WORK, BUY, CONSUME, DIE

There have been countless novels written about the future of our consumer driven world and not many of them have seemed to be a stretch at all. Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 are two great opposing visions of the future: Huxley’s novel preaches that in our future we will be manufactured, segregated, and totally controlled by the government without ever questioning it, while Orwell’s is a world in which you might be able to question what’s wrong with the total control the government has over you but there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s a book I read when I was a bit younger and my flavor was more for the science-fiction side and unfortunately I can’t remember its name or the author’s name but it also shows another way our future might turn into. A single corporation runs the world. Even though there is a government and other businesses, all the money and power stems from the single corporation. While I don’t believe that any of these singular versions of the future are possible, I do believe that it may look like something in the middle of them all.

Salman Rushdie’s short story, “The Auction of the Ruby Slippers” from East, West,  is a good mix between these three ideas. “People venture out but rarely nowadays; nevertheless, and rightly, the Auctioneers believed this prize would tempt us from our bunkers…Most of us nowadays are sick” (87). Rushdie’s use of narration is abrupt and jolts the reader without much expository information to explain his narrator’s world; we’re thrown into a pool of the narrator’s surmounting paranoia and nervousness and expected to swim to shore. This feeling is captured in the description of the masses crowding to see the slippers and everyone’s desperation. So what’s the great importance of the slippers? “We revere the ruby slippers because… of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return” (92) The narrator knows something’s changed in the world in a way that he wishes could be turned back through “reverse metamorphosis.” This idea is quite like Orwell’s thought that people would know something was wrong with their world but what makes it different is the delusion that the slippers would have the power to do so which is closer to the Huxley view of believing in a fraudulent life.

However, the slippers aren’t the core of the problem in Rushdie’s story, it’s the actual auction. “The Grand Saleroom of the Auctioneers is the beating heart of the earth” (98).  The narrator plainly states his acceptance of the way the world has turned into complete consumerism. What makes this world more believable than any other depiction of the future is the emphasis on consumerism. Our world today isn’t far from this already and even though we criticize the media for senseless advertisements and the push to buy into the materialistic mindset. It’s become therapeutic for some people to buy things, making it ok to go into debt and we’re even told it’s our duty to spend money to “help the economy.” But this only brings us closer to Rushdie’s thought of our future where the sale of movie memorabilia can have a power over everyone, even for two people to kill themselves when they touch the display glass. The question is, just how far away from this reality are we?

So if we’re that close to that reality and we want to keep away from it then we must take action against it. For example, concentrating on our daily needs and keeping our spending low. We have to determine everything’s true value and how necessary it is for us to have it. The media is a known source of pressure and I’ve been TV free for about three years now and I’ve loved it. I’m not getting the wasteful ads and useless media tales we’re told is the news. If we concentrated more on our own sustainability rather than useless toys, not only would our future be a bit brighter, but our lives today would be richer.