Good work. Thanks.

“Those of us who live in towns and cities are bombarded on a daily basis with information that seeks to warp the value judgements we make.”

You say that as if there’s some group that is outside that influence. Rural and exurban people live in communication as though they have the same lives as people in cities now. That’s part of the problem: a lack of barbarism/natural risks to prove the worth of civilization (isolation from nature). When barbarians don’t exist outside civilization, they arise from within as the organic maintenance of stability is forgotten.

Then there’s this: If the individual’s wants are to be urgent they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied. For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.

The pragmatism of Stoicism is overwhelmed by “jobs”, “brands” and “products”: of which, it’s difficult to distinguish whether this means objects or people.