The Perverse Society -- Part Two

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Committee,

Thank you once again for the time you are devoting to the results of my studies. Some of you have advised me that you recognize the perverse society about which I am reporting. My reply is this: though you may indeed recognize it, I doubt you truly understand it. In all honesty, I don’t believe I truly understand it either, at least not fully.

But what I have come to understand is how unconscionably criminal that it is.

As previously mentioned, the culture in question is based on the principles of slavery and exploitation of the masses to benefit the elite. Every aspect of this society serves to perpetuate it, and the servile class are either unaware of their lot, or unwilling to accept the truth.

The slaves themselves spend most of their waking lives labouring, making themselves ready to labour, or travelling between their work site and their dwellings. As previously mentioned, personal property is an illusion provided to the servile class: they own nothing lasting because of built-in obsolescence and constantly shifting trends; their dwellings are either leased from elite landowners or are liened by the government through taxation.

The servile classes spend their days doing either physical labour or clerical work. They spend the majority of their time working in gangs with their fellow slaves, oftentimes overseen by other slaves who have advanced somewhat in the hierarchical echelon. The elite, themselves tend to minimize their contact with their servants.

For their labours, slaves are awarded a weekly stipend, from which taxes are taken both by the government and their masters. The society encourages slaves to run up massive debts in pursuit of the material trinkets that they themselves often labour to produce, so after payments are made to their creditors and providers of essential services, the slave is left with very little real income.

This system of indentured servitude is generally accepted by the servile classes as the norm; they have never known anything else, so they do not understand that they are being exploited. The elite control the workplaces, they control the economy, they control the essential services, they control the government and they control the markets and the prices of marketable goods. They control everything that a slave needs, in order to survive in this society. The result is they therefore perfectly control the slaves.

Either through taxation or direct payment, everything in a slave’s life must be purchased: food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, transportation, recreation, and every manner of personal belonging. Likewise, even things like water, heating, communication and even protection must be bought and paid for. The amount of money a slave needs to spend in order to meet these needs often exceeds their ability to pay up front. For many items, they must therefore enter into payment arrangements, putting themselves into debt.

This debt forces them to continue to labour for their masters, even as it outstrips the stipend that the servile classes are paid for their work. The elite encourage the slaves to go into debt, by making it easy for a slave to acquire loans, lines of credit or so called “purchase financing”. Invariably, interest is charged on these credits, meaning the slave has to pay significantly more than they borrowed, often over the course of several years. Invariably, when the slave is out of debt, the need arises, most often through the artificial manipulations of the elite, for them to go back into debt again.

In short, the servile classes are required to work, in order to stay alive.

And yet, despite this obligation to work in order to stay alive, the slaves are told they are absolutely free, that they have liberty to do as they please, say what they will, go where they wish. The truth is they can only do what they please so long as it does not interfere with their taskmasters’ plans for their daily labour. They cannot speak out against their masters or their labours, for fear of being banished from a work site. Banishment from a worksite often means being barred from other work, as the masters exchange their information on the slave. Unable to work, the slave then loses not only his stipend but everything that that stipend buys, including food, shelter, clothing, and ultimately, their very lives.

The slave, though allowed to travel virtually anywhere, is really limited to being able to travel to and from the job, or to and from the markets. And then, their travel is limited to when they are not supposed to be at their labours: they are not paid for the time they travel from home to their worksite, nor are they paid for their return. In fact, they usually must pay out of their own pocket for the privilege of being able to travel to labour for their masters.

This means that the slaves live in constant fear of doing something that will displease their masters, for their livelihood depends entirely on the pleasure of those they serve. And though they are allowed to rest at night and for two days out of the week, slaves are expected to be able to be called upon at any time by their masters to return to work, in case of a so-called “emergency”, or required to put in extra time at their labours, until they have virtually no time for themselves or their families, at all. It is not unusual, in fact, for the slave to work until they die.

Often, the slave has so many personal household duties to look after in the small window of time allotted to their personal pursuits that they cannot truly rest, relax or sleep a healthy amount of hours; any personal interests or pursuits they must have therefore comes at a cost of either household duties or rest. The elite do not encourage the servile classes’ pursuit of outside personal interests. In some cases, they even forbid it.

To ease their emotional burdens, the servile classes often turn to calmatives to relieve themselves. These calmatives, generally highly addictive substances, are again things that must be purchased from the slave’s wages. This again reduces their ability to get out of debt, further locking them in to the cycle of indentured servitude.

The servile classes often rely on organizations purported to occupy themselves with improving the slaves’ working conditions and personal situations. These organizations are funded from deductions from the slave’s stipends, and more often than not, the organizations, themselves have as a primary goal looking after the interests of those who run them. It is therefore not unusual to find that these organizations ally themselves in name with the slaves, but in truth with the masters, working not to aid but to appease the servile classes.

