It strikes me how far we’ve come as a species. We’ve completely minimized the need to constantly be on guard against the endless physical threat of being eaten by a wild animal, or helplessly struck down by the omnipresent, invisible dangers of a minor disease or infection.

And we did it by creating a world where we have to constantly be on guard against endless psychological threat of behavioral and emotional manipulation, and or helplessly having our own interests subsumed by  the omnipresent, invisible dangers of a downright religious commercialism. We are a constantly barraged by a manufactured culture that proselytizes a set of values which solely serve the interests of powerful people, allowing them to get what they want from everybody else ever having assume any slight risk to their person by needing to approach and put others in direct physical jeopardy to coerce them, as it was for most of previous human history. And it’s such an effective program that many people are not just willing to give up their own interests without any physical coercion, but actually thankful to do it. Some are even proud of it.

There’s a reason for having this realization today. I’ve been watching old Twilight Zone episodes, and today I watched the Christmas one where Art Carney plays a wino who becomes Santa Claus. The central theme of this heartwarming episode is that Art Carney’s character redeems himself by producing the precise present everybody he meets wants.

And it struck me, suddenly, just how horrible the values that produced this episode are.

One thing I’ve written about elsewhere—and a topic which will inevitably pop up in great detail somewhere on this site at some point—is that the most effective propaganda isn’t telling people what to believe, it’s simply slipping what you want them to think right past them by giving them explicit messages that validate their own values, but which depend, as a silent device, on assuming the things you want them to believe.

So, this episode’s heartwarming tale of redemption—who could complain about a heartwarming tale of redemption?—didn’t advocate for consumerism. It simply operated, in its entirety, on the silent assumption that giving people a gift they want is the highest good. It openly raised issues of economic class, of prejudice, of corruption in authorities. But it never risked raising the question of whether giving people material possessions is really a virtue, not in any way that might consciously get you to think about it and perhaps question it. No, it just presumed it tacitly.

And that got me thinking. Obviously, people want gifts, they want possessions. If you are someone who says, “Stop giving kids toys, stop giving adults bottles of sherry”, you’re arguably the bad guy. People like those things. Because that’s how deeply ingrained commercial interests have got us to equate supporting their businesses with happines, not just today, but already over 60 years ago when this episode came out. (Notice, you never see anything suggesting that, for Christmas, making your kids or spouse something from the heart might be a virtue. It’s always things that have to be bought that are presented as the key to happiness.)

And I realized, if consumerist propaganda had already taken that solid a hold 60 years ago, and probably long before then, just how big the collective effort to instill it must have been. Fighting it would be tremendously difficult—especially once it was ubiquitous and became a basic and societally widespread assumption that it was essentially the atmosphere we live in permanently. As they say, I don’t know who discovered water but I’m sure it wasn’t a fish.

And it just got me to wondering. This has overwhelmingly bent our society and culture. It’s inseparable from them. It is woven through the fabric of the civilization our ancestors built to escape the savagery of the jungle.

And suddenly, watching the holiday miracle of Art Carney redeeming people with consumerism, I had a flash. For just a moment, I questioned whether having to be constantly on guard against efforts to persuade us to subsume our entire culture, our entire sense of our own purpose and values, our entire selves, to serve commerce, wasn’t a lot to give up just to not have to occasionally fight off a saber-toothed tiger.