Something Trite

This one is inspired by a prompt from a game being developed by Marty Shambles and a co-collaborator. It's not much ... and as the title implies, it's not novel. In any way, form, or fashion. But it was fun to write.

I know it’s been said before, but I have to say it. I can’t stop myself.

It’s not that society is necessarily built to get you down, but it certainly isn’t built to get you up. Our society in particular, that is to say the early twenty-first century North America, by the Gregorian calendar, is built in such a way that there is practically no path to move from “down” to “up”, but there’s about three hundred thirty million and one ways to go in the reverse.

And I tell you what, the people who somehow manage the upward climb, they don’t seem like it’s all that great up there. But as someone who hasn’t and almost certainly won’t, I’m here to tell you that the view from down here paints a beautiful picture of the top.

Where was I? Society!

Society has a way of keeping everyone wherever they are. Well, if they’re at the bottom that is. And unless they’re at the peak of the top, society tends to have a way of bringing them down to wallow with the rest of us.

They say it’s a bug of the system. “They”, of course, being the people who taste a bit of the heavenly ambrosia before they too are thrown from Olympus like the worms they are. But of course, it’s not. A bug, I mean. It’s definitely “of the system”, but it’s less a bug and more the central feature of the system. That system being, of course, big C Capitalism.

But Terra! I can hear you crying out before you open your mouths, you who are down here at the bottom with me. But Terra! Capitalism isn’t society! Capitalism is the economic system under which we suffer! Society is Fine!

Wrong!

Society is shaped by the systems and structures that support it. Capitalism. Democracy. Republicanism – the political concept, not the political party, which is a different monster. Socialism. The big scary frameworks that grant power to those who find themselves in the favour of them. And no matter how much we try to say “society isn’t the same as capitalism – democracy – politics – any of that”, we cannot escape the fact that all of those things are inherent to our collective experiences, and thus society is those things.

And so, if Capitalism is built with the sole intent of keeping you down, and if Capitalism is one of the systems controlling our existence, then it goes without saying: Society just has a way of keeping you down!

You don’t have to believe me. But I’m right. So. There’s that.