Sugar and sabre-rattling
On the marketplace of ideas
There are fewer and fewer spaces that foster the cross-pollination of truly diverse political and philosophical backgrounds.
As I traverse the confectionery aisle at Coles, I’m struck by the ways in which high-calorie, fleeting pleasures appear, at first glance, like a rainbow of bite-sized ways to ameliorate our craving for a pang of sweetness.
The marketplace of ideas behaves similarly to the pre-diabetic marketplace of Mars Wrigley and Nestlé.
Political and social movements and arts and cultural institutions understand the importance of packaging.
Suffering is deep fried and branded with ideological fervour. War is boiled down to a playground for the better angels of our nature to scrape their knees and sing out in self-soothing sanctimony.
History is whittled down to a spear. For the uncountable impotent, to brandish a weapon and bare one’s fangs is to indulge in a fleeting, self-actualising pleasure.
Whatever the name of the ‘cause’ behind this indulgence, our primitive hijacking of others’ tribulations is a self-serving affair. Justifications for brutish campaigns as ‘social justice’ are too often retroactively fitted to the real, un-interrogated subconscious needs of the broken.
“Only two grams of sugar per serving” glows out from the colourful, plastic wrapping. We’re invited to squint beneath yellow floodlights and Bruno Mars at a wrapper’s underbelly to ascertain what exactly constitutes ‘one serving’.
There is as much justification and as much reasonableness for mobilising around a popular crusade as there is for eating Maltesers. Both bring pleasure in small doses.
But what of a diet of sugar or sabre rattling?
Both poison: one the body, the other the body politic.
Photo essay: Carriageworks, 2025.
The sixty-five-metre-long, seventeen-metre-wide renovated train shed hosts the Carriageworks farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. Three of its four sides are walled, leaving one of its two longer sides mostly exposed.
Eliot, T. S. (1915). The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
Sugar cravings work so the more you have the more you want . Libel mongering works the same - the more they make the more they want and thd worse they become. Hence the descent into craziness.
You write so eloquently and beautifully Josh. At times a bit over my head, but engrossing reading nonetheless.