I started a new squirty bottle of mayonnaise yesterday (I know, I know, it’s almost too fascinating to bear already, but stay with me) and it was… rubbish. It was like water. Slightly creamy water. It was quantifiably worse than the previous bottle, whose last (rich) dregs had already been deposited on my plate.
And because it is getting towards the end of the year and I am very, very tired and almost permanently furious, I rang my mother to tell her. And she told me about the abundance of very similar experiences she was having with cleaning products. Where once she could depend on viscous gels that would cling to the sides of sinks or toilet bowls, or cream cleaners worthy of the name, now all was, well, as watery as a modern mayonnaise.
It’s so that manufacturers can save money, of course. We get that. We’re furious and lead tiny lives, but we’re not idiots. The question is – why make an inferior product? Why not keep the same quality – the one that, you know, actually does the job – but sell it in smaller amounts?
Well, I know why, and because I am so tired and furious and so sick of this goddamn year of misery, strife and all despicable points in between, I will tell you. It is because we are in thrall to the thick. Not in a disinfectant-in-days-of-yore way. Thick as in stupid. Thick as in “as thick as mince”. Thick as in thick.
Manufacturers know that if their products stay the same but look smaller a large number of people will think they’re being cheated and stop buying them. This is because a large number of people are thick. And thus we must all suffer for it, even and especially those of us who are capable of resolving the price/volume/quality equation in a way that would leave everyone better off – at least in the sense of having cleaner toilets.
Once you start seeing it, it’s everywhere. The thick are the reason we have the bottled water industry and all its attendant, astonishing wastage. Ditto liquid soap – because they were so easily convinced that bar soap, in existence for 5,000 years, was in fact a dread vector of dirt and disease. The thick are why we can’t have standardised clothing sizes, for example. Because people need at least one place they can go to where they are a size 10 instead of a 14 despite (surely? Surely?) knowing that their bodies have not lost a stone between walking through one retail emporium’s door and another’s.
It’s why we have always had astrology (you’re a Pisces? Really? That’s amazing, amazing how much nothing it means!) and it’s why the whole wellness industry, the astrology of this millennium, exists. There are simply too many people thick enough to believe that “natural” is synonymous with “good” and believe shiny-haired women with lovely kitchens and secret eating disorders are the fount of all knowledge about nutrition, biology and the exact interplay between them along every inch of your own, specific intestinal length.
Which wouldn’t, I suppose, matter too much if the thick were a closed circle, just talking about chia seeds or star signs or the advantages of pump dispensery over solid state matter. But with the advent of social media they have come to dominate everything. The thick are generally just that bit louder, more loquacious and more aggressively convinced of their right to be heard than everyone else and so, we hear them, everywhere, just that bit louder and more aggressive than everyone else.
And what is the automatic reaction of the powers that be to what appears to be the majority group? It’s to pander to it, of course. Which again wouldn’t matter too much if it remained just a matter of commercial companies diluting condiments or cleaning fluids (though I still object) in response.
But of course it spreads. Do you remember the vox pops and other testimonies in the days and weeks after Brexit from people who had voted to leave because they wanted to stick it to the Government but didn’t actually want to depart from the EU and would in fact be negatively affected, personally or professionally, if – not when – we did? That’s thick, and parties both pandered to and exploited it.
More and more importantly, however, we are beholden to the most dangerous of the thickos – the ideologues. The people incapable of holding two thoughts in their heads and considering the merits of each, of weighing up one side’s arguments, then another’s – maybe even a third’s, sometimes! – and coming to a reasoned conclusion. Or perhaps feeling that they still don’t know enough and investigating further in the hope that enlightenment will eventually dawn and a position timorously arrived at is still capable of further alteration, should further information arrive.
I think in 2024 there should be a concerted effort to stand up to the thick and stop pandering to them. Because unless we do, life is going to be just a squirt of watery mayonnaise on every plate.