Deception: The Show Must Go On

A Demand-Driven Fantasy

When I order a piece of cake at a restaurant, I always wonder how much more cake there is back in the kitchen.  Not because I’m greedy, but because it always fascinated me how, from a logistics point of view, the owners manage to achieve that magical goldilocks balance between having plenty of cake for customers on one hand, but not so much cake that it would lead to financial loss due to unsold units on the other. It must be a headache having to speculate on the level of demand as well as its variations due to low and high-consumption days, or the shifting demographic profile of the clientele which, I would think, affects which cake flavor they choose, and if they have any desire for cake in the first place.  How on earth does any restaurant do this?

As consumers of course, we never have to worry about how the restaurant will magically manage to have our favorite cake slice in stock, if and when we decide to walk into their premises on some random day.  How does an entire back kitchen manage to match what is on the menu, at least most of the time?  As far as the customer is concerned, the entire menu should be available: thus, when they order, they should be able to select based on their desire, not based on what is best for the restaurant, which would help to reduce waste in the kitchen. 

This is pretty much the same principle in which our civilization has been appropriating natural resources: based on its wishes and demands on the day, not based on what is sustainably available in nature.  The way we manage our restaurants is a micrography of our global economic model: we have been raiding Earth’s kitchen with abandon, in much the same way we rock up to a restaurant, ordering anything we like just because we happen to have a rectangular piece of plastic in our wallet.

As consumers, and restaurant patrons, we are vital to the survival of this surreal economic system: with each impulsive purchase we ensure that the system is driven by demand and desire, as opposed to availability and balance.  This happens because we are indoctrinated, very early on, with the core values of industrial consumerism: the customer is always right, no product should ever be unavailable, and if something breaks down, fastest solution is to throw it in the trash and buy a brand new identical item immediately.  How convenient.  It is no wonder why selfishness has reached a peak: hyper-narcissism was deliberately encouraged and engineered by a psychonomy which recognized, very early on, that selfish and narcissistic people simply buy more stuff. Over decades of “aspirational” marketing, all of us became more and more narcissistic, until this became the norm. Great news for the psychonomy, bad news for the planet. As for society itself, it is virtually gone, existing more as a collection of public services rather than a community. Because of this engineered narcissism, we have all been atomized into individual cells within the vast farm we are being reared in.

Add to this the apparent seamlessness of all of our daily transactions, and you have a seemingly faultless, effortless, magical and sustainable system.  But most of all, this artificially created system gives us the false impression that we live in an abundant, magical world where nothing will ever run out, however much we consume.  The network of goods extraction, manufacturing and supply chains is executed so well, that it literally caters to every need and desire we could have ever had, now available at our fingertips on our computer keyboard.  It is a perverse, gluttonous fantasy made reality.  Surely there must be a catch.?

You’ve guessed it.  We have been conned.  Our entire economic system is supported by a grand illusion of abundance.  This abundant world that we consider “normal” is actually not sustainable – meaning, it won’t be “normal” for very much longer.  It is a house of cards, because it does not obey the physics laws of supply and demand that the ecosystem relies upon.  In real nature, resources and goods are not abundant.  Supermarkets do not exist.  Animals have to scavenge for food, and sometimes even skip a meal.  Plants agonizingly reach out to the sun, and may need to wait weeks or months for rain.  Even human bodies are designed to last without food for days, even weeks.  During this time, humans can still function and go about their daily life by metabolizing the fat reserves under their skin.  This is our normal way of being, and how we were designed. Resources are scarce, but every being on Earth manages to eat in the end, if they just wait a little bit.

In the normal ecosystem of the planet, consumers are not worshiped and spoiled like gods, as they are today, because this would make the ecosystem go bankrupt within a matter of hours.  And this is in fact what is happening.  The planet’s ecosystem is being raided by humans who live in an illusion of abundance.  The illusion of abundance is the dogma behind the most destructive force on the planet: extractive, corrosive, toxic necrocapitalism which is bankrupting Earth and ending life itself.  The dogma “if the consumer wants it, we will bring it to them, whatever it takes”, has been fundamental to supporting the illusion of abundance.  The consumer became both a victim and a deity: at no point should demand fail to be met, even if this means having to open more sweatshops, slash and burn more forest, or kill the last tuna fish on the planet.

The Fraud That Is Money

The restaurant manager is an illusionist: he may have succeeded in convincing his patrons that everything on the menu is available, but it is all a dirty magic trick.  While he maintains smiles on the main floor, back in the kitchen it is carnage: slash and burn agriculture, extinction, resource depletion.  There is a long list of victims and long-term consequences.  But we can’t stop now.  The show must go on. The illusionist must keep the magic trick going for as long as possible, even if the odds are not in his favor. How does he do it?

