The Dictatorship of the Toys:

In the adolescent society, products are not so much end uses as image devices.  Corporations ‘imaginise’ their products by crafting them into mythic symbols that fuse the worlds of waking and dreaming.  Advertising has evolved from the spruiking puff, with its descriptor-based exaggerations and lists of benefits, to elaborate metaphoric fantasies of desire and fulfilment. Propaganda has morphed into evocational, irrational and non-linear gestalts that pump the goods and services they represent, straight into the unconscious.  Thorough research keeps honing these practices from being an inspired art form to a methodical and systematic science driven onslaught.

Insofar as the imagined component of a product is greater that its overt use values, it becomes a toy.  The conversion of product into toy is the engine room of overproduction and consumption.  A use value has some boundaries that are defined by the utility provided.  Dreams have no such limitations.  Neither does the accelerating productivity that feeds them.  By tapping the power of dreaming, capturing the sources of imagination and infantilising the entire culture, the toy maker idearchs (rulers who control mass populations through manipulating their imagined worlds) have acquired power over mass populations beyond the wildest dreams of their totalitarian predecessors

In the post modern era, after the jingles have become silent, there will be a certain incredulity at the degree of consciousness control exercised over modern people and the ability of corporations like Coca Cola and McDonalds, to raise insignificantly trivial products into icons more powerful than the pyramids.


“You mean they actually paid real money to buy that stuff?”

“Well no, it was toy money for big kids who never grew up, who always wanted more and were never satisfied for very long.  The more they filled up their lives with toys and the more elaborately they were made, the emptier and more diminished their lives became.  The more they played with them, the less they played with each other, or their children, who were already orphaned by long hours of toy making.  So they gave them toys instead and their unhappinesses multiplied, like the things they threw away, including life itself; for new toys were more important.  They broke themselves so that their toys might grow and multiply to impress the other kids who only loved toys, who died for them, killed for them and almost destroyed the planet for them...”


As the world of necessitous production is turned into a toy emporium, the interactions around it are transformed into games and fantasies.  The ability to differentiate between game playing and authentic interaction becomes blurred beyond recognition.  Sport becomes business.  Business becomes gamesmanship.  Play becomes entertainment more real than life itself.  Relationships become playthings.  We have learnt to play at life as if we were characters in a fantasy show.  If it gets boring or difficult, we switch channels, situation, spouses, children, persona or image. 

This world of game playing most properly belongs to the world of the young, who have to immerse themselves in virtual realities.  These stand in for the experiences they are yet to have and thus prepare them as far as possible for the Real Adult Thing. 

This is not to say that adults shouldn’t play games.  It is just that they have to understand their boundaries so as not to risk becoming drowned in them.  They need to be able to understand that play, games, toys and entertainment are side shows.  They are a legitimate diversion from the more central, but often mundane processes of life only within reasonable, limited and clear rules of engagement. 

In the absence of such adult perspective, games become an avoidance of, or inability to access emotional, moral, or intellectual depth, commitment, or transparency; i.e., the means to and evidence of existential security and growth into genuine selfhood.  None of us is immune to the blandishments of the game, particularly if enough money and hype is thrown at it, but adults understand the nature of their fantasies and are capable of engaging other people or social situations as they really are.

In the fully-grown, the child’s eye view of reality is both a sad loss and a dangerous delusion, for it obscures the authentic adult landscape and the real challenges, obstacles, dangers and rewards that make it up.  The games that the child-adult plays represent such a small cross section of not only what is theoretically possible, but also what is there to be found at hand.  The real adult thing isn’t easy, but it builds an existential fitness to withstand, learn and grow from its vicissitudes.  Sometimes the deepest satisfactions in life are built on the ruins of desire, fantasy and sexual games.   

The game can altogether take over even nations.  It can so cushion their sense of reality that something as serious and real as say a disaster is likely to be understood as only happening to other people; or it is just a special effects scenario with rescue, resolution and romance edited into the final shots.  It is someone else’s game plan, as seen on TV.  When Real Disaster does strike, the adolescent dreamers wake in pained disbelief that this could happen to them!

A world built around toys is both enchantment and trap, like exotic tropical carnivorous plants that drown and dissolve their victims.  They drown in their own needs and dreams, and the labour requirements to meet them, so that the production war machine can be fertilised, grown and replicated.