Welcome To Hell Essay, Research Paper
Welcome To Hell
Welcome to Hell. Please let us enslave you. We’ll give you a free t-shirt if you fill out
this credit card application… You can drive home in this brand new car, with no
payments until 2000… It’s so much easier to not worry about these details. We’ll take
care of them for you. All we ask is that you send in your payment every month like a
good slave.
No, no, don’t read books. Libraries are closing more and more everyday anyway
because they’re obsolete, now superseded by television. That concept we taught you
in grade school called “literacy” was just a lie, just like everything else we crammed
down your throat. We just want to make life easy for you! We’ll even give you pretty
pictures and animation to protect you from that mean computer! Just you don’t worry
about that. We’ll manage all the details for you for the low, low price of $99.95.
The less you know, the better off we are. Job security. Think we’re stupid? We are, but
we can bull*censored* our way onto your desktop, because you’re even stupider than we are.
The truth is, you never knew you had a choice. You probably wouldn’t even know there
was such a thing as software, without which the computer can’t operate, if it hadn’t
been for our constant reminders that you can upgrade the crap we sold you for the
low, low price of $79.95. But it’s worth it because you get a 30% increase in
performance. That will actually impress you because we’re competing with ourselves
here.
It’s actually not that hard. After a late night and a hang over, we quickly code this
crap and hire graphics professionals to candy coat it. Then we break anti-trust laws
and cut every corner possible to shove it down your throat. Once we’ve got you
convinced that we’re the only people who make software, then we just have to make
our code a little bit better, which isn’t difficult considering how *censored*ty it was in the first
place, and then sell it to you again! The greatest part about this deal is that you’ll buy
it!
We know that and we use it to our advantage, destroying all possible competition by
using what we call Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt and we whisper little messages to you
that you don’t want the competition because it’s “not well supported,” which is just our
*censored*ed up way of saying that we’ve got everyone brainwashed into thinking that we’re
the only option.
After we have this down (which we do), we use another concept we call “embrace and
extend,” which, again, is our *censored*ed up way of saying that we take over all open
standards, change them as we see fit, and then shove them down your throat, without
you even knowing it, by simply telling you that the competition doesn’t support our
standard. We’re rewriting the books of commercialism and we’re taking you with us!
All my life, I have been beaten down by concepts that are false, surrounded by people
who unknowingly were brainwashed by these concepts and from the age of 16 I stood
to look at these concepts bearing my middle finger. I was angered that these people
who called themselves my elders could sit and tell me how incompetent I was and lead
me through a life of torture they called “discipline,” and I wondered how such a mass
brainwashing could occur that could possibly make these people forget their childhood.
They undermined my self-esteem, my self-confidence, and wasted 12 years of my life,
until I realized that I have unknowingly been sold their lie, working like a dog to pay my
bills, credit cards, and buy neat little toys that will enslave me till the day I die,
cowering at their beuracracies, kissing their feet to give me jobs as they stuck their
noses in the air and said I wasn’t good enough.
I was becoming just like them, doing as I was told, going to their classes, debugging
their RatC programs for them, going to their jobs just to slack off day to day, waiting
impatiently for the next paycheck, and forgetting my childhood, just as I wondered so
long ago how so many people could let it happen to them and I promised myself that I’d
never let it happen to me. Through all of my conformity training, I was convinced that I
must be the one in the wrong. How can all these people be wrong, and I right? Can this
world really be as sad as it seems?
Status, money, college degrees, yachts, Cadillacs, mansions, and best of all, you get
to look down on all these poor kids who you used to be among, “disciplining” them into
shape, scolding them for their creativity, cursing at them for using profanity, punishing
them for their sins after a late night at the bar or a long weekend in Vegas, hating
anything that resembles your own problems, not realizing that they’re learning it all from
you, all in the guise of “looking out for what’s in their best interest,” not realizing the
absurdity in keeping them from being as miserable as you are, not even having a clue
that they’re slammed with it from birth, sitting them in front of a television, taking them
to church, lying to them about a man called Santa Claus who blackmails them into
“being good.” Just another religion, but for children. They’ve come to know of him as
their savior because he brings them lots of toys. He’s like a drug dealer who gives his
first fix for free, and you find yourself working all your life to support your habit of
buying toys.
After 14 years or so of solid training, these poor children quickly find that they’re
absorbed in it and, just like their parents, decide that the only salvation is long
weekend nights slamming gallons of alcohol, dousing their pain in chemicals, filling their
lungs with cancerous smoke, filling their noses with powder, anything that will drive
away this awful hell that’s been built around them, or into which they were born and
forced to obey. Competing fervently for sacred resources that are only sacred because
corporations and government personnel hoard them, they pursue any career that will
support their habits and pay for their toys, finding after all those long hard years of
being told that “honesty is the best policy,” that that’s actually the quickest ticket to
skid row, and that success is an equation consisting of lying and cheating, so they use
any asset which may serve to benefit them, sticking their nose up at anyone who won’t
bring them the status they seek.
