The low cost model is spreading to virtually all sectors of the world economy. Food production, retail, furniture, clothing, air travel and many other activities are now largely in the hands of multinationals operating according to that model (including through their suppliers, subcontractors and distributors).
The effect is particularly dramatic and quite literally toxic in agriculture and retail. Many hard pressed consumers now look for the cheapest of the cheap when buying their food.
Doing so they not only weaken their health but support intensive agriculture and its attendant destruction of ecosystems and local communities. They support massive sea and road transportation. They encourage companies with no concern whatsoever for the welfare of the people working for them, often on precarious contractual terms not far from slavery.
But many consumers are themselves victims of the effects of globalisation and generalised obsession with “productivity”: less jobs, harder work and lower real incomes for almost everyone, and ever more money for a very small “elite”.
Crucially a lot of people regarding themselves as middle or upper middle class feel the pinch, fear for their future and that of their children. They too now often rush to hard discounters to get ultra cheap chicken wings, potatoes, wine and other products (see for instance http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2736246/We-Lidl-class-Store-s-11-99-bubbly-woos-new-shoppers.html )
Like most people today they are too busy and distracted to be able to visualise mentally the hall with ten thousands chickens, each with the equivalent of an A4 sheet to survive on, all stuffed with antibiotics and other chemicals. When you eat the flesh of one of those birds, what happens is that your body-mind-soul system receives messages of fear and utter misery encrypted in the cells on the poor creature out of its animal concentration camp. And these messages do you no good at all. Physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Industrially grown potatoes also carry disharmonious vibes as the soil they came from was turned over by big machines destroying its rich ecosystem of worms and other creatures, before being spread with large amounts of chemicals. Not to mention the use of GM varieties. As for cheap industrial wine, this is more a chemical drink than real wine. No need to go into the details.
In short, rushing to the supermarket to buy cheap food plays in the hands of a profoundly predatory system of which the unaware buyer is one of the first victims.
But, many will say, we have no choice; our budget for food is now so limited. Of course it is under pressure from lower real incomes and from competing demands: housing, cars, electronic gadgets, holidays, and all sorts of things to keep up the appearance, to try to stay on the pathetic social ladder.
Mankind has fallen in the huge trap of materialism, and the rise of the low cost model signals it is entering the last stage of evolution towards generalised slavery and disharmony.
But, as explained at length in previous posts and in the book The Subtle Dance, this sombre “reality” is only is a thin layer within a much broader reality, most of it not directly accessible to our five senses.
Once you begin to see through the veil of material so-called reality, your whole outlook on existence changes radically and you are no longer a lonely rat rushing in a dead end.
Be lucid and take heart.
Love,
Leo
Copyright © Leo Foresta 2014
Leo Foresta 