Courtesy of Daryl Mitchell/Wikimedia Commons

The Whole Capitalism Cult: Part One

Alyssa Yeager
Jul 26, 2017 · 3 min read

No, nothing is sacred. And even if there were to be something called sacred, we mere primates wouldn’t be able to decide which book or which idol or which city was the truly holy one.

— Christopher Hitchens


“Lean!! Leeeeeean!!”

And lean we would, every time my mother screamed it. She had the timing down, and always called it at just the right moment. Three of us seated comfortably would suddenly become a single pile of giggling humanity, leaning into each other, squished up against the side of the Tilt-A-Whirl car. And because we all followed my mother’s command, that car would spin wildly, without fail, every single time.

My favorite ride on the Ocean City, New Jersey, boardwalk was always the Tilt-A-Whirl. Every summer my parents would rent a beach house in the South Jersey seaside town for a week — before my brother, sister and I became teenagers — and we would spend our days in the surf and sand, our evenings on the boardwalk. The personal highlight of most days for me came in the evening on the boardwalk, squished tight with my mother and sister, spinning and dizzy, on the Tilt-A-Whirl at Gillians Wonderland Pier.

I still remember that feeling of momentum on the Tilt-A-Whirl — the butterflies it caused in the pit of my stomach. Contrary to anxiety it was a feeling of excitement, and I looked forward to it every day during our vacation week. Strangely, that same unmistakable feeling also surfaces each time I achieve something new, or find myself in front of an audience. I know it well, and think of my mother’s instructions on the Tilt-A-Whirl as our momentum began to build: “Lean!! Leeeeeean!!” That feeling is about making something happen.

When I was a pre-teen at the Jersey Shore, I didn’t know a lot about real life. Instead, I knew every music video on MTV inside and out, studied and dog-eared every new issue of Rolling Stone, worshipped idols like Kurt Cobain, and dressed for high school like D’arcy from Smashing Pumpkins. It took me a long time to see those things for what they really were — to understand the cult that all of it was enshrined inside. That understanding finally hit me a few years later, when a fiercely anti-corporate punk in bondage pants with a red-tipped mohawak tried to convince me to try a cigarette in the high school parking lot one afternoon. As it turned out, his fiercely anti-corporate belief wasn’t really a belief — it was mostly about being cool and fitting in with a preferred group or tribe. It was a brand, much like the Marlboro he offered me.

For many of us, that understanding eventually comes. Next to nothing is sacred, nearly everything is a contradiction, and almost none of it is real. And then we go on to learn how to use that awareness to enter into a system and play what often feels eerily similar to a game of achievement and leaning into momentum to make things happen, hopefully with ethics in mind and in the most honorable way possible.

The contradictions are omnipresent today. Our tribes are more, not less—many in the name of individuality and freedom. And though we may like to critique that system we call Capitalism in general — or more specifically The Establishment, Wall Street, big business, consumer focus groups, marketing and advertising, and the steady churn of new and largely unnecessary products in the name of innovation — if our critiques are getting us elected, making us money, or earning us an audience on social media, we should be self aware enough to understand that we are very much a critical part of the system we’re critiquing.

To be continued…

Alyssa Yeager

Written by

Contemporary artist. Creative Director. Sometimes street and urban photographer. #art #photo #design #politics.

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