People with good looks quickly find that that’s the greatest asset they could ever
possess, and although they say they resent “not being loved for their brains,” have no
problem using their assets to their advantage. Since everyone’s obsessed with sex, all
they have to do is remind them of it, and they get dollars stuffed in their underwear. A
free fix! What a deal! All because of these self-created taboos and obsession with
something that is more natural than bees making honey.
Or they go to school, claiming that education is the pinnacle of human endeavor,
earning the status they so desperately seek. I eventually find out that they, in fact,
don’t give a *censored* about education or furthering their field, but instead spend their time
begging giant corporations for money, talking to newspaper reporters and drinking Coca
Cola while they con their undergraduates with a meek salary to do their work for them,
which, in fact, consists of little more than “looking busy,” urging them to become just
like them, pursue graduate school and look important. Actually not such a bad deal in
this *censored*ed up society.
Mass email spamming is a big business. These people aren’t *censored*ing around. They spend
from 9am to 5pm every day finding new ways to cram *censored* down people’s throats. They
go to school for years to learn marketing strategies so they can spend their lives
finding new and creative ways to make us buy their crap, whispering to us everywhere
we go that More Is Better, that we need what they have to give us, all for their low,
low price.
We buy it! We don’t even know we have a choice after hearing their *censored* on the TV,
radio, newspapers, Internet, email. They even own the media, picking and choosing
what news is broadcast. Overall, they control everything we hear and see from the day
we’re born. And we call this a free country. There’s nothing free about it. We’re all
captives to a system we hate, dragging ourselves out of bed every morning to do that
classic ritual known as “making a living,” hating every moment of it, continually looking
at the clock to see if it’s time to go to the bar so we can forget about it all again.
We watch giant corporations and government, which we think we have no choice but
to support, destroy the planet, spill pollution everywhere, cut down trees which make
up the vital lungs of the planet, watching the ozone layer deteriorate, and all the
beautiful greenery be covered with asphalt, but that’s okay because we’ll do anything
to avoid those long hours of traffic we have to suffer with everyday, breathing in toxic
fumes and smog, hoping that some day, someone will figure it out. Then we watch the
world suffer around us, reading articles in the newspaper about sex crimes, murder,
robberies, hostages, bombs, suicide, drive-by shootings, car crashes. The culprits are
just children like the rest of us, who got tired of being lied to.
We don’t really like the Catholic Church, especially because they tell everyone they will
burn in Hell if they use condoms, so we watch the world population explode
exponentially, but we don’t even know the real crimes they commit: telling everyone
they’re pieces of *censored*, forcing us to cower before them and kiss their hands in the hope
that they don’t throw us in hell, telling us that this planet is only a means to an end, so
it’s okay if we destroy it.
In fact, they have chapters about it in that book they gave you for Christmas (which,
by the way, is a holiday they created with the name of their Savior to represent
months of fervent shopping, greed, and stress, which can all be taken away with
eggnog, which they will give to you for the low, low price of $4.95 plus tax, plus CRV,
plus the income tax you paid to make the money in the first place), that clearly gives
you permission to abuse your children, commit ridiculous acts of violence “in the name
of God,” and kill anything that doesn’t look like you since you were created in His image.
This too, they shove down your throat from childhood, when they know you’re most
easily influenced, describing graphically the details of Hell, and threatening you into
submission, all of which you’ll find in the pretty little name of “Sunday School.”
So I finally looked around me and realized that these people didn’t just waste 12 years
of my life. They wasted 23 years of my life, and were fixing to waste the whole thing,
because all along I’ve been going with it, thinking that I must be the one in the wrong,
slowly watching myself conform, enslaving myself with credit cards and toys which
amounted to little more than junk, begging for their petty wages just to pay the bills
and buy time, deferring my problems for another day, doing just as they wanted me to,
because my suffering brings them great wealth. I was hoping that some day I will wake
up happy.
Some day, when I make friends of these psycho-paths, make one of them my girlfriend
(a concept which they also created in this complex scheme they call “dating” that
keeps people scared of each other and puts money in their pockets by telling them to
buy flowers, candy, dinners, and movies), get a “real job” in the “real world,” and make
enough money to pay for a dynamically expanding list of expenses that grows as my
income grows.
Some day, I will be able to live in their world in peace and not have all these problems,
until I finally realized that these problems were all given to me, handed to me as a part
of my citizenship to their crappy society. Some day, I will be free, and be able to make
my own choices, until I finally realized that it’s their jail.
Don’t you see? It’s financial slavery! We’re all living in captivity. We rebel and fight the
system when we’re younger, but eventually, they break us. Do you really think it took
you 12 years just to learn how to read books and do algebra?! Most of your education
is dedicated to breaking your spirit, forcing you to conform, and wrapping you up in a
neat package for society to process.
This is the jail in which I’ve been born, and I’m convinced that this can’t be the only
way. I’m convinced that it’s possible for me to escape the clutches of this society and
to break free. There’s got to be another way. But there’s no way to find it while I’m in
chains. We live in a society that calls itself free, yet measures freedom in dollars.
