a drive-by analysis
We begin with The Edukators, a recent German film.
EXTERIOR. MOUNTAIN CABIN. DAY.
Twenty-something JAN and his two anarchist accomplices are hiding with their captive, the bourgeois HARDENBERG. Like his kidnappers, Hardenberg was once a young radical.
JANHow can someone with your past live the way you do You must have had ideals.
HARDENBERGMy father told me, “Under 30 and not liberal, no heart. Over 30 and still liberal, no brains.”
JANYeah, right. But I don’t believe that crap. It’s the standard excuse of guys like you.
HARDENBERGIt happens slowly, gradually. You hardly notice it.
One day, you abandon your old car. You want a dependable car, with air conditioning, a warranty.
You get married, raise a family, buy a house. The kids need a good education. That costs money. Security! You create endless debts so you need a career to pay them. So you do like they do.
Then one day, to your surprise, at the polls, you vote conservative.
(scene)
In this little myth, which billions today live out (or want to), Hardenberg gives a neat summary of the mechanics of modern slavery in the developed economies of global industrial fascism.
Though every item he mentions serves a necessary function of life on Earth, its form is corrupt. All of these forms (listed in the first column below) are strictly part of the cultural hypnosis of contemporary industrial civilization. There is no objective demand by life for these forms. All of them can be retired and replaced by natural systems (in the second column) that are cheaper, easier, and more enjoyable by 2-3 orders of magnitude:
car foot, bicycle, horse, train, bus marriage love nuclear family extended family house shelter education adult availability money frugality and natural abundance security sociality debt honesty and harvest-based livelihood career pursuing genuine talents selling out selfhood partisanship common sense
Since the house is the most expensive and isolating item above, it anchors our slavery within this system. The house necessitates the other elements. If you have a house, you must get a job to pay for it. To get to work and psychically buffer oneself against its impositions, one likely requires a car.
The trap is set. The house becomes nothing more than a personalized prison cell entailing 30 years of indentured servitude. Observe that “mortgage” means death pledge. Servitude, in the form of a job, leads to time-scarity and parental neglect. The car is the gateway drug of consumer financing and global devastation (as well as a portable Russian Roulette game for the whole family).
Social isolation erodes security. Fear leads to credit card shopping sprees. Debt engenders dreams of freedom, at least for one’s children. Ironically, parents force these dreams on their offspring. Thus, we arrive at education and selling out. One ends the fiasco at the polls, where one tries to compensate for this lifestyle with a indignantly righteous opinion about who should be left holding the bag.
Inasmuch as these are all more or less corollary factors arising from pandemic psychosis, I suppose the causation could be switched around. One fellow I talked to recently said it is the pursuit of a career that leads to everything else, due to the college debt a career entails these days. I was raised by an architect, and I’m cheap, so I’m biased towards the house argument. Maybe it would be better to start with conformity. Or something not on Hardenberg’s list, like a family disaster: a death, catastrophic illness/accident, or bankruptcy. That’s fine, but these pieces come into play in our lives one way or another. And any analysis leads to the same conclusion: no one needs any of this crap.