Oh Say, Can You See, We Have Never Been Free

How The Freest Slaves In The World Got Duped

The best moment to rob someone of their freedom is when they have taken it all for granted; or better yet, when they have forgotten what freedom was in the first place. This is precisely what has happened to Americans over the past century: consumerism replaced the need for democracy so effectively that, consumption became the definition of freedom for Americans and many others in the West. Why care about democracy when you can have products? Why have freedom when you have free refills at TGI Fridays? Why have national healthcare when you have nationwide CVS and unlimited opioid prescriptions? And for crying out loud – why get all intellectual, depressed and “socialist” about your country, when you can just delude yourself instead that you live in the freest, richest, most abundant nation that has ever existed in the history of the known Universe? After all, this is what American government after American government, whether blue or red, told their people: you are the freest people in the world, living in the freest country on the galaxy.

But this level of high fructose supremacist bullshit Americans were force-fed wasn’t just nationalism. It was corporate propaganda engineered to stop Americans from fighting for real freedoms, not just the freedom to choose between 37 flavours of diabetes at the cereal aisle of Walmart. Yes, the capitalist utopia came to the rescue of any and every American who had entertained even the slightest doubt that something may be terribly wrong in this amusement park. The enticing deal that corporations offered Americans was this: we give you cheap products, services and entertainment, and in return, you shut the fuck up. As Americans roamed the shopping malls, their diplomats were busy roaming the world installing dictatorships whenever and wherever they could meddle in with their pale, crusty, Mc Donald’s-smelling white fingers: sinking entire nations into decades of poverty and instability and then having the audacity to call them “shitholes”, after turning them into such.

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But the shitholes were fantastic internal publicity for the US: they made America look even more of a dreamland in comparison. See those shithole countries? You don’t want to turn into that. You won’t turn into that. Because you’re an American, and God loves you, and you are living in the greatest country on Earth. You are living in our big and beautiful capitalist supermarket we call the US of A, where you can get a mattress delivered to your door any time of the day. Queue the Star-Spangled Banner please at high volume, followed by another commercial break.

And while the death penalty remained an almost daily occurrence in a country which otherwise oozed freedom from everywhere, the BS narrative of American Freedom became so hardwired into the minds of Americans that any critique of their country’s social justice situation was automatically regarded as blasphemy. I know because I was there in the 90s. During my 11 years in the US, Americans found me extremely boring every time I tried to discuss politics or social issues, areas that shaped THEIR daily lives. Their eyes literally glazed over as I watched them fade into a cognitive coma. They had been conditioned to think that “serious stuff” should be left to politicians and communists, not citizens whose brains are already busy navigating the latest version of Nintendo. By this day, most Americans had learned to see criticism of their country with a combination of disbelief and suspicion: “Don’t go all commie on me now, dude”.

America’s white corporate oligarchy had already killed the Left many, many decades before the dictatorship rolled into the country. 2025 did not happen in 2025. It took generations to prepare and launch. If there was ever a nation that needed an authoritarian wake-up call it was the USA, because it had always had one foot in the fascist mud anyway: you can’t go around the world installing juntas and assume it won’t eventually hit you domestically. The cognitive dissonance of this double game is thermodynamically unsustainable.

Experts had been expecting it for decades. One bright morning on November 6, 2024, fascism marched into the shopping mall while Americans were still deciding on frozen yoghurt toppings and finishing up watching Wicked and Gladiator II on the big screen. And working, working, working themselves to death. Working so much, they forgot to visit the voting booth. Worse even, forgot to think before they voted. It was the perfect day in the utopia. The perfect Christmas gift for the red and blue oligarchy.

But of course, the US is merely an example of a worldwide problem: the illusion of freedom, and the illusion of choice. Every day we are offered millions of products and choices, giving us the illusion that we are in control: we are free to design our own life, and if we select carefully, we could even have an impact on the world. But we have never been in control, simply because all these choices boil down to a single choice: another cash injection for the oligarchy’s necroeconomy. These choices were created for us but not by us. They were created by an Unhappiness Machine that needs to keep selling and propping into power the same oligarchs over and over. The only way to beat fascism is to starve the capitalist monster that funds it – that we fund, with every purchase, every tax. The smartest purchasing choice is to reject the choices we are being given: to overthrow the cleptocracy and throw this corrupt system into its own dumpster, the place where it has been discarding both its citizens and the planet ever since the day of its abominable birth. If we can do this to Tesla, we can do this to other companies. We can do it to the government. Good riddance, cleptos.

This isn’t easy. We are the only ones who can claim back our freedom. The necroeconomy only sees us as purchasing vectors. We need to remind it that we are humans. As long as we continue to give up our rights in exchange for treats, we are as corrupt as the powers that rule us, because consumption slaves get zero choice on what this system does with their money. The only choice they give us is this: how exactly, with which specific product purchase would you like to kill Earth today, or support an ongoing genocide. The only choice we get is to choose how exactly we would like this system to execute us.

The corruption must end, because otherwise we all lose. The more consumer choice this supermarket of death offers, the narrower its own choice becomes. In the end, the only choice on the table for all of us is extinction.

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