The market economy as a trap for the consumer model

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Let's assume a hypothetical situation: we live on an island with no connection with the outside world, and we grow corn, which we eat, and we grow it poorly - that's why we eat poorly.

And if we learned to somehow grow it better, then we would have more of it. And we use all our reserves - labor, mental - to learn how to grow corn. On this path, we reward ourselves and punish ourselves. The goal is clear: more corn. And it depends only on us how quickly we will achieve this goal.

In this situation, even taking into account the fact that there is not enough corn yet, and everything, let's say, is not very good in the current reality - there is no gloom of a dead end. In this situation, there is a path and evaluation criteria, and a prospect for society. It was not enough - there will be a lot!

The transition (leap, fall) of sociopsychology from realistic thinking to market thinking meant from the very first days the greatest shock for any linear perspective. And not only in life, but also in the head, in the moods. We not only lost our way, but also lost our way of thinking, all these “points A” and “points B” disappeared from Stalin's problem books.

First of all: the "corn" society, which we invented to simulate the situation, does not have the goal of increasing the volume of corn cultivation. Profit is determined not in tons and not in kilograms, but in banknotes that have an obviously conventional character, tied to power and domination. If you are the owner of many tons of corn, and your corn has rotted away, then you have not millions of profits, but millions of losses.

A big harvest does not mean big profits: it is often a crop failure that makes rich farmers rich when prices skyrocket due to a shortage of corn. And a "gift of God", a high harvest - in the conditions of the market will rather ruin than enrich.

The standard of living of a person in such a society is completely unrelated to how he works, what benefits he brings to society. Most of all, the standard of living is associated with the ability and desire to terrorize and blackmail other people, to squeeze out of the relationship a configuration that is beneficial for oneself (and, therefore, unfavorable for the counterparty) configuration.

+++

A favorite of the pastoral paintings of all great writers, from Homer to Stephen King, is a farmer. When they want to portray goodness, they resort to the image of Arcadia, to a person who works on the earth. And this is a grateful environment for the artist.

Here is goodness - how a person works in the field. Here is goodness - how he collected his corn and took it to the market, and grateful buyers smile at him, for whom he is a breadwinner. Here is the goodness of how, having sold his honest, in the field of his face, the grown crop, having made the townspeople happy with mamalyga and popcorn, this "sower and keeper", a God-bearing peasant, pampers his family: he buys something for his wife, something for his children. Goodness again! From sowing to harvest and harvest festival - one continuous goodness!

And now let's say two terrible words that will burn Arcadia, like Sodom and Gomorrah, to the glass firing: conjuncture and free prices!

Our God-bearer can smile as much as he wants at the Sun and numerous children, while plowing in the sweat of his brow. But as soon as he pokes himself into the market to change, it turns out that there is absolutely nothing to smile about. He is not selling the planned volume of his corn to the state commission at a price known in advance! He will sell it to someone, no one knows to whom, for some, no one knows how much.

This is where the tragedies begin. He raised his corn for a whole year - what if there were heaps of it and no one needed it? And no one told him - there is no State Planning Committee! He, like a fool, spent a whole year, spent on seeds, equipment, fertilizers, etc. - and eventually brought a mountain of snow to the North Pole! Lie down and die …

Or maybe vice versa, and no less scary: he brought a cart of his own corn - and they are looking for it with fire during the day, not enough, there is a terrible shortage! They offer a double, triple price … And here comes a beggar widow, who asks to sell her at the old, low price, because she is starving … But our farmer is not his enemy, they are tearing his hands at new prices! What should he deprive of his children for the sake of the children of this widow?

-Go out with your coppers! - says our farmer, and no longer looks like a blessed god-bearer, as the genius of Stephen King painted him.

And after all, it is difficult to condemn him: in the second situation (when the goods are being torn with hands), no one canceled the first (when the goods are not needed for nothing). The farmer must now stock up on money for a rainy day - so as not to die when the market conditions change …

But the situation of uncertainty in the market, fraught with tragedies of uselessness or worldliness, is not the worst (although it is terrible: you do it and you don’t know: either you are busy with something, or you are crushing water in a mortar).

The worst thing is that Someone who buys corn is not at all interested in buying it dearly. And in the most direct and rough sense, without allegories and quotation marks. The cheaper a farmer is forced to sell his corn, the more profitable it is for the buyer. Every money that got into the farmer's wallet was transferred there from the buyer's wallet.

