In the franchised pseudo-communities the stakeholders of local enterprise have been replaced with centralized corporate shareholders. The difference between remote corporate shareholders and the local community stakeholders is an essential distinction to understand. Corporate shareholders seek profits for their companies without concern over the profits and losses to the communities they impact with their goods. Corporate shareholders use their consolidated financial, marketing, and political strength to disempower local small business stakeholders. This power play allows remote shareholders of infectious corporate franchises to seize control, and to influence from afar, the community's social, political, and commercial structures in ways that sicken and ultimately kill the local community. This death struggle is between centralized corporate monoculture and natural and diverse, local community culture.
When we buy junk, we become junk. A disposable society is only fit for disposable people. The loss of craftsmanship to mechanization, specialization and outsourcing, and the orchestrated suffocation of talented tradespeople has turned America into a sweeping, franchised wasteland of disposable goods. We make junk, we consume junk and we are junk. One need not look too far to see entire communities in utter shambles. Planned obsolesce has fostered cities that look like above-ground landfills. These landfill cities are full of transient quasi-gypsy renter-citizens, whose household economic lifeline is subsidized by remote mega-corporations through their international exploitation operations.
When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism. Modern capitalist consumer-life commoditizes people and "educates" them to become human products. A culture that raises and grooms people to be human resource products in a marketplace cultivates non-individuals who experience life through materialism. When people are treated as creators versus products, materialism diminishes. This is because the way people see themselves changes. We see the world as we are, and also as we are treated and seen by others, and by our environmental situation. With rare exceptions, the people who work in corporations, like those working on assembly-lines, are not producers — they are products. This is a distinction that is often overlooked. Human products see the world as a grand carnival of products. Being a human product, versus a producer, makes people feel powerless as ultimately disposable commodities. In consumer life we become what we produce and consume — disposable junk to be used and thrown away.
We predictably to buy the trash we are sold (through conditioning), while turning away from the life-sustaining majesty of real food and towards illusionary, counterfeit foods, which fill us with pesticides, drugs, chemicals, dyes, sweeteners, and brain-altering excitotoxins. We eat from a chemical cauldron of witch-KRAFT, or any non-food in a box with pretty, lying images on the package. There is a disappointing, recurring promise we continue to see, where advertisers avow to deliver meaning and joy to the consumer, but ultimately they only deliver illness and misery. The truth is there is no happiness outside of ourselves. These institutions are criminal enterprises of deceit and ill-intent because they harm people and erode the gift of life and freedom. All of these misdirections, and clever marketing tricks keep us from realizing that the sources of real value come from nature and human resources, both of which we already possess. The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.
One bank hijacks the orange as a marketing symbol and has the audacity to suggest we put our money in their bank, because according to their ad, money does not grow on trees. Of course the exact opposite is true. Wealth does not grow in banks, other than fiat funny-money, but real wealth most certainly does grow on trees. The food, fruit, nuts, oxygen, shade, shelter and habitat of trees have intrinsic, everlasting and real value to human beings. No matter what economic system comes or goes, food and oxygen will always be worth more than gold or any other fiat currency. Money and true wealth do grow on trees. Beautiful food and health are priceless.
Credit card companies, pharmaceutical pushers, automobile advertisers, fast food hawkers, grocery stores and banks all market us solutions, which promise us we will be happier and freer if we contract with them through their offerings. Auto corporations portray their customers exhilaratingly perched on top of a mountain, rather than the reality of being buried under a mountain of debt. They seduce us with visual dreams of being free, and we end up surrendering our precious freedom for a fool's paradise. The master illusionists use these powerful psychological triggers to prey on the deep emotional longings for safety, happiness and freedom we all have. We see it with credit card commercials that promise to protect us from marauding barbarians, but they are the pillaging, new robber-barons themselves — a psychological sleight-of-hand to hide their crime in plain sight. In reality though, it is just more lies.
Real life is imperfect and shows differences and variety, characteristics which are not favored in monocultures. The coveted perfect life is a created standard, which is purposely unattainable. The deceptive, glossy media images of faces, bodies and lifestyles, make us hate ourselves so we will buy a solution to love ourselves once again. The conditioning advertisements make us ashamed of our blemishes, imperfections and flaws, but these so-called flaws are really our strengths and gifts. These images, idols and fixations on conformity and unattainable perfection make us illusion-prisoners. The very brands that promise us relief and personal freedom deliver the opposite of freedom; instead turning us into material junkies. They are using us, and in the process convince us to trade our originality and personal freedom for lives of economic slavery and dependency.
The monocultural corrals-of-thought are forms of enforcement which create class-stratification through brand self-identification. Television and media act as corporate slogan madrasas that indoctrinate and collate future product disciples into obedient purchasing-classes. Oddly, the lower-class buyers see the "big brands" as more sophisticated, not realizing that locally-crafted products often possess the hallmark of real sophistication the higher-class shoppers crave. There is nothing higher-class than real craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands. A craftsperson's hands create authenticity and truth, honesty containing blemishes and imperfections. These inconsistencies are a signature of great beauty; they are unique and defining. Artisan variation is beautiful to the unique eye of the beholder. In contrast, franchises and machines create identical uniformity for equally indistinguishable buyers.
Wake-up! Think for yourself, be yourself and return to what is real. Free your mind and free yourself from brand slavery. We are not safer or more culturally enriched working at big corporations (for health insurance), buying the same products, drinking the same coffee, eating the same devitalized and poisoned foods, and swallowing the same political, entertainment and marketing propaganda. By bombarding each person with hundreds of thousands of commercial messages per year, and through generations of cradle-to-grave consumer conditioning and lifelong intra-cerebral media drips, consumers have bought into the notion that monocultures provide more choice. "Diversity" as a hallowed slogan repeated by minions of mono-consumers is Orwellian Doublespeak like, "war is peace" but which says, "conformity is choice."
We should expand our senses and reason to make wiser choices that bring us in closer, yet more respectful contact with natural life. We must release control. Control is not humble; control is arrogant. We must heal the Earth with sustainable, biodynamic, organic farming, and reject the unnatural, monoculture plant concentration camps of the industrial era of force and control. All monoculture is inherently vulnerable; from plants in gardens to people in urban centers. When you unnaturally crowd animals, including people, into overpopulated and tight quarters, the incidences of diseases will rise. This has been incontrovertibly documented. Taking any plant or animal out of its natural, dynamic, and diverse surroundings increases the number of pests. This happens because the number of pests also become concentrated, as the number of natural pest predators diminish, ultimately requiring more fertilizers, pesticides or antibiotics to forcefully sustain the health of the unnatural monoculture. The simple fact is that livestocks and gardens become stressed and weak as a monoculture. The same can be said of humans, in regards to stress and mental health as it pertains to social mind-cultures. Social mind-diseases arise out of crowding people into limited choice-spaces of artificially homogenized environments. When you narrow people's choices to a limited subset of mass produced experiences, by removing them from the village of natural community life, and put them into monocultures of control, things start to break down. Unhealthy, degenerate and self-destructive viral memes start to breakout, commonplace depression begins to reach a low-boil, and anger and resentment fester like an infection that will not go away. People crowded onto corporate and social conveyor belts, like animals in the slaughter-chutes of factory-farms, are all part of the same big massacre of natural joy.
