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“So,” he thought, “what is our role here at the Hut? Do we simply spy on consumers and make gnarly comments?”
He saw himself as a lousy consumer although he had consumed vast amounts of perception from outside himself. Perhaps consumers were a cut above colonists or conquistadors or mountain men. If the people were not busy consuming they would be busy doing something and most of it would be bad.
“But they see themselves not as they are but as they want to be thought of and so open to the literary imagination. After all, if I’m a lousy consumer but am always being judged by my prowess as a consumer then I have to defend my inefficiency or, better yet, supplant it with something superior or, at least, superior in my own scale of things.”
And his experience had taken him into poor neighborhoods and rich ones and in all places he found the vast majority of people to be consumers. “Count the bodies and broken laws buried in the happy consumption of the wealthy,” someone had remarked. He later found out what that meant and agreed in a general sense. “But, after all, aren’t wealth creators above and beyond the mere consumers?” When the successful warrior-king had plundered a declining Roman town and taken its gold and silver didn’t his prowess and violation of human decency allow him to distribute more goods to himself and his cronies?”
Idle questions were always sport at the Mud Hut.
He was only interested in those who consumed the world and turned it into wisdom.
Those few, in other words, who were unafraid.
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