This is how a situation arises in which people are mutually interested in each other's misfortune. In some disasters that undermine the counterparty, making him weak - and therefore docile. To what extent can this interest in someone else's misfortune reach in a market economy - in the words of a classic who hated socialism and communists, I. A. Bunin:

The Russian peasant, having fallen into a situation of market trade with his main commodity, bread, in a matter of years became "wild", "crazy", having learned terrible cruelty towards each other, towards all living things:

“Beggars are poisoned with dogs!”, “Lut! But also the owner! "," Are they burning landlords there? And wonderful! "," For fun, pigeons are knocked off the roofs with stones! " And hungry, skins, hungry! Give her half a pound of bread for all the work, and she will devour it all under you … That was a laugh! " (highlighted by Bunin - E&M note).

Bunin reflects not at all empty sadism without meaning, but precisely the benefit that is quite obvious, including from his stories about life - which someone else's misfortune brings to a market person. Ferocity helps the owner to knock money out of the laborers - otherwise he would be without money. A hungry prostitute is sold cheaper and more willingly well fed, etc.

Cruelty concerns not only the top, as the Marxists thought, who whitewashed the people, equating poverty with righteousness. Market brutality is a game in which there is always one person the hunter and the other the prey. The farm laborer robbed by the owner finds himself a cheap prostitute, and kicks out his own, driving her into the coffin. Yes, and that one, if he drop his wallet, will not call out, and it is not difficult to understand, even to approve of this: take it, girl, from the spicy scum, until he comes to his senses, there may not be another chance in life!

There is no place in the market for pastoral relations - no matter how much our Bunins and their Kings are looking for them. The farmer, personally swarming in the corn, is the same rabid beast of prey as the billionaire manufacturer, only smaller in size. A cat is not kinder than a tiger, although, of course, weaker than a tiger. No form of labor in the marketplace makes a person kinder, every form teaches to rejoice in someone else's misfortune. Even preachers who carry the word of God - and those market players! And where should they go ?! And they have to kick money out of someone else's misfortune, someone else's fear, someone else's stupidity …

+++

To paraphrase a well-known aphorism, I will say: anythe economy corrupts a person [1], marketthe economy corrupts him absolutely. The Deed, turned into a commodity, is deadened, it loses the sacred features of the Deed, it loses its own inner meaning. Its only meaning is payment. Packaging with bread and packaging with poison, if they are at the same price, are identical for the market. A book and a bottle of vodka are indistinguishable in the accounting report, because there is only their price, and no other properties.

The USSR tried to find a way out of this situation, did not find it, fell apart, everyone would cry bitterly at such a "breakdown" of the best aspirations of mankind … But the winners began to laugh and dance on their bones. The gloomy impasse of hopelessness, in which society has no path, no goal, or even society itself, as something unified, they declared the norm of life. Indeed, if you can become rich at the expense of another, then why enrich yourself with him? Explain to lions and hyenas - where and how to walk with the antelopes on the same path!

In two words, the post-Soviet society - dead end of schadenfreude … It is a mutual hysterical malevolence that spews out geysers of backbiting. If the neighbor is doing badly, then we are good until the pig squeals! When the Americans in a week (under Obama) fell and crashed at once five worn-out military aircraft - I wrote about it in such a way that I almost broke my mouth in a smile! Here it is, our chance: they have plundered the American army, serviced the planes shitty, soon, you look, and completely fall apart!

Therefore, they will not be able to finish us off! I reluctantly rejoice when something is bad in Ukraine, and my colleague from Ukraine catches every negative in the Russian Federation in the same way. We have completely forgotten how to rejoice at each other's successes, and it is understandable why: each of their success is a nail in the lid of our coffin, and vice versa. But everyone wants to live …

And we - corrupted by the market cult of success at the expense of others - are involuntarily drawn into this global schadenfreude and backbiting, we voluptuously calculate when this or that neighbor will fall apart, and we know for sure that he voluptuously counts our days in the same way. In such an atmosphere, it is ridiculous and stupid to speak of some kind of global cooperation, of a joint solution to the most pressing problems common to the entire planet.

We hope that the Gulf Stream will stop with them, and they, freezing, will buy more of our gas; On the contrary, they rely on renewable energy sources and oil shale - so that we do not have to pay anything for gas! We, like two killers with knives, circle in front of each other, looking for where to stick the blade …

They dream of chaos in our country, of dead and freezing spaces, torn apart, as in Iraq and Libya, by civil wars. They throw huge efforts and money on this - not to help us in our problems, but to push us into a Ukrainian cattle burial ground. We, of course, pay with the same coin - but it cannot be otherwise.

