Society is becoming so predictable. It might be just me finally growing up/old, or it's just that people have run out of ideas.
Last week I was strolling about a supermarket. Well, not actually strolling, but was moving from one huge fruit tank to another, picking my apples, and my bananas, and my oranges. An older couple came behind me, analyzing the quality, texture and firmness of the clementines. The husband muttered unsatisfactorily that he'd never seen such moist, small clementines in Kaufland before. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and, as the wife took the basket further to the next tank of possibly even worse citrus fruits, he grabbed one clementine, stuck it in his pocket, and then looked around to see if anyone had noticed him. He didn't see me, he was much taller than I am and looked somehow above my head, as if I had been invisible or didn't count in the first place.
I didn't think about it a lot at the time, but I brought it up with a friend later on and they challenged me to think about it more. I don't know why, but I completely ruled out the possibility of the man being kleptomaniac. Probably because I have never met one and I can't relate to that. But I kept thinking about the gesture, the image of him 'subtilizing' (like we'd say in good ol' Romanian) that damn clementine. How would a small, moist fruit like that (with this much, I agreed with him) be of so much importance to him as to risk his freedom by stealing it? It would have cost him a lot more to pay for this gesture, than if he had actually bought the thing.
And then it dawned on me. As I went on through the supermarket, I started noticing all sorts of things I hadn't even paid attention to before: chocolate wrappings, peels of apples and opened bottles of soft drinks on the shelves. This was a trend I had never even noticed until that moment, when that man almost drew my attention to it.
Supermarkets used to be a fun place for me to go... back when they were new and the concept was a sign of high trust and civilization. I'd imagined a supermarket in third world countries were people die of hunger and thirst. And I imagined all those people bursting inside a supermarket, filling it up, not caring about cashiers and cash machines, and simply gobbling everything they touched. THAT was to me the difference between civilization and primitiveness. The fact that we DIDN'T starve, and even if we were hungry, we wouldn't touch anything we had carefully selected and placed in our baskets, until it was ALL PAID FOR.
That is civil consciousness. That is what the concept is based on.
But by becoming such a highly civilized society, we've actually merely and lamely returned to the cave era.
Last week I was strolling about a supermarket. Well, not actually strolling, but was moving from one huge fruit tank to another, picking my apples, and my bananas, and my oranges. An older couple came behind me, analyzing the quality, texture and firmness of the clementines. The husband muttered unsatisfactorily that he'd never seen such moist, small clementines in Kaufland before. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and, as the wife took the basket further to the next tank of possibly even worse citrus fruits, he grabbed one clementine, stuck it in his pocket, and then looked around to see if anyone had noticed him. He didn't see me, he was much taller than I am and looked somehow above my head, as if I had been invisible or didn't count in the first place.
I didn't think about it a lot at the time, but I brought it up with a friend later on and they challenged me to think about it more. I don't know why, but I completely ruled out the possibility of the man being kleptomaniac. Probably because I have never met one and I can't relate to that. But I kept thinking about the gesture, the image of him 'subtilizing' (like we'd say in good ol' Romanian) that damn clementine. How would a small, moist fruit like that (with this much, I agreed with him) be of so much importance to him as to risk his freedom by stealing it? It would have cost him a lot more to pay for this gesture, than if he had actually bought the thing.
And then it dawned on me. As I went on through the supermarket, I started noticing all sorts of things I hadn't even paid attention to before: chocolate wrappings, peels of apples and opened bottles of soft drinks on the shelves. This was a trend I had never even noticed until that moment, when that man almost drew my attention to it.
Supermarkets used to be a fun place for me to go... back when they were new and the concept was a sign of high trust and civilization. I'd imagined a supermarket in third world countries were people die of hunger and thirst. And I imagined all those people bursting inside a supermarket, filling it up, not caring about cashiers and cash machines, and simply gobbling everything they touched. THAT was to me the difference between civilization and primitiveness. The fact that we DIDN'T starve, and even if we were hungry, we wouldn't touch anything we had carefully selected and placed in our baskets, until it was ALL PAID FOR.
That is civil consciousness. That is what the concept is based on.
But by becoming such a highly civilized society, we've actually merely and lamely returned to the cave era.
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