evolved only a little way from a command and control militaristic structure that uses force to maintain its survival at all costs.
The creation of the mass consumer society is simply the bedfellow of mass production, keeping people trapped in fear and psychological hunger, buying the products it needs to sell to maintain its financial survival. "In a consumer society, there are two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy" (Ivan Illich). In a consumer society, the financial system becomes a weapon of choice to help maintain it.
Instead of facilitating natural human capital based on instinctual reciprocation in relationship and community and the treasuring of uniquely human qualities and talents, like the industries, it serves corporate finance seeks to prioritise itself. It becomes institutionalised industrial legally enforced financial debt that puts financial capital as the primary social aim.
Everyone is forced into an endless cycle of boom and bust and austerity for the many amid avarice for the few. Its underlying cultural ethos determines how we are educated, trained, socially conditioned, brainwashed by advertising. It abuses our treasured uniqueness and squeezes it into a homogenised hyper-competitive cult of libertarian egoic individualism, leaving most people exhausted and burnt out and mentally ill, and the natural resources of the planet depleted.
At its core, the mass consumer society rests on the propagation of psychological separation the external objectification of happiness. In other words, it is all based on a fundamental delusion about the reality of life. It is the industrialised version of what in non-duality circles is referred to as the "Separate Self" or "Separate Me". It is the antithesis of the natural flow of unitary consciousness that is the true reality of life.
It is inevitably a bubble of delusion that will end as more and more people awaken to the reality of the unitary consciousness that underpins all life.
Disparaging, ridiculing, and side-lining such powerfully liberating understanding in a culture that relies on the Separate Me's full (often macho) egoic force is one of the ways the culture maintains itself. Buying off authentic spirituality and transforming it into a corporate mass hierarchical organisation that is organised more like a business than a community group is another. Individualising authentic spirituality and creating an explosion of spiritual confusion is another. Commercialising psychology to become nothing more than a hypnotic soporific to keep everyone as calm as possible so they can continue in this high-pressure existence is another process. Mass brainwashing through advertising is another. Turning the true education of young people into a job training scheme is another.
The first step is individual awakening to what is going on and seeing the root cause as the relentless propagation and reinforcement of the false belief that we are separate from each other and life as a whole. Realising and experiencing our unitary consciousness regularly and align our personal and social lives around less self-centred behaviour. Reorientating our organisation and governments to put human and environmental capital at the top of their agenda and financial capital in service to this is another step. The reorientation of all our social conditioning systems at every level to teach the truth of consciousness is the another. Creating a culture that enables proper human nourishment through appreciating beauty based on understanding truth and sharing love is another. The ingredients for all this to happen are present. We are currently witnessing the frightening collapse of the culture of the Separate Me and the emergence of the culture of unitary consciousness. Let's give the precious resource of our attention to the birth of the latter rather than the death of the former.