After all, the very essence of the market corruption of a person and a nation is in a manic thirst to sell the cheap as expensive as possible and buy the expensive as cheaply as possible. The market man longs for a new blockade of Leningrad: after all, there he will be able to exchange diamonds and Faberge eggs for a piece of black bread, for a crouton.

And there is only one step from thirst to direct assistance in organizing the blockade. All these Yugoslav, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Caucasian and other wars are needed to exchange a crouton for a diamond. There is a black magic alignment of big blood and big money on the cosmic scales. Billions in the hands of bankers have not only a monetary denomination, but also a denomination in turtles, human lives. Each of them contains a certain amount of monstrous atrocities, without which it simply could not take shape.

+++

The victors who trampled on the USSR imposed this sinister impasse on humanity, in which the fight against the shortage of corn was replaced by the fight against "extra mouths." The point is not to make more of the product, but to sell it at a higher price, to narrow the circle of its recipients, to “cut off” all the so-called. "Losers". And everyone tries, under fear, to get into the losers cut off by the door.

+++

A society in which the formation of a person takes place in a frantic struggle with other people, and the formation of a nation - in a frantic struggle with other nations - is, of course, a dead end. It cannot formulate ascent, criteria for overall success. The success of one is a misfortune for another, the big house of one family is the homelessness of another, etc.

But can this impasse of post-Sovietism be stable? Obviously not, it is obvious that his floor is inexorably falling through, the bottom is being punched.

The frenzied struggle of people against people, nations against nations, men against women, children against parents - inexorably shakes and destroys everything that served as a connecting material, and was called "civilization." Its inertia is quite strong, and even today we use the achievements of the mind and work of long-dead people who gave us a better world than their own.

But no inertia is infinite. If you think that cynics, determined only to take from life, giving nothing, but more, will be able to sit on the neck of the noble dead forever, then you are a naive person.

No achievement of civilization exists in a buried, unclaimed, non-actualized form. The fire that is not supported is extinguished. Achievements of current civilization turn into artifacts of dead civilizations, if they are not studied, absorbed, or lived by them.

It is the most common heritage of human civilization (and therefore the most valuable in it) that is the least interesting to local egoists of the consumer world. In him, what serves everyone together is not interesting to anyone individually. They try to shift the care of it onto others, and mentally shift it, inventing a "spare humanity" instead of themselves. We, they say, will only have fun and enjoy, and let the granite of knowledge be gnawed by others, "redheads" …

+++

This approach has broken the most key and fundamental concepts of culture. There was a substitution of concepts, when instead of one another is slipped, often the opposite of the original meaning of the term. For example, modern Westernizers and liberals perceive "modernization" as the speed and scale of change, and not at all as quality changes.

In the original version, the meaning of modernization was not at all to change and replace something. Changes in themselves cannot be an end in themselves, this is a mental disorder - all the time to change something without meaning and effect!

The point was, as a result of the changes, to make it is better … And not just something, I myself do not know what, but not similar to the previous one. Modern Westerners, however, see same-sex marriages as a worthy substitute for automation and mechanization of production! What is the point in such a substitution of shocking mutations for improvements - no one knows, including themselves.

But they are really trying to measure modernization by the situation of sexual minorities and the emancipation of psychopaths into everyday life.

The dead end will turn around and is already turning into a large-scale catastrophe - within which the marking time (closely associated with competitive mutual destruction in this crowd) will turn into a “free fall” on the sharp stones of primitiveness.

And I feel sorry for those who, while understanding "modernization" in a peculiar way, do not see this dynamics of the transition from a dead end to a catastrophe - while all reality literally cries out about it!

[1] If anyone is interested in decoding the term, then here it is: all human behavior is divisible into sacred and pragmatic. In sacred actions, a person sacrifices himself and his property in the name of some of his shrines and beliefs. He feeds the sacred with himself. In the pragmatic sphere of behavior, a person, on the contrary, gets what he eats.

The attitude of a professional to what he does for sale inevitably becomes cynical, because the reasoning comes from the position of profit.

A pieceworker strives to hand over more and get rid of work as soon as possible, the one who is on a salary - to leave work under one pretext or another.

A man talks about how lives - not at all like that for what he lives. Consumables cannot be treated with reverence, no one equates children (I live for them) and cattle, slaves (I live off them, I live by them).