The Great Substitution: Remembering What We Were Before We Were Consumers

There are moments in history so quiet you wouldn’t notice them at first.

Moments not marked by headlines or war, but by something more cunning:

A shift in language.

We were once called citizens.

It’s a word we barely remember, not because it’s old,

But because it was buried—on purpose.

A citizen is someone with standing.

A soul with rights and responsibilities.

A participant in the collective life of a people, a land, a future.

A citizen has agency—not just to vote, but to shape, to resist, to co-create.

But somewhere—right in the midst of the modern age—something happened.

In the aftermath of war, unrest, and global restructuring,

When people were beginning to rise,

To organize, to demand fairness, dignity, freedom...

A new spell was cast.

We weren’t silenced—we were rebranded.

Consumer.

That word may sound ordinary now, but it’s anything but innocent.

It’s the name of a strategy—a systematic effort to reduce human beings from agents of change to agents of purchase.

This wasn’t an accident.

This was designed.

Meticulously.

By governments, corporations, economists, and think tanks who saw the raw power of a mobilized population and decided it was too risky to let us believe in our own influence.

So they offered us a trade:

You can have everything... if you stop asking for anything.

Stop asking for justice, for equity, for community, for meaning.

And in return, here’s credit.

Here’s convenience.

Here’s comfort.

Here’s stuff.

It was genius, really—if what you wanted was control.

They didn't need to take away our voice.

They just gave us a thousand things to buy instead.

A citizen shows up to a town hall.

A consumer scrolls Amazon at midnight.

A citizen marches.

A consumer upgrades.

A citizen demands dignity.

A consumer seeks a discount.

And what of rights?

They too were reframed—packaged in customer service scripts and hidden in user agreements.

Now, rights are something you earn through spending—status granted by platinum cards and premium subscriptions.

But in that transaction, something sacred was lost.

And in its place, a kind of spiritual emptiness has grown.

We live in a culture that produces too much and satisfies too little.

That promises happiness in the form of packages but leaves us hollow once the box is opened.

We live in a system that tells us:

You are only as valuable as your ability to consume.

And that same system is killing the planet, fraying our relationships,and robbing us of meaning.

This forgetting we live in—

it didn’t happen by chance.

It was manufactured.

And it continues to be.

But remembering is dangerous to those who profit from your sleep.

Because when we remember we are more than consumers—

we begin to ask questions that can’t be answered by sales or slogans.

We start to see that success is not wealth, but connection.

That freedom is not in the mall, but in the commons.

That joy is not purchased, but lived.

This isn’t about blame.

This is about clarity.

It’s about looking at the spell we’re under and realizing we can choose to wake up.

It’s about recognizing that this moment in time—right now—

calls us to re-member ourselves not as units of productivity, not as avatars of appetite, but as citizens of Earth.

As co-creators of a world still possible.

A world where success looks like sufficiency.

Where enough is enough.

Where value is measured in care, not currency.

Where we are more interested in becoming whole than appearing winning.

So yes—let us grieve what was stolen.

Let us see the cost of the great substitution.

And then—let us rise from the forgetting.

Let us remember ourselves back to life.