Memetic Analysis: Consumerism as the Perfection of Slavery

34. When the Shopping Cart Becomes the Yoke: How Neoliberalism Turned Desire into Bondage

🌄 Trailhead Musing

Well now, partner, gather ‘round the campfire and lend me your ears. This here meme comes swaggerin’ into the infoscape like a gunslinger with a grudge, declaiming that all our shiny gadgets and endless choices ain’t freedom at all—but the slickest, sweetest brand of bondage ever conjured by them highfalutin money-changers. The old factory chains got swapped for credit cards, and the corral’s got no fence ‘cause the critters don’t reckon they’re penned in.

And let me tip my hat to the fella who set this trail a-blazin’ in my mind: Jiang Xueqin, a Beijing-born educator and frontier thinker. I was sitting by the glow of a YouTube campfire on his channel, Predictive History, when he lit into a yarn about the shape of our times. Folks mostly know him for another video ‘cause he warned a second Trump term might drag America into an ill-fated war with Iran—a real powder-keg. But what caught my eye was his reckoning on how we all got here. He laid it out plain: After the Great War and the dust-up of WWII, Western societies flirted with worker-centered ideals—call it a dalliance with socialism—where a fella’s worth was measured by his labor, not the trinkets he could stack. But come the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher rode in with neoliberal saddlebags full of deregulation and tax cuts for the big cattle barons. The revolt of the elite, he called it, and sure as sunrise, it flipped the whole order on its head.

From then on, we weren’t workers banded together, but lone consumers scrapping for status. CEOs’ pay soared from twenty times the average ranch-hand to two hundred times or more, and any fool with a windfall spent it not on community but on shiny wagons and fancier hats to outdo his neighbor. That, Jiang reckoned, is the perfection of slavery—a system so sly you help cinch your own bridle and smile while you do it.

This ain’t just a lament sung under a desert sky. It’s a call to saddle up and face the hard truth: desire’s been tamed and yoked by capital, and it’s time we learned how to ride free again. So let’s get into.

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🌐 Ontological Domains

Freedom, once reduced to shopping, becomes a ritual of surrender draped in the vestments of choice.

• Cultural – Diagnoses consumption as a hegemonic value system.

• Political – Frames neoliberalism as an elite project to secure dominance.

• Economic – Argues capital orchestrates all life’s rhythms.

• Psychological – Reveals the colonization of identity by consumer logic.

• Narrative/Mythic – Casts consumption as the mythic substitute for solidarity.

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🔬 Analytical Level

At every layer, this meme maps how ideology seeps from policy into identity, re-coding the self as a consumer unit.

• Macro – Civilizational structures and economic systems.

• Meso – Institutions and subcultures.

• Micro – Individual subjectivity.

• Meta – Historical ideologies (Marxism, neoliberalism) as narrative frameworks.