Second class pleasure

Ordinary people, almost all people, are controlled by, shall we say, the remaining 1%. We’re (most of us) controlled by the carrot and stick method, only that for humans the ‘carrot’ bit is mainly in the form of animal products. Our love of them keeps us controlled. It’s a neat system.
Everything that comes from the animal industries is meant to be pleasurable but usually it’s ‘second class pleasure’ – cheap thrills, ice creams, chocolate, nursery teas, that old favourite, ‘meat’ and all the little luxuries we equate with enjoyment. We’re given almost anything to keep us ‘sweet’. It’s a sort of ‘seconds world’ of cheap and cheerful commodities, to keep us working and consuming. It’s like that now in Australia but it was like that half a century ago, for me growing up in England.
When I was a child I had a friend who lived a dull life in our exceptionally dull town, forty kilometres down the river from London, an hour’s train trip away. He used to go up to the ‘bright lights’ on a Friday night for the purpose of ‘having a laugh’. London for the poor is an exceptionally dull place, no laughs there. But just getting away from an even duller town for the night was some sort of enjoyment, some sort of relief from life “in the pit”. (Our fathers worked ‘down the pit’, in cement and paper factories situated in ugly depressions cut out of the chalk cliffs along the River Thames). We did have our indulgencies which made life bearable but they were strictly second rate, often to do with ‘treats’ made from animal stuff. It took our minds off the awful trapped feeling of living in this inescapable ‘pit’. The deal was that if we came to terms with life there, we could have plenty of indulgent ‘treats’. Obviously to many people living today, in this sort of cheap-thrill world, they’re tempted by the very same tawdry pleasures.
In order to socially engineer the lives of people, it makes sense to hold people in ‘the pit’, keeping them happy with a few miserable ‘indulgencies’. As ordinary people (I’ll call them “99%’ers”), we don’t have to deliberately indulge in evil activity to get what we want, it’s done for us. Neither do we have to be aware of acting compliantly when we’re trying to find relief, because we do so many things in a state of semi-consciousness (we gigglingly call it ‘indulging’). I suppose I’m rather obviously pointing to one of the most popular activities, that of eating animals. It’s an example of acting semi-consciously – that is, eating indulgently but keeping what we’re doing away from our full consciousness. It’s evident at meal times, that if we didn’t reduce awareness of it (when eating animals) we’d be in trouble – with ourselves. If we couldn’t “detach” from the guilt of what we were doing, it would cripple us. In order to conduct our day to day lives we, reluctantly, have to do some things semi-consciously. The dull town I came from was almost entirely, and probably still is, full of people who act semi-consciously. And yet these same good hearted people, trapped as they may be, are still capable of true feeling. They know the feeling of guilt and temptation and they learn how to enjoy the simpler pleasures of life. This is in sharp contrast to the rich (I’ll call them “1%’ers”) who control others’ lives but who keep themselves immune to any sense of their own wrong doing. For a start, the 1%’ers don’t ‘do’ guilt whereas the 99%’ers do!!