Let us first dispense with a misleading (and superannuated) word: “society.” You and I, mere human beings scrambling to survive, inhabit a marketplace. From the moment we step outside our door, figuratively speaking, contractual and civil laws circumscribe each and every interaction we have with our fellow citizens/consumers. (I’m mindful that, with the absolute governance of private property, this “door” is likely to belong to the mortgage bank rather than us.)
Having left this sanctuary, what should we do? Aside from public areas set aside for recreation, we are to–buy or to sell. But what can we sell? Our mere physical labor, aside from low-wage grunt work in warehouses and such, has little or no market–value. Granted, one can become an apprentice to a carpenter or plumber or roofer, and, with minimal formal training, perhaps eventually make an adequate income. Or perhaps, by walking dogs, mowing lawns, babysitting, working a cash-register–all low-wage jobs which rarely generate a living wage. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: mortgage payments, taxes and insurance premiums, stomachs unrelenting in their daily demands, children who will need that roof and food and “education.”
We need marketable skills; i.e., technical expertise which, given the ever-accelerating changes in computer and related technologies, will require up-to-date training. Young people, aware of this elemental fact, embark on degree programs (borrowing, say, $100K with accrued interest to pay for it), and may end up with business training in finance, marketing, information technology, accounting, and so forth. They have bought such expensive training in the expectation that, finally, they will be able to sell their skill-set (if not themselves) to some anonymous corporation.
Such corporations, tens of thousands of them, are the true inhabitants of the milieux: legal entities which shield the major share-holders from civil (and often criminal) liability for harm, not only to the hapless human beings who sell them their skilled labor, but even more to those millions who buy their thousands of products. Such products, only a small percentage of which are necessary and/or beneficial to “consumers,” are relentlessly marketed through algorithmic calculations 24 hours a day–so that the human person, already habituated to selling her labor (rather than living freely), has also become habituated to the constant stream of subtle “prompts” to buy, buy, buy (rather than enjoying free sensibility and creative thought).
Each and every day, the beleaguered individual, no matter how consciously in denial of her status as both pre-obsolescent technician and disposable commodity, marches on. Her primary motivation? Vague hopes about a financially secure future–to continue this treadmill of children’s college costs, retirement, medical bills, and so forth. In fact, after 20 or more years of such steadfast effort, she may attain the ultimate: ownership of her dwelling, on a 40’ x 60’ plot of land (in what is still anachronistically called a “neighborhood”). Of course, such “neighbors,” informing the newcomer for her own good, insist upon certain standards of appearance and upkeep of this box-with-a-roof, in order to ensure increasing property-values of their adjacent properties. Finally, In “retirement,” the old person can withdraw into her castle, no longer forced to work alongside persons she detests or face the daily stress of the traffic-choked commute.
Each corporation, designed to increase share-value for its primary owners, externalizes as many costs as possible: exorbitant student loans for attainment of mandated skill-sets required for initial and continued “employability,” transport, office attire, and so on. To survive (especially with low-cost housing rapidly disappearing), the individual is drilled to be ambitious for upward “success” in this aptly named “rat race.”
One option remains: although each person may be compelled to accept outrageously one-sided, demoralizing conditions for employment (i.e., the purchase of her labor-skills), she is not forced to buy. What if one chooses to remain…a philosopher, composer, or radical intellectual? One will find very few “buyers” indeed for what one has to offer. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, today’s media-addled populace seems to know “the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
And so, the creative outsider chooses to remain outside, or on the fringes, of this all-encompassing marketplace. If she offers real truth, beauty and wisdom, but finds exceedingly few “buyers,” she nonetheless attains the perspicacious insight that her inner freedom is, in fact, realized through non-participation in a commercialized, dehumanizing milieu which trains, conditions, and degrades the countless millions of persons who are pushed onto the “work/spend treadmill” from which there is no escape-switch.