Has our fascination with fake cost us our soul in the west?  Are we terminally modern?  This struggle happening between real and artificial may be the clue to the way the future is going to be.

Turn on any TV set to get the news these days and what do you see? The pre-emptive war in Iraq is treated like a game show.  The line between fantasy and reality has blurred. The conglomerate decision is, they are selling us ideas as well as a war, rounded off to make it palatable so the gullible and the brain dead will swallow it.  If you dumb down at the top, where does that leave the bottom?

In supermarkets today, grape juice doesn’t smell of grapes, and people prefer that.  Flower shops are scented to smell of flowers. Even scent-free soap is scented. Artificial plants are put in parks, because it is too costly to maintain real ones. It is predicted that this is only the start of it.  Artificial is now the norm and is the expected. As we continue to endorse the artificial over the real, what is being lost in the process is our connection with nature and our own inherent nature is being denounced. 

The Orwellian social conditioning experiment is alive and well and degrading what we hold most sacred – life itself. Who cares about the natural world when people are nostalgic for the synthetic?  This whole era of fake is taking away the power of the original.   Are all consumers just dupes leading “false lives” in thrall to the graven idols of marketing? Is shopping no more than a response to existential depression? Is capitalism masquerading as ‘fulfillment’ whilst dedicated to fostering a permanent state of unfulfilled desire?

Consumption in Australia has reached a new flood tide. Total monthly retail sales,  just over $12 billion as little as four years ago, are nearing $17 billion now. Household indebtedness,  $180 billion a decade ago, is nearing $700 billion. We have raised the bar of the quantity of material possessions we possess but are we any happier because of it? Australians are richer, fatter, taller, longer-lived, and bigger spenders these days. But we are also more self-focused and more self-obsessed. There’s a growing tension between the values consumerism espouses and the way we choose to live our lives. The capitalistic system deploys its capacity for consumerism by bringing us into complicity with its own oppression in two ways.   First by turning us into a commodity; next by assimilating our wants to the commodity nexus. It’s a fact that the teenager was invented as a market.

 In ‘Bigger Cages, Longer Chains,’ Larry Law said the image is the final form of commodity.

“The world is full of ideologies that claim to offer freedom, but in reality simply offer us bigger cages and longer chains.  The demand for an end to cages and chains may seem idealistic to some people, but the real idealists are those who think we can carry on as we are”. ----Bigger Cages, Longer Chains.

Timothy Leary called the generation born after 1945 “electroids”, that is, people programmed by electronic means. These developments have never occurred before in human history.

The Image and Artificial Intelligence go hand-in-hand.  According to the New York Times, Vivienne, an interactive companion accessible on powerful, third generation mobile phones, was recently introduced by the company ‘Artificial Life’.

She is a high maintenance, video-image “girlfriend” who goes on dates with you, kisses, speaks six languages, and converses on 35,000 topics. The manufacturers marketing spin is Vivienne is prudish (no sex, no nudity), but hey, not yet anyway.  But you know how it goes, if there’s a market, and pornography is a multi-billion dollar market, then capitalism is always willing to screw a higher percentage out of you for that ever illusive satisfactory profit fix.

If I wanted to control the world I would change the way people viewed the world. I would organise and centralise information by re-writing the history books. I would standardise university textbooks and  ‘normalise’ the images that control the power of language and movies, leaving nothing to chance.  I’d use doublespeak to produce an effect by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously without the person being consciously aware of the contradiction.  It’s no surprise that doublespeak is used a lot in the military.

 In the consumer marketplace, the same principles apply. Take, for example, consumer-orientated, fur-wearing Madonna.  First she’s selling us sex,  now it’s spirituality. For decades she has scoffed, mocked, and thumbed her nose at animal rights activists along- side pal, Gwyneth Paltrow. How did the ‘Material Girl’ become such a spiritual icon anyway?  Her latest white mink coat and sheepskin lined fox fur Cossack hat make headlines around the world.  Pheasant-hunting on her estate with husband Guy Richie, she’s snuffing out life, to focus on the after-life! Sometimes she’s called a feminist, by simulating sex on MTV. Aren’t celebrities the ultimate illusionists? Lordy. Can spirituality and evolutionary progress be approached through fake influences anyhow?  Can the aim of all religions, all of the Ways, be approached through the artificial?  Doublespeak makes bad things, look good.

Well-known Kabbalist, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach knows where the bodies are hidden.  His own online column has this to say on Madonna:

“Far from aggrandising Kabbalah, Madonna’s practice of it sends the message that one can by mystical without being spiritual, and one can claim to be holy while having lost all dignity…”.

The business of inventing and flaunting Playboy’s conception of femininity becomes an indispensable form of social control under technocracy.  

Western culture is a land of freakish face-lifts, fake tans, fake foods, fake advertising, fake feelings, fake celebrity worship and a culture where one can never get enough.  We have constructed the world of our own alienation – and now we are paying for it.