Why did the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America burn valuables they had earned by hard labor? Jewelry, clothing and all the rest of it? It was a ritual, and it was called potlatch. Picture it: a member of a wealthy family would bring out the very thing that made him wealthy and destroy it, demonstratively. What savages, you will say. Well, no. We are doing exactly the same thing right now.
Why? For all the same purposes, for show: we are the same savages, our evolution is totally failing to keep up with the development of society, mentally we have stayed in those very same tribes. Why do we need consumption like this? Why do we need such a variety of goods and services? You will say: you don’t need it, so don’t envy what we have. Well, that is fine; my point is that this consumption builds a cage, in which a person is kept as in a circus, and from time to time he steps onto the catwalk and glitters, shows up in the Instagram feed — and here we go again, back into the cage.
We are ready to live in a cage for years just to shine for five minutes on stage. And yes, the cages are arranged so that we can see the others shining. It seems to us that this stream of shining pours onto us without stopping, and we fail to notice that the people appearing in that stream are all different ones, different faces. That does not interest us; the only thing that interests us is the stream — the stream itself, not the person — and then we ourselves appear in the spotlights and vanish back.
We hoard, hoard in our dirty cages, we hoard envy, we hoard jewelry, we are the Indians! Just like them, we hoard so that later, in a single instant, we can burn it all! Burn it so that they, everybody else, see our flame and understand who the boss is here, who the master of these cages is. We are participants in an ancient ritual, mentally infantile, we are bricks, little bricks, and capital runs us from above.
What does capital need this for? For nothing at all — this is a potlatch too, just one level up, with villas and yachts. The same people, no better and no worse and not even more successful. Capital is us, and we are capital. We are little particles of Frankenstein, behind whom there is likewise nothing, just as there is nothing behind our desires: he lives, he consists of us, and he pursues no goals whatsoever.
So what is to be done? Is it even possible to live outside Frankenstein? I do not know the answer to that question; I know only that in order to stop playing potlatch, the first thing you have to do is stop watching the endless stream of shining, disconnect from consuming media, disappear. The world of media will not cease to exist, but… you will move from one Frankenstein into another, into a community where people boast about who ate how many cabbage leaves and saved how many trees with beavers in them. The new car will be replaced by giving up fish, the holiday by the sea by a book read. The same potlatch, only in profile.
In short, everyone has their own Frankenstein; what matters is to understand that and not to attach much importance to media, but simply to live and try to consume less — then there will be less to hoard, which means less time in the cage: the shining will come more often, maybe not as brightly, but more often.