A Dystopian Vision

H.E. over at The Enlightenment Project does something I've been wanting to see for a long time - they illustrates a scenario in which big business gets its way and rules the world.

Needless to say, it's not pretty, nor does the world last long:

The whole earth will be an engine for producing ever more wealth, on an endless upward spiral of more consumption and more work, until the earth is depleted and we are used up. The slag heaps will rise--human waste will accumulate: huddled masses of unproductive individuals who are burnt out and used up. But even the least productive citizens will be put to use as inmates, products of a growing privately-run prison industry on contract from the caretaker state, providing jobs for legions of guards, cafeteria ladies and other service workers, and handsome profits for stockholders.

About the only thing I think was left out is that morality will be super-repressive, as it would be based on a very specific reading of the Bible, and that trangressions would be punished severely. That means no abortion, no birth control, hell, no public acceptance or acknowledgment of the LGBT community, etc. etc.

Ah, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, taken to a very gruesome (but logical) end. H.E. does offer a succinct description of what's happening in the United States in terms of production and consumption:

This is, on a grossly inflated scale, the life most humans have lived until very recently in history: eat to work and work to eat--the endless cycle consumption and toil. It was only after the Industrial Revolution succeeded that a significant number of people could get off the treadmill, and buy time to enjoy themselves--to consume, and produce Culture in the old elitist sense: poetry, music and art for art's sake, literature, philosophy, crafts and pure science, the whole end and purpose of life. Now we're being told to get back on the treadmill and go even faster. Work harder and longer to produce more and consume more. If we achieved so much through those generations devoted to production and consumption, think of how much more we could produce and consume if we eliminated that unproductive leisure time, got back on the treadmill and devoted all our time and energy to production.

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, indeed.


UPDATE: In a roundabout way, that second quote starts to get at why I don't like work.