"Takers" and "Receivers" 

espite the dodgy title this isn’t some erotic homosexual piece, just in case you’ve found this via some dubious web search, but a missive on yet another of my crackpot theories