We are just starting to find out the real face of capitalism. However, his face, a male face, has always been there, subtly quiet and observant. Simply, we weren’t allowed to even look at him directly. We had enough fear and enough faith to give him our hand, whatever that was supposed to mean. No need for eye contact, just a mutual agreement, sufficient commitment to fight tooth and nail in any discussion against dictatorships, communism, or whatever useless naïve utopia anyone wants to sell us. Because in the end, we had food on the table and a bed to sleep in.
Then, the internet arrived. And it changed how the story was being crafted. Suddenly, we found ourselves inside the TV studio with the red light on, when all the fables were being written and recorded. Directors, actors, and crew were looking at us like strangers, but without apparent concern: “well, it’s weird they are here but let’s just keep rolling with the next scene. Action!” And man, weren’t we amazed? Amazed and surprised. Surprised and disgusted. Then terrified. Asking ourselves: “Wait. What I’ve just seen through my screen… was that real? Is the world that dark?” The Wizard of Oz was forced to step out of the cubicle and confront the visitors. What their eyes have seen doesn’t matter that much if the story is convincing enough (and they still have the green glasses on). That didn’t last much and the spell was finally broken. This was the first time we had the intuition that something was off. Meanwhile, information, culture, new and fresh stories, documentation, art… were emerging to the surface after being buried since the beginning of civilization. This freedom of ideas, knowledge and individual growth forced the status quo to take a step forward and grasp the nettle => the dot-com bubble. The problem was not about controlling the internet market as they thought; this deviation caused a frontal collision against a physical wall they didn’t even see coming because their minds were in Cyberspace®. The real problem was to take back the narrative again. The one we, the users, the servants, the plebeians, have seen in the darkroom and will never ever forget. Companies then switched from making billions of dollars to changing the world for the better. Connect with friends, share your ideas, find everything you need, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Etcetera & etcetera. The jackpot was not in the product (you 2000s bubbler idiots) but in how useful can be the data that your product generates. Narrative change: our leaders are not driven by money anymore but by honorable principles to make the world a better place. And we idolize them (in a disturbing way, with too many similarities with the ancient gods). They had Zeus, we have Zuckerberg (fuck, that is even too accurate). They had Hera we have Oprah. And Bezos (Apollo) and Musk (Ares) and Gates (Poseidon). And we love to hear what they have to say. Because they are not merely humans, they use their power to seed ideas in their servants. Bill Gates used to say he only rested on Sundays, Musk shows off his crazy work hours per week while Bezos has lots of non-human advice about what you should do if you want to be a successful leader. And what about all the (tech) after-life promises from these prophets/gods? Living in space, interacting through the Metaverse and not in person, infinite energy, upload our conscience to the cloud… All of them resemble biblical promises to postpone our anxiety apart from the immediate problems (that, casually, can only be solved by diluting the power of those deities in favor of new cleaner, fairer, solutions). All these messages are impregnated in the global conscience tissue, generating perfectly designed ideas for our minds: if you are not succeeding already you are a loser. If you are not working all the time you are not working that hard. If you have feelings you will never succeed. Eat or get eaten. This, of course, causes mental distress in a universal layer. The essence of capitalism ideology, as always, is nothing but social Darwinism disguised into a progressist mentality. Confrontation. War. Masculinity. Who were we trying to lie to?
And while aaaaaall of these changes happened, we found ourselves in the same work situation as, 20, 30, 40 years ago? 40 hours a week (minimum) of focused dedication to someone else’s idea of success. We have been witnesses of these technological advances, but on the labor side we still struggling with our 8-hour job, the kids, invoices, structural violence, cancer, sexism, racism, and the list goes on and on. We are stressed, we have anxiety, we feel depressed and someone tells us to meditate, do yoga, go for a run, go throw some axes and get some beers? Our psyche can’t stand any more of this dystopia. Binge-watching on our screens how the world is messed up, how the future is not looking any good and how elites try as hard as they can to maintain the actual world order at any cost: fossil fuels, plastic cataclysm, the exponential growth of social and economic inequality, animal cruelty, useless food waste while global malnutrition, the acceptance that most of our life we will work for another person without a real purpose, complete nihilism regarding politics and politicians… and the list goes on and on. And now that we are opening our eyes, they want to call it “The Great Resignation”. All this mess comes to our minds, in a subconscious way, every time we try to close our eyes and try to sleep. This layer of reality, as much as we try hard to deny it, is still there and soils everything around us. Because deep in our minds we know this doesn’t make any sense at all: we are in 2022. We already have the resources to end most of the problems we’ve been told will be our condemnation: clean water, electric energy, food availability for a growing population, the cure for deathly diseases. They are not 100% solved but we have far more than the necessary technologies and knowledge to tackle them and finally make the earth the paradise that some of the richest people are not interested in (they are interested in the afterlife. Your afterlife). What’s more, we are able to accomplish it without the real need for a revolution because as bad as capitalism is, it sure can be evolved into a system where levels of fairness and happiness are a reality. No need for philosophical archaic debates between socialism/capitalism. Let’s just evolve, we can do better. A gazillion times better.
No, there is no Mental Health Pandemic around the corner, we’ve finally seen capitalism right in the eye. And this COVID pandemic seems to be the final blow for the curtain to fall. Can you guess what is on the other side? A simple, dark, sharp and absolutely polished mirror. And what we see there is not pretty, we don’t like it because we’ve never looked at it before. The mirror’s magical powers are no joke: suicide, depression and drug abuse, addiction, anger and sadness. Violence. All of it increasing in numbers and evolving into things we still don’t understand (when mixed with the huge tech leap that the last 20 years did to our brain). But the problem is not us, as the Mental Health Pandemic prophecy “claims”. We’ve done our part when it came to it, keeping business alive by switching instantly to the only way of telework that sustained the entire economy and prevented collapse. The problem is that the system where we live doesn’t give a damn about human souls in any structural way. We are just commodities with life expectancy. And as long as this is the case, we won’t have any magic pill that shuts up our consciousness, profoundly asleep in the deep of our guts.
Then, the only way to cure ourselves is to cure the system where we live.
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