The most insidious form of domination is the one that makes the dominated thank their chains.

Traditional slavery required overseers, whips, and the constant threat of violence. It was expensive, inefficient, and—most importantly—generated resistance. Rebellions were frequent because the enslaved knew, with absolute clarity, that they were not free. Modern consumerism has solved all of those problems for the ruling class. It has created a system of control so complete that its victims volunteer for longer hours, deeper debt, and greater isolation while believing they are exercising freedom.

This is what the lecturer calls “the perfection of slavery.”

You do not need to be forced to work sixty or seventy hours a week when the new iPhone, the designer handbag, or the perfectly filtered vacation photo on social media convinces you that your worth is measured by what you own. You police yourself. You compare yourself. You borrow at compound interest to finance a lifestyle that exists primarily to be photographed and envied. The whip has been internalized; the overseer now lives inside your skull, narrating your inadequacy in real time.

Traditional slaves could dream of emancipation. The consumer cannot even imagine an alternative because the system has convinced him that rebellion would mean giving up the very things that define his identity: the car, the apartment, the branded clothes, the follower count. To revolt would be to become a “loser.” And losing, in a consumer society, is the only unforgivable sin.

This is why the revolt of the elite in the 1980s was so brilliantly successful. By replacing the worker (a political subject capable of solidarity and collective demands) with the consumer (an isolated, competitive individual), the elite destroyed the only force that had ever threatened their dominance. Workers organize; consumers compete. Workers go on strike; consumers refresh their feeds to see who just bought a bigger house.

The genius of the system is that it runs on desire rather than coercion. You are not dragged to the mall—you run there. You are not ordered to refresh Instagram—you do it compulsively. You are not forced to take a second job to pay off credit-card debt—you proudly call it “hustle.” And when you finally collapse from exhaustion, you blame yourself for not working hard enough, not the structure that engineered your exhaustion in the first place.

Francis Fukuyama famously declared liberal capitalist democracy the “end of history” because no rival ideology seemed capable of challenging it. He was half-right. The true end of history arrived not with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but with the triumph of a system in which the masses are too divided, too indebted, and too addicted to status to ever imagine collective liberation again.

Consumerism is the perfection of slavery because the slave now loves his chains, polishes them, and begs for tighter ones—convinced that one day, with just a little more effort, he will finally be free.