Warning! People are turning into Robots

Mass culture and cliché

Everyone goes to school, everyone wants to sing and make big bucks like wiz kid and Davido, every boy out there wants to play their way through the streets of Berger to the top flight football clubs in Europe, everyman believes most women are in relationships for money, every woman believes that any man who as much as accidentally looks their direction on the street wants to take them to bed, every politician is corrupt, Christians must attend church on Sunday, you cannot succeed in an examination without cheating, men have to ask women out on dates all the time, Women have to stay at home and take care of the children. Please give me a break, I am tired of the Cliches!

If we accept that the Merriam-Webster dictionary is any authority at all on the English language, then we may approve of its definition of Cliché to mean; "Something, most often a phrase or expression, that is overused or used outside its original context, so that its original impact and meaning are lost. A trite saying; a platitude. [from 19th c.]"

 

Cliché as a word came into use in the 19th century, this however was not the only innovation of that epoch, in-fact several historic events occurred in the 19th century, the most significant being the consolidation of the industrial revolution of the late 18th century and the consequent abolition of trans-Atlantic slave trade by the imperial British monarchy in 1807. 

For the context of this writing, my intent lies not with discussing the heinous trans-Atlantic slave trade, but rather Clichés and how the industrial revolution may have led to it.

 

Prior to the birth of industrialisation, production had been primarily executed through the use of human labour as opposed to industrialisation which is capital intensive. This meant that human creativity, innovation and dynamism was appreciated before the advent of industrialisation, and when industrialisation arrived together with its army of advantages and benefits, one of its most staggering disadvantages was not just the creation of unemployment where non previously existed, but also the sacrifice of dynamism and uniqueness, in exchange for mass culture and production.

Therefore people moved from being dictators of what they consumed, to being mere pawns at the hands of manufacturers, who offered them practically the same range, type, colour, shapes and sizes of commodities to choose from. Industrialisation thrived in the fact that machines cheaply churned out large quantities of cloned commodities through a mechanised process, forcing people to abandon the right of choice in exchange for the cheapness and convenience of industrial goods. This may have been the birth and indeed rebirth of present day mass-culture as we know it, a term synonymous to the word cliché.

 

The present day society is just a mammoth crowd of cloned individuals, wearing the same type of clothes, professing the same set of ideals, holding the same set of prejudices at the expense of creativity, dynamism and individuality.
Dynamism has since left our shores, leaving us with the easier option of being mere reflections of the next person. This has been achieved at the expense of self-expression and creativity. Many of us today live in denial of our true self, thoughts and opinions.

Every lady wears the same set of make-covers and style of clothes, today, even hairs are being worn on hairs, how pathetic!
Would it not be weird for anyone to claim that millions of Nigerian Women all want to wear artificial wigs at the same time, or that brands like Gucci have become their preferred supplier of handbags? Indeed, when one walks into the streets of Lagos, do all the ladies not look same and alike or am i the only one who has observed? The touch of uniqueness and individualism is non-existent anymore, people want to be mirrored by the fake and expensive standards and opinions of society.

 

Models and indeed women have to be skinny and seemingly malnourished before they are considered sexy or beautiful. The presence of big butts and breasts has become the new definition of 'Gifted'.
Men consider women trophies and sleeping with them the only means through which these trophies can be acquired, a loner at the cinemas is considered strange, because cinemas are specially meant for couples? The list even gets more absurd with outrageous expectations like men who are also humans and indeed emotional beings being expected not to cry, to marry only younger women, and to steer clear of the Kitchen.

 

Even our occupations are traditional and Clichéd. Be a Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Engineer, Farmer and the likes, today no one wants to wake up from sleep and aspire to become what they dreamt of, instead we all have our role models cut out for us, a line of robots waiting for someone to vacate an office just for us to fill the position. When did our fountain of creativity dry up? why have we sacrificed the beauty of the original in exchange for a carbon copy? How did our talents and natural abilities get lost in the maze of academic activities in school? How did you get so predictable that i can rightly finish a sentence you are about to utter, even before you get midway, where did we get comfortable with the conventional and wait for a set of super-humans to set the trend while we follow?

 

Indeed, he that subdues his inner thoughts and actions just to please the expectations of others has not only started living, but has not realised the brevity of life. True happiness and fulfilment only begins when we start expressing ourselves not just routinely, but dynamically and creatively, for then we all would be standards, and not mere mirrors of other's wishes to be reflected upon.

Written by Onyeoziri Favour.