When Future Generations Swing their Pickaxe on Us.

`

Supermarkets don’t mind losing the odd penny on milk, for they know, everybody needs milk. And once they have got you inside their ‘store’ to get your ‘pinta’, they, like the spider, have got you in their web. Now you are into controlled consumption.

For as you walk out of the store with your ‘pinta’ in passing you might just be drawn to those commodities on display which have been reified (made real) so as all confusing contradictions are sucked out of them. Hmm, quite a good price too. Despite yourself, you have been drawn into the prestige of consumption.

So you stop as you walk down the aisle, and there on the altar/shelf the thing/item stands in front of your; shiny, new. You look; someone has invoked desire in you, and desire is a thirsty beast and its thirst will not be denied, it must be quenched.

So you buy and while you are it you buy some more. Now you walk out of the store

with your perfectly packaged purchase (s) which has commodified you into a certain feeling that you are a success. Not only that, you seem kind of...transfigured.

How will future generation view all this?  Will they too swing the pickaxe on life as it was. Just as we have swung our pickaxes and dug with spades and sifted ever so carefully the precious past, to discover the curve of a 4000 year old Athenian street and concluded that this indeed was once a much travelled highway.

Just as we pore over the Parthenon Way and marvel - will they too marvel at our behaviour?

.“Look here” they might say, “...there seems to have been a lot of activity here – indeed, this was one of their busiest thorough fares, maybe we should name it the ‘Supermarket Way’.

“Look, they had these places, perhaps they were their Churches. There seems to have been a relentless saturation of empty spaces by them."

‘Capitalism I think they called it, it appears to have been unfettered.”

“Yes, materialism seems to have been their therapy.”

“Why do you think they behaved in that way?”

“Perhaps it was some deep nihilistic void left in their beings by their inability to control their own destiny.”

“Perhaps, perhaps.

“Look this seems to have been the Capital of this kind of behaviour. Didn’t they call that place, America?”

“Interesting....these American citizens seemed to have overcome their Protestant ethic of an earlier Calvinist age and thrown their savings and future income to the winds.”

“Yes, they appeared to have been the high priests of it all. 'Shopping', isn’t that what they called it?”

“Yes, they were the full time professional shoppers.”

“Yes they seem to have valorised this shopping, judging by these walk ways.”

“Materialism seems to have been their therapy.”

“I suppose it was a consoling replacement for their lost divinity.”

“Can we discern what time all this was?”

“I am sure it was Just around the time of the advent of the neurosciences - when they thought they had ‘free will.”

 “Thought they were making their own histories, eh?”

“Afraid they didn’t realise it was not in circumstances of their own choosing.”