Through another magic trick: money. Money is abstract currency which does not really represent value.  Moreover, it can respond to variations in supply and demand: if consumer demand increases, the price per cake slice just goes up. As more and more people ask for cake, the higher price triggers more production, and everyone wins: the consumer, the restaurant owner, the farmers supplying flour, butter, sugar and eggs.  Of course, all of these winners belong to the same species: humanity.  Earth is the big loser: the animal and plant species that participated in making the cake got absolutely nothing out of this process. Some had to be tortured or had to die so that the cake can be made, others even went extinct in the process.  An uninsured, undocumented immigrant somewhere in an industrial-sized bakery not far from the restaurant had to break their back making cake batter all day.  Untold carbon emissions had to be released to create the steel industrial kitchen machinery he is surrounded by, which consume vast quantities of electricity.

And as for the consumer, when they got to the restaurant they realized that they had some leftover cake in their fridge at home, after all.  It turns out they didn’t need cake.  They just needed to get some fresh air, so they filled their steel car with petrol to drive to the restaurant and have their cake slice instead of the one at home, which they will probably throw out.  The plastic card that they have in their wallet is the consumer’s own magic trick.  Money is a credit note of equity stolen from humanity’s one and only lender, Earth – randomly distributed to bored human consumers driving around in their gas guzzlers for their next cake fix.  As with all credit, it becomes worthless when the creditor goes bankrupt. 

Humanity has maintained the illusion of abundance by committing financial fraud.  The key to all financial fraud is deception.  Our civilization has perpetuated its theft against nature by rearing Michelin-starred illusionists and an army of Harvard-educated economists proud to study an economic system that does not even obey first-grade math. We are amassing a massive debt towards the animals, plants and the climate system of the planet which we are demolishing in order to temporarily sustain the impossible illusion of abundance.  Colonialism, intensive agriculture, slavery, mining. We have been living on “cake credit” for hundreds if not thousands of years, producing what we need through a process that eventually breaks the cake oven itself, and sets the house on fire.  All of us with jobs are being paid by an economic system that is a bankrupt Ponzi scheme, and has actually never turned a real profit at any point in its existence. Our one and only lender, Earth, is going down, and so are we.

The Invention Of Waste

But there is one last magic trick that the restaurateur-cum-illusionist must perfect: he needs to be able to coordinate a complex, often unpredictable logistical operation from the production line all the way to the table, so that the customer gets their cake at an affordable price, and he turns a profit no matter what happens.  It seems like such an impossible feat, that you would assume the goldilocks balance of supply and demand would only have been achieved if the Harvard-educated economists were having board meetings with the restaurant’s manager on a weekly basis, using advanced modelling and predictive analytics of cake consumption data and other variables, and adjusting cake supply accordingly on a daily basis. They would look into the entire cake process and try to make it more energy efficient and profitable, yet fair and sustainable. There would be environmental scientists advising on the impact of overconsumption, population increase and intensive farming on the natural environment, and how this could affect “the future of cake on Earth”. There would be a social scientist and immigration advisor helping Julio from Guatemala who works long hours in the cake kitchen, so that he is more valued and appreciated, and better rewarded for his back-breaking work.  There would be a doctor helping him with his diabetes, a result of working in cake quality control for years.

Instead, there is a much, much easier magic trick which avoids solving all of the above problems, and increases the restaurant’s profit in one single step: throwing all of the unused cake in a new human invention called “the bin”. We’ll just make more cake, at a cost to workers and natural resources, increase the price per slice to cover for our expenses and dump whatever cake is left at the end of the day in the trash. This way the restaurant is always stocked, the customer always gets what they want, and we even make a profit.  The illusion of abundance has been saved, for yet another day.

Along with money, the concept of waste is the double-fraud which completes the cycle of extractive, exploitative, self-destructive necrocapitalism. Both money and waste are abstract concepts engineered by humans.   In a real ecosystem nothing is ever wasted.  Every time uneaten cake is thrown in the restaurant’s dumpster, unnecessary work hours in the cake factory have been spent. Plants and animals have been unnecessarily slaughtered. CO2 was unnecessarily emitted to fire up the oven. We may label the dumped cake as “waste”, but it came at an incredible cost to the planet. Waste is yet another illusion.
All magic tricks have to end sooner or later, when the curtain comes down and spectators return to their normal, real lives. Our psychonomy has invented a number of magic tricks to keep the illusion going: abundance, money and waste being just three of them. But there is no more Earth left to destroy. The show is ending. The red velvet curtain (and the red velvet cake) comes crashing down on the illusionist, taking the ceiling along with it. And that’s not his only problem: a starving mob is about to eat him alive. The self-destructive entity of necrocapitalism will push the entirety of Earth, including humans, to their absolute limits. Maximum profit requires maximum exploitation and maximum extinction. This, will end in maximum collapse of the ecosystem, and the human psychonomy attached to it. 

It takes an incredible amount of effort to kill an entire planet. This will be by far our biggest, and our last, magic trick.

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books