Bottom Line by Michael Eichenbaum

The bottom line is that in order to get people to do things they don’t want to do you have to make the alternative unpalatable. People are varyingly moved by incentives but few will consciously choose misery and disempowerment. so, as the rate of profit falls, as the garrote tightens around the throat of the concept of ”prosperity,” less and less is available even for those incentives you’re willing to offer. But you can always make it worse to refuse. Is living in barely state sponsored penury getting worse year on year? Then make institutionalization and imprisonment a literal rape factory and make jokes about it core to the cultural zeitgeist. Is struggling in a shitty office job awful? Embrace a new caste of ritual human sacrifices you strand outside of buildings in the wealthiest places in the world, drying like pemmican on the asphalt unmedicated and subject to unlimited violence at the whim of literally any passerby. Then you can feel better.

The lords and ladies demand an ever larger share of free money, and so the piss-hearted man-mongers of middle management can scarce offer a merit raise. but they can by silent collective agreement make refusing to accept their grim grey immurement a literal hell on earth and trust that most people will choose a private agony over a public execution.

This is why it gets worse, and why it will continue. This is the iron logic of control, where the milk of human kindness drains upwards, and what runs into the drains isn’t milk.

M.E.

Michael Eichenbaum is 22 years old and a Gilroy native. He is a frequent contributor to, most notably, his Notes app. Primary outlets for existential consternation include anonymous social media posting, saxophone, and lounging at coffee shops having impassioned discussions about what spacefaring extraterrestrials would look like. He desires to live with joy and give with joy.