A woman walks into a department store.

She takes in the racks and stacks of stuff, the

sugared music, the sale signs, the listless customers shuffling through the aisles, and is
moved suddenly and to her own astonishment – to shout. “Is this all there is?” An assistant
comes round from behind his till: “No, madam. There’s more in our catalogue.”
5
This is the answer we have been given to everything – the only answer. We may have lost
our attachments, our communities and our sense of meaning and purpose, but there will be
more money and more stuff with which to replace them. Now that the promise has
evaporated, the size of the void becomes intelligible.
10
It’s not that the old dispensation was necessarily better: it was bad in different ways.
Hierarchies of class and gender crush the human spirit as effectively as atomisation. The
point is that the void that was filled with junk could have been occupied by a better society
built on mutual support and connectedness without the stifling stratification of the old
15order. But the movements that helped to smash the old world were facilitated and co-
opted by consumerism.
 Individuation, a necessary response to oppressive conformity, is exploitable. New social
hierarchies built around positional goods and conspicuous consumption took the place of
the old. The conflict between individualism and egalitarianism, too readily ignored by those
20who helped to break the oppressive norms and strictures, does not resolve itself.

So we are lost in the 21st century, living in a state of social disaggregation that hardly
anyone desired but which is an emergent property of a world reliant on rising consumption
to avert economic collapse, saturated with advertising and framed by market
25fundamentalism. We inhabit a planet our ancestors would have found impossible to
imagine: 7 billion people, suffering an epidemic of loneliness. It is a world of our making but
not of our choice.

Now it appears that the feast to which we were invited is only for the few. Figures released
30last week show that wages in the UK are lower than they were 13 years ago. A fortnight
ago, Oxfam revealed that the top 1% now possess 48% of the world’s wealth; by next year
they will own as much as everybody else put together. On the same day, an Austrian
company unveiled its design for a new superyacht. Built on the hull of an oil tanker, it will
be 280 metres (918 ft) long. There will be 11 decks, three helipads, theatres, concert halls
35and restaurants, electric cars to take owner and guests from one end of the ship to the
other, and a four-storey ski slope.
In 1949 Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell to argue that his dystopian vision was the
more convincing. “The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience … The
40change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.” I don’t
believe he was wrong.