With money, you can do anything. You can read and study and learn. You can
volunteer your time to any organization you wish. You can start your own
organizations. Who needs organizations? You could simply spend your time doing what
you find valuable, help anyone you want, hurt anyone you want. You could stay or
leave. You could go anywhere you want. You could begin any career you want, work
any job you want, start your own business, or not even work at all and slack off all you
want. That’s what I call freedom.
Without money, you have one choice: work. A noble pursuit in and of itself, but it loses
its nobility when one has no choice. What is the distinction between work and play
besides the freedom with which one has to do it? More specifically, there seems to be a
distinction between fun work, play, and just plain drudgery. For most people, their jobs
fall under the latter category.
They agonize every morning to get out of bed, groan over a giant mug of coffee, throw
on their clothes, try to make themselves impressionable, and race to work, fighting
miles of traffic. They spend hours slacking off and passing time, trying to avoid the
boss as much as possible. They justify it at the end of the month with their paycheck,
much of which is spent on trying to forget about it all. Television, sports, bars, Vegas,
dance clubs, exotic dancers, marijuana, cocaine. Most of it, though, is spent on toys,
which we see every day flashed across the television. Fast cars, big houses, cute little
computers, boats, jet skis, motorhomes, yachts, mansions.
Some of the biggest expenses are the ones we don’t even see: income tax, sales tax,
retirement plans that never pay off, interest, insurance, repairs, CRV, registration fees,
bank fees, storage fees, parking fees, dumping fees. They’re all there. We pay them
and their only purpose is to sustain the lifestyle that they told us to lead. It’s bad
enough that we spend money on junk we don’t need, but it’s unforgivable that we end
up spending more just to earn the money to buy the junk, pay taxes just to purchase
the junk, pay interest just to buy more junk than we can afford, pay insurance just to
protect the junk, pay mechanics and repairmen just to fix the junk, pay registration
fees just to let society know that we have the junk, pay bank fees just to have the
money around to pay for the junk, pay parking or storage fees just to put the junk
somewhere, and then when we’re all done with it, pay dumping fees to get rid of the
junk.
When we’re done buying their junk, and dishing out even more just to sustain it, we’re
broke. Paycheck’s all spent. Time for another unbearable month of work. Months go by,
years go by, all the dreams are brushed aside, and we wonder where our lives went.
The only thing we have to show for years of hard work and misery is a garage-full of
junk that doesn’t work, is out-dated, is no longer useful, or is no longer as exciting as it
used to look on the TV.
On top of all of that, we have thousands of dollars in debts. Our paychecks are no
longer spent on junk as much as it is just keeping up with the interest on their debts.
Now we have a job we hate, junk we have to find a way to get rid of, bill collectors
nagging at us, and all of our time and money goes into keeping up with it all; by this
time, we’re beginning to feel that all we really ever needed was love.
That’s what I call slavery. Why are we so easily captivated by it? Simple. We accept
the reality which we’re presented. People spend their lives working fervently to keep us
from thinking, they themselves a captive. What can we do about it? Again, simple. Stop
buying junk. You don’t need to waste time at a job you hate earning money if you don’t
spend it on anything. Instead, you can waste your time at a job you hate earning
money undoing the whole mess. Not a very attractive option, but, hey, that’s why I
call it slavery.
Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might
advise to work twice as hard as they do–work till they pay for themselves, and get
their free papers.
Henry David Thoreau
What options are available when the world’s values are either strictly American, or
nothing more than a bad replica of American? Is there any better society? I don’t know;
I’m too busy working to study up on it. What are the social economic options? I don’t
know; I’m too busy working to study up on it. Marxism, capitalism, socialism,
communism, feudalism. I know all about what I’ve been told is the wrong way to live,
but you’ve seen how I feel about what I’ve been told. I wish I could spend time learning
these things for myself, getting all the perspectives, and making my own decision
instead of letting society do my thinking for me. But I can’t. I’m too busy working to
study up on it. Gee, too busy doing their crap to think for myself. Coincidence? I think
not.
Lucky for us, they have a convenient little system set up so that we don’t have to
think for ourselves. They give us a fake dualism between liberal and conservative,
Democrat and Republican, so as to not overwhelm us with options. Two choices, which
are so similar as to be only one option, but different enough to make us think we
actually have a choice. Each camp has their platform and their suggested votes
because they know we’re too busy oiling their Machine to actually study it in-depth.
And in case anyone is actually dedicated enough to study it that well, they expend the
rest of their effort snowing us with corporate-owned media that entertains more than it
informs.
With money comes time, and with time comes freedom. I know this is a catch-22. In
order to get money, you need to have money. In order to get freedom, you have to
work and sacrifice. All of this used to scare me because I’m still stuck doing the same
thing. I’m deferring my happiness until the day when I will no longer have to defer my
happiness, which is absurd if you think about it, but I realized that given my confined
situation I might as well give myself hope that someday I will actually be free from it.
Hey, I’m not the one who made the society; I’m the one fighting it.
Call me paranoid. Call me pessimistic. Call me a rebel. But you’re enslaved nevertheless.
I may be paranoid, but you’re miserable. I no longer see the value in keeping people
from prejudgeing me. People who are quick to prejudge won’t hear my message
anyway, and those that are open-minded enough to hear it will hear it loudest.