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One is born. During childhood, one's life is centred around one's suburban semi with its restrictive garden or yard. It is cramped. There is no space to play and wander around the wonders and expanses of nature. The only place close to hand which offers more space is the street. But this is dangerous. Yuppie women speed past with their own kids safely cacooned in their little shiny four-wheeled bullets oblivious, or at least unconcerned, as to the stress and danger they present to other people's children as they pass.
One is sent to school to be taught what the elite of society want one to know and believe. Then on to college or university to be formed into a useful human resource unit to power the capitalist production lines of the immediate short-term future. A cog for a corporate machine - a fast-food waiter, an accounts clerk, a machine minder, a driver, a salesman, a programmer, a rocket scientist.
But whatever required kind of human resource one may have chosen to become, one inevitably finds that one is one of many. One of too many. Consequently, upon being flung into that writhing turmoil known as the job market, one finds that the wage one can expect is rarely more than that needed for bare subsistence. It is unrelated to the number of years of hard study one had to endure to acquire one's knowledge and skills. It is unrelated to the level of difficulty or effort required to do one's job. It has only to do with how many human resource units of a given type are available compared with the number required. If there are not many fast-food waiters around, that job will pay well. If the market is flooded with rocket scientists, then that job will pay badly. The only time one is paid more than subsistence for one's labour is when the economy within which one works is expanding rapidly. It is nothing to do with how rich or poor the economy is as a whole. This is what is observed to happen. This is what is experienced by the many. This is free market capitalism.
One is thus from early adulthood thrown into a dog-eat-dog competitive world of the job market. Hoping desperately to find oneself in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people. There to sink or swim. So if one is lucky (because luck is what it is) one manages to get a job. One reports to work each morning at one's master's premises, performs one's narrow set of allotted tasks until evening then returns home again.
In time, by chance one meets a mate, gets married, mortgages a semi in the suburbs, has children. Continues reporting to work each morning at one's master's premises, performing one's narrow allotted tasks until the evening then returning home again. Escapes on fortnight's holiday each year to stave off madness. Pays tax and social security. Pays mortgage. Works hard for 30 years. Made redundant. Ejected onto the scrap heap. Provided with just enough social security money to sustain basic biological existence in suburban isolation. Hounded to find a job which is not there. Fortnightly inquisitions at the Jobcentre. Threat of loss or reduction in social security benefit and pension. A burden on society. A malingerer. Can no longer afford annual holiday to escape the madness. Retires. Survives for about two miserable years on State pension. Dies.
Whatever other events take place along one's path of life, they are only incidental and peripheral to the main purpose of being a good obedient human resource for the greater economic good of the capitalist elite. All such events and activities like going to the pub, bingo, spectator sports, and above all television, are not provided for one's edification. They are encouraged merely to keep one's mind sufficiently torpid to prevent one from becoming dissatisfied with one's conditions of life as an arbitrarily expendable economic resource.
So, how does living in this viciously-competitive economic treadmill affect the human character? What kind of people has being forced to live together in the crowded isolation of late 20th Century suburbia turned us into?
It has made us adversarial and confrontational. It has made us selfish, inconsiderate and intolerant towards each other. It has made us quick to take and give offence. It has made us treat strangers like things instead of people. It has made us isolationist. It has made us compare people, forever evaluating and ranking them according to their perceived economic worth. It has locked us into eternal competition. It has made us suspect and distrust of each other. It has made us paranoid fearing what others may be doing behind our backs. It has put fear onto the streets. It has turned groups of young friends into gangs of yobs.
Consider our changing suburban environment. People are afraid of their homes being burgled. They fit powerful exterior lights which are either on all night or are set to come on if a person approaches their premises. Or a cat or a hedgehog for that matter! But these same people are not in the least concerned about the annoyance and inconvenience their external lights are to their neighbours. Another major annoyance caused by inconsiderate neighbours in suburbia is noise and roaming pets which foul other people's gardens. I have already mentioned speeding cars. There are many other examples of selfish anti-social behaviour wrought by so-called ordinary people upon their neighbours in modern suburbia.
I have seen tigers and bears at the zoo in their cages. I have watched as they have paced back and forth, round and round, in endless ritual. My stomach reaches as I see a caged gorilla eat its greens, then vomit them up, devour the vomit, spew it up again, eat it again. In an endless ritual. I have heard that caged chimpanzees, out of boredom, will engage in all kinds of perverse activity with each other, and that when provoked they will defecate in their hands and throw their faeces at human spectators. Unnatural behaviour caused by confinement in unnatural environments.
Gangs of city youths. Going nowhere. Wandering the geometric streets. Breaking radio aerials off parked cars. Throwing empty beer bottles at anything that catches their eyes. Neighbour behaving inconsiderately to neighbour. The irrational aggression of motorway madness and road rage. Unnatural human behaviour caused by the constraints of an unnatural socio-economic environment. An environment in which people are geographically close yet culturally far apart. Physically close together yet socially isolated. Neighbours yet strangers. With fixed postal addresses yet never belonging. Franchised citizens of a nation state, yet dispossessed sojourners in a strange land.
The legacy, which capitalism has bequeathed to the modern individual, is to be:
A consequence of this legacy is the kind of character it has created within him. He acts the part of a team player while at heart he is a self-seeking individualist. He gives visibly and patronisingly to Third World charity while callously despising the poor and needy of his own street, claiming they have the same chances as he and are poor and needy through their own sloth. This is clearly not the natural way of life of the human species. Humans are gregarious. The natural or anthropological community of the human being is larger by far than that of any other terrestrial life-form. Relationships within it are far more highly developed and intense than in any other. It cannot be a concatenation of unrelated commuters. It must be a socially caring and economically fair community of trusted friends.