Excerpt from The Culture of Make Believe

Monopoly (p. 422)

From chapter "Distance"

The inevitable result of our social and economic system is monopoly: centralized ownership, unified control, monolithic power. The last six thousand years have seen a grinding away at diversity: biological, cultural, theological, economic. One crop, one culture, one god, one owner – these are manifestations of a cultural urge to simplify complexity and thus increase control. Whether the crop is corn in Iowa or trees in Idaho, whether the god is Yahweh, Christ, or production, the result is inevitably deforestation and mass extinction, genocide, “Christianity or death,” and a global marketplace in which billions of identical consumers purchase billions of identical cans of Coca-Cola (“the real thing”). Such are the fruits of our culture. Even a cursory examination of ecology, psychology, economics, and history reveals a relentless tightening of human and nonhuman experience, leading monotonously toward the eradication of all that is different, toward stasis, toward death.