Your world, your way!
A luxury cruise line smugly asserts.
Your world?? I don’t think so.
Your way – what is that?
Is it the illusion of being special, powerful, admired, coddled, better than others? Only as far as you exchange value for fantasy. You have to fork over units of worth for your units of luxury and privilege. With
out them, what are you? A medium of worth that is empty of it.
There’s a backdrop of the sacredness of humans. You can do anything if you set your mind to it. That’s the bar set by a humanist society to which anyone can aspire to and reach. It’s a backdrop to consumerism. You are born with all the requirements needed to reach the top – as long as, for whatever reason, you wield the units.
That’s financial capitalism; and it’s gobbling up all other forms of it. Social, familial, cultural, scientific, intellectual…
When we worship ordinary people just for control of the most unqualified forms of capital, reaching their status is not out of reach for anyone. We can get the huge attention for our every act, we can buy that crazy yacht. It won’t be an achievement that transforms humanity that gets us there, it will be basically from manifesting some fortune that society has told us is a birthright. Whether by design, or autopoiesis, our world, our way is engineered.
So I am middle aged and have acquired relatively large amounts of financial units (with an entire world giving them worth) to “afford” a trip through the History and culture of Europe (now my world) while being obsequiously escorted (my way). Thus is Europe appropriated and made into a prostitute – a Disneyworld exhibit – in exchange for units of value that flow in the bloodstream of the parasitic leviathan that is wringing genuine worth from humanity’s placenta.