Buy Now Pay Later.
The four most dangerous words in the english language are, buy now pay later. Well, some may disagree, but in the next few words, I am going to show you why they are.
Whether you like it or not, everybody sells their soul to the devil...I just decided that I'd get a damn good price for mine from Mephistopheles' agent.
Just as Luke Skywalker needed Yoda and King Arthur needed Merlin, fate had decreed that I would meet and learn from R. Little did I know then, but this great man would show me the tricks needed to thrive in this dreadful new dog-eat-dog world of self-serving capitalism while also ensuring that my corrupt side was cultivated successfully. Admittedly, this second task was made simple by my natural propensity for the principal vices on this planet. I needed money. Big Money.
There is a part of us humans that can never be satisfied no matter what. The genius that invented money as a medium of exchange must have been a psychologist possessed by a vicious evil spirit that knows no bounds. You see, money is the root of all evil and I'm sure you've heard that numerous times. But it simply and truly is.
Those that have it will do all sorts of evil (the prettiest people do the ugliest things on the road to riches and diamond rings). Those that do not have it, do the ugliest things to get it as well. So both sides of the coin are entrenched in dirty business. And that my friends, is where you lose your soul and become a slave to the beast.
In order to survive in this cut-throat-survival-of-the-fittest world, you must do and acquire certain things to present a facade of success to the outside world. This appeals to that element of insatiable demand within the human soul. Think about it, with the exception of the five human basic needs: air, water, clothes, shelter and food, what else do we really need?
Well, there are certain things that one must utilise to make twenty-first century living as comfortable as possible: mobile communication, all forms of transport, decent housing (in a good neighbourhood with enough space to swing a cat...well furnished of course and therein lies the devil). It's when you want to 'live comfortable' that things get complicated whereby you end up selling your soul and becoming a slave to the things that you 'need' to acquire.
One definite consequence of the recent boom times is an increasingly divided, dissatisfied society. Self-serving capitalists' ostentatious display of wealth help make sure the less well-off feel that they are working in Mcjobs and so act like the underclass that they are rapidly becoming.
Between 1990 and 2005 the top one percent of the UK's richest peoples' share of the national wealth moved up from seventeen percent to twenty-five percent and has undoubtedly risen further since then. The rich are getting richer and the poor are gettting poorer. Ironically, this was especially true under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's management of UK plc. Eighteen years out of power made these guys so paranoid about being viewed as 'old labour' that everytime the business community asked for 'business-friendly' reforms they rolled over and allowed tax and regulatory changes that facilitated the rich accumulating ever more capital.
This very visible ever-widening disparity in wealth helps cause such resentment that an increasingly violent, crime-ridden society becomes a racing certainity. In Great Britain, we are all Thatcher's children now living in a country where there is 'no such thing as society' - just a bunch of individuals competing with each other for the scraps on the table. In this unhappy dog-eat-dog world the only answer for many of the repressed is, as 50 Cent so sweetly put it, to 'get rich or die trying'. Call me old fashioned, but that attitude doesn't seem condusive to a healthy, joyous society.
Admittedly, this process has been helped by the decline in religion and the discrediting of its successor, left-wing idealism, by the failed experiments in Russia and China during the twentieth century. Into the void stepped money as the one true God and the Gospel according to Adam Smith became the only one that anyone now listens to. We are missionaries for the new faith and our conspicuous consumption is a testament to modern day slavery to the Almighty dollar.
Capitalist economies can only survive if they grow and that requires people to be dissatisfied because only people desperate for material betterment will buy that flashier car or that smarter jacket. To ensure success we have enlisted advertisers as our propagandists to spread the word. These scumbags will sell us the ice cream that makes us fat and then make sure we buy the diet pill to make us slim.
The trick is to make people as unhappy about themselves as possible so that they strive to spend the cash (which is not theirs) in the false hope that it will make them happy and sexy. The last thing they want is for you to be content because then you'll just stick with your beaten-up Ford Cortina and the whole system collapses. You can buy now and pay later.
The problem is that money is so clearly a false god and that striving for it single-mindedly generally brings nothing but unhapiness. Desperate attempts to keep up with the Joneses just breed discontent mainly because there is always some joker who's got more than you.
The question, of course, is why haven't have-nots got their stuff together, realised 'all property is theft' and changed an unfair system that condemns them to living as second-class citizens? 'Bread and circuses' were used by the Roman elite to keep the plebeians in line and now we have cable tv and KFC, football and Mcdonald's. As the radical William Corbett said two centuries ago: "I defy you to agitate a man on a full stomach." Radicalising people to try to change a corrupt system is made even harder when the alternatives have been discredited by the likes of Stalin and Mao.
Anyway, our masters have successfully employed clever propaganda to feed our pathetic obsession with celebrities and so distract us from unjustifiable wars and the hideous unfairness of our socio-economic system. What's even worse is that the media have so successfully extolled the virtues of the market economy that most people blindly 'believe the hype' despite Public Enemy's best attempts to try to dissuade us from doing so. Hence we live in a superficial, bling bling society that is neither happy nor peaceful. Mordern-day slaves we all are.
I for one, is in the process of renegotiating with the devil to have my soul back because I shall only spend what is in my pocket. Middle finger to wants. I do not need that holiday in the Maldives. No credit, thank you very much.
And that my friends, is why those four words are the most dangerous in the english language.
I hope you guys leave this post with a bit of your soul back.
Now could somebody pass me a pair of scissors. I have some plastic to...fill in the rest. You know how that story ends.
7 comments:
Beautiful. BEAUTIFUL!! Which is why underemployed is (should be) the new organic. Make do. Find your talents. Be creative. Grow and cook your own food. Put together your latest fashions on what's already in your closet or recycle somebody else's from the resale store.
How can we be starving amidst all this plenty? We're not, but we've been convinvced that we are. It's the illusion of need that's keeping us hungry, and we find ourselves fat and bloated and still hungry.
Yes, there are people truly, TRULY in need and it's not us. But we are deluded to think that it is and have stopped giving out of fear.
I have tried the communal living thing and that doesn't work either because there are so many wolves among the sheep.
But simply changing our view of our reality WILL work, and help us stop feeding the beast.
Good luck, I know you can do this because you see beauty in creativity and inspiration and not in pointless "bling". And because of your brilliant thoughts here, I am renewing my efforts.
POWERFUL!
I am going to challenge this just a wee bit and say that money is not the root of all evil. Money is just currency. If you replaced that currency with something else that a majority of people decide is valuable, then you have the same dilemma. Consider the tulip crisis in Holland in the 1600s. Replace cash, securitized mortgages, CDOs and credit-default swaps with tulips and the 2008 crisis is akin to the tulip depression several centuries ago. Even the barter system can enable the innate greed that lies within some people. For me, money is not the root of all evil. Fear and insecurity are the root of all evil. Those things breed racism, greed, a need to seem better than others and a whole host of other negative traits and outcomes. I am even going to go as far as to say that inject fear and insecurity into religion and this supposedly more elevated aspect of of human life starts to reek of judgment and repression. We all live with some degree of fear and insecurity -- and when we behave badly toward someone else, we can be certain that at the core of that behaviour is one or both of these two states. So we try to ameliorate those feelings. Some people do positive things for the benefit of many (albeit some do it with a self-interested heart). And others do self-interested things (including making more and more money), which, when taken to the nth degree, sometimes yields "evil" results. Money is just a currency, a means, a thing -it is neither good nor evil. It the emotion that we bring to the obtaining, use and loss of money that colors it one way or the other.
Wise words. Debt is a big step to enslavement... STAY AWAY FROM IT!
great post! someone wise once told me: "Cash. Only pay cash! Credit card is death."
Nice post, David. I think people put themselves in debt because their state of mind. If you're constantly living in à State of mind to prove yourself to the world, money Will take over your life. We're born alone, and we'll certainly die alone, the only person we have to prove something to is ourself.
I'm very aware of the things I buy. I always ask myself, do I need it, will it make me happy, will it make my life better and can I afford it. If the answer is yes to all of those questions, I buy it. I have a creditcard to purchase things online but I never spent money I don't have. I refuse to do it. As I grow older, material satisfaction isn't the only thing in life that will keep me satisfied anymore.
So again, it's just your state of mind. I believe in being connected to the universe, and all the things you'll need will be provided. That doesn't mean you have to sit on your lazy ass, but just not "pushing" ourselves in life. Why? We can't bring along all the materialistic things to our grave...
yet again you have looked in to my soul I was that person with the buy now pay later syndrome, you feel as if you have all the money in the world, as you can afford that 80 pound top because you can pay later.
Now I dont have credit cards or credit of any kind, and am working steadily through my debt as I actually want to be somewhere in a few years, credit is death its so liberating when you can actually afford to pay for something outright
Well written article, but I too agree with the Photodiarist that money is not the root of all evil but rather the emotion that is attached to money that is the problem.
In this society today even credit or credit cards are not the problem, rather the people that take out the credit and can not efficiently manage the credit because they have borrowed for emotional reasons(to buy a holiday, a car etc)
Compare this to an astute business person that takes credit from a bank, grows his business, pays back the credit and now makes the money work for them.
I believe our society is in the problems it is in today not because of capitalism, but our continual need to make excuses for our selves in order to run away from our own insecurities.
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