Hyper Normalisation Response.

It’s hard after watching HN to know what to do. Governments are beholden to the banks, corporations etc and they in turn are beholden to shareholders. Shareholders are the financial equivalent of a nameless factory fishing fleet dredging up the last morsel of marine life. Their portfolios are amoral and a-human numbers meaningless but for their size. The population at large in this scheme of things has no leverage. A metaphor might be a gigantic chocolate wheel where millions of hamsters drive its rotation fed with coco and milk. They eat a little and their little feet make chocolate to grow the wheel. On the outside hundreds of knives skim off the excess. This excess isn’t used it simply accumulates in huge vaults of chocolate bars. The hamsters daren’t stop for fear of going hungry. So back to what to do. It’s easy to blame the shareholders as chocolate skimming charlatans but what if they’re just a product of the wheel spinning too fast? What if the problem is caused by the hamster, in the hope of a little extra food, are over pedalling? Is there a speed between zero and too fast that feeds the hamsters but doesn’t create excess? What if the hamsters slowed down? And what does this mean outside the metaphor? Being a war baby and growing up post war I naturally have minimal desires. It’s easy for me to make do and mend, to buy in charity shops, to maintain and make what I have last and wear extra cloths rather than have the wall-to-wall heating on. Buying is a rare delicacy for me. In bankers parlance I’m a ‘deadbeat’, a person they make no profit from. The film suggests the main ‘work’ of the population is to spend and be in debt because it’s these two areas where we create profit for shareholders. So what if we all adopted my post-war ethos? Adopted as a freeing fulfilling pleasure not a dour penny-pinching austerity. Other than the most poor we could cut our spending by 20% to 40% by ignoring the constant clamour of advertising dictating what we aught to need. This as I see it is the only lever left to us to cause change. By simply ignoring the demands put on us by the current system profits and share prices will drop, it will become a buyers market so prices will drop and we will begin to hold the money and the power that goes with it rather than bankers and shareholders. But will we or won’t we be able to resist the induced lure of a new kitchen, TV or payday loan?