There are these stories about the end of communism in Eastern Europe, about all the consumer goods they marvelled at that we take for granted in the West. Particularly bananas.
At the most basic level this was a problem of material scarcity. You just couldn’t get hold of them until after the Wall fell, because communism sucks. But at a deeper level it was a problem of a warped, propagandised information environment. If you don’t ever see pictures of foreigners eating bananas, after a while you just forget about the whole idea. It’s hard to notice an absence.
Call these “banana goods” – things you can’t get (because the economic system is a failure), and you don’t realise what you’re missing (because the failure is hushed up).
Or, you might know in the abstract that the thing exists, but you worry it would be somehow outlandish or morally dubious for normal people to have it in abundance. This is a more sophisticated coverup, in which the citizen participates in his own immiseration, emotionally blackmailed into making cope-excuses on behalf of the failed system.
Yes, westerners have bananas, but anyway they’re imperialists who lynch negroes …
Yes, I can’t have air conditioning, but anyway it worsens the urban heat island and increases carbon emissions …
Then you hop on a plane to a first-world city like Boston or Tokyo, and AC is just totally unremarkable there. Their governments don’t guilt-trip you for wanting to be physically comfortable in hot weather. Their national grids can handle the load.
Then you see on twitter the world sniggering in disbelief as England once again falls to pieces over a 30C heatwave. “Why don’t they just install AC?”
I agree, it’s bananas.