The slave’s working conditions vary somewhat, depending on what sort of labour is required. Universally, however, the hours are long and the atmosphere is grim. Often, the labour is dangerous or at the very least unhealthy: most slaves are locked away inside great buildings, away from fresh air and sunlight, constantly pressured with quotas, either of products assembled or services rendered. The quotas increase constantly, and the more a slave produces, the more they are expected to produce.

Because of the nature of the society, the cost of everything is constantly inflating. There is, obviously, virtually no indexation of the slave’s stipend, even though the amount they must pay for everything, including interest on their debts, constantly increases. When the stipends are raised, it is never significant, and often, the increase is entirely reabsorbed by taxation.

The servile classes spend their entire lives in service to the elite. Though they are often convinced they are labouring for themselves and their own betterment, the opposite is true: the elite control everything. Whether it be the food on their plate or the roof over their heads, the money to pay for it goes into the coffers of the elite, who own the farms and the lodgings. All goods are manufactured by companies owned by members of the elite class, as are the stores where these goods are sold. Education is run by the elite, and is so costly that only the elite themselves truly benefit from anything other than the most basic education.

Every aspect of this system is designed to benefit its masters and architects. Every penny of money earned by the slave is filtered upwards to the elite, either the owners of the factories or the government that reigns over the slaves. The heads of the government and the heads of the factories, farms, companies and churches often interchange themselves; as I previously mentioned, in this perverse society it is a very few families who make up the elite; one or two per cent of the overall population, at most.

The servile classes have been bred to accept this elaborate system of control. They are indoctrinated with a perverse loyalty to their masters that is disguised as patriotism, but is in fact nothing more than territorial xenophobia.

When a slave is intelligent enough to realize something is wrong, when that slave learns enough to recognize, even in part, what is wrong with this exploitative society, they are isolated, silenced and then subjugated. Those who will not be cowed are made examples of, in order to keep the rest in line.

Revolts have occurred in the past, but they have always been successfully put down, usually by sheer brute force, and making examples out of the rebels. Dissent, though allegedly permitted under the laws of this so-called civilization, is not tolerated.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Committee, it is my sincerest hope that you recognize this society, for it is our own. We are all slaves, to our employers, to the banks that extend us credit at high interest, to the utilities that provide us with essential heat, light, water and communications.

We willingly addict ourselves to truly worthless baubles and gadgets, games and entertainments that aren’t necessary, except that they distract us from being able to truly do anything to improve our lives. The truth is, the luxury items we indebt ourselves for, the music players, the games, the computers, the fancy clothes, the toys and the distractions, will not make us happier. They will not make us live longer. They will not make us healthy, they will not feed us. We only want them because their manufacturers tell us that we must want them. When we spend money on them, we are receiving so much junk in exchange for so many hours of sacrificed life.

It isn’t the Emperor who is a fool parading down the street without any clothes; it is us. The Emperors are the ones who sold us on such foolishness.

We take drugs to make it all more bearable: the coffee, the cigarettes, the soda that “keep us going” through the day, the drink with supper or before bed, the dope we numb ourselves with…all of it serves our masters, because it renders us more complacent; it keeps us in line.

From the first day we are in daycare to the day we leave school we are taught to conform, to obey, to be like everyone else, or else we face dire consequences. When we enter the labour force, we are expected to keep our heads down, shut up, do our jobs. But our jobs take up most of our waking life. We cannot complain, for fear of retribution. We sacrifice our very lives for the sake of a very few rich, greedy, exploitative bastards who know they are better than us, simply because we are all too stupid to realize that we are in stocks, being led to the slaughter like cattle. Though we are not butchered literally, is there any doubt that we are giving up the best years of our lives, in order to serve someone else?

We are willingly giving up our healthy years, our youth, our freedom, for the sake of wages that more often than not barely allow us to keep our heads above water. Even those of us with benefits, such as health insurance, retirement plans, so-called protections, could lose them if they lose their jobs. What then? Even if you are lucky enough to live long enough to benefit from your retirement savings—assuming you manage to keep any—oftentimes those benefits are insufficient to keep you alive, in which case you lose much of everything you’ve worked so hard to have.

Why do we do this? Why do we continue to do this? Why are we working for the benefit of others? If we must work to survive, should we not be working for one another? Should we not put our efforts towards our own mutual benefits? Why are we making rich elite swine even richer, by sacrificing our very lives?

We are enslaved to corporations and institutions whose only true goal is to make rich people richer. But we are the ones who build the products they sell. We are the ones who provide the services they charge so exorbitantly for. We are the ones who toil in their fields, their factories, their offices. We are the ones who provide them with their freedom, their luxuries, their privileges. When are we going to stop? When are we going to take away everything that we have been fleeced into providing them? When will we take back our lives?

When will we stop being such fucking slaves?