Fifty-Eight: Walmart Videos (01-11-2024)
Democratization of knowledge has doomed America's (and the world's) middling classes to spiritual torment. There is no reason a Walmart store manager (at best) should be exposed to the full ideological breadth of human experiences and the total suffering of the world. It is said that a Saint has the capacity to care for the whole world, and a man the capacity to care for those around him (her). Social networks and lightning-speed internet expand the net of care to Saint proportions for people whose emotional capacity as yet stretches barely to the people around them.
This is to say nothing of the ubiquitous and dehumanizing, near-constant edifice of cars. America's social sphere is mostly compartmentalized in steel and plastic, with gross facsimiles of countenance making no inroads to mitigate the infuriations of the open road.
Perennially, a video will go viral of a supposed careerperson, in their motor vehicle, lambasting the system's inability to grant them financial salvation in exchange for their penitentiary labor. Socialist framework: all worker should be paid a living wage, with which they can afford housing food, basic necessities, and (21st Century American Socialist Addendum) some spending cash for fun beverages. Capitalist pig retort: Walmart jobs are for teens and bored retirees. Galaxybrain Centrist Interjection: Both of these things can be true, and neither negates that people presently are underpaid and products are overpriced.
The smaller but more internal issue here is perspective. In Middletown America, where the largest employer is Walmart, it is socially evident that Walmart employees should be capable of living off their Walmart wages. However, these wages should afford them a comfortable life in Middletown America, not a Los Angeles rockstar lifestyle. Part of American Protestant Temperance is the economic infeasibility of vice, inclusive of non-narcotic pleasures. Our culture has an innate ability to sort fun into a luxury price bracket. We all collectively feel that fun should cost a little more money, as a self-imposed penalty for engaging in bodily pleasure, whether sexual, narcotic, or even simply visual. Only basic primitive hobby is free (kicking a ball [if stolen], running [if at risk of injury from inadequate surface / shoe]).
Had an old manager at a major Minneapolis-based retail corporation, many miles from Minnesota, who had aspirations of Hellcats and late nights at The Club, often bragging about his liquor purchases and car modifications, though he had yet to afford his dream car. Not to say his aspirations should be the SEPTA bus and syrup sandwiches, but why is a regular person, like just some guy walking down the street, paralleling the interests of record-deal musicians and 15-minuter artists? Obviously social media, nebulous algorithms, deliberate marketing, and more have already been identified as the root cause, but little has been said as to the resulting psychological damage that occurs when this lifestyle is left unobtained.
I am not a rich person, and I'll never be. I'm still learning to be satisfied with the contemporary snail's pace that success accumulates at. Under 30, we'll all have nothing. That's how it goes now. What is to be done for the people who will never have anything, who have been told they will? Seriously, there is a major class of people, probably near half of the population, who, for reasons of elite immigration, economic retraction, inflation, or any other multitude of factors, have had their life path to stability and comfort, then retirement, erased. What will be done for these people?
Also, there's a lot of right-wingers (especially on substack) who rue the "social destabilization" caused by immigration or migration or black people or whatever, who've doubled down on this belief at the cost of their social standing and sexual marketplace value, who seem to forget that if their dream social cohesion did exist, it would be best served in a socialized system, which they also don't want. Right wingers really just want to whine and complain then write manifestos that are really just genocide fantasies. Great ideology you got there.