Routine. What you do every day. The same as the day before. Like this night shift week. Work, back to the accommodation, sleep, cyberspace, food, back to work. There's every chance that tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that will be the same. Yesterday was like that, today too, unless anything unexpected intervenes. Millions, billions of people are in the same sort of situation, going round and round the same hamster wheel day after day. Why? Apart from the biological imperative to pass on your genes to the next generation, why on earth do it? Slogging away, day after day, to try and provide a better 'standard of living' for you and yours, only to find, ultimately, that your efforts only really enrich the much-quoted 1%. The bankers, politicians and their assorted hangers-on, the so-called celebrities, famous for being famous and usually, these days, with little or no discernible talent, the magnates and oligarchs enriching themselves at the expense of destroying the jobs, the lives of their underlings. The age of 'greed is good' style over substance. What, for the 99%, is the point of colluding with a system that guarantees your own subjugation? The whole rotten, meretricious edifice ought to be swept away, as far as I'm concerned. But it never will be, because most people can't even see they're being subjugated. To quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four, not for the first time, 'Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious'. Who needs the Thought Police when you've got the tabloid press and its televisual equivalent, and 'reality' TV shows?
Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B
You do it because of the people you love. I'm not sure why I do it sometimes, although I guess my job has intrinsic rewards. If you ignore the cogs in the machine aspect of it, and concentrate on the individuals.
ReplyDeleteThey want us to believe that real change will never happen. But last century showed that it could. The first world war and the depression got us to the point where things might have turned out differently. Maybe next time.
Hello Billy
ReplyDeleteMaybe you're right about doing it for my family, but does there come a point where 'man cannot live by altruism alone'? Perhaps because of the long-term financial stress we've been under, I think that point might be conceivable, if not enactable.
Obviously, those in privileged positions want to stay there, want to retain their wealth, power and influence, they'd be stupid not to, but that still doesn't, to me, explain why so many 'ordinary' people just accept the status quo without even thinking about it, still less taking up cudgels against it. Maybe progress would have been better served by yesterday's asteroid flattening what currently passes for civilisation, and allowing the survivors to start with a 'clean slate'. Having said that, human nature would doubtless pervert any such new beginning pretty quickly. 'Greed is good', after all.
Love & best wishes
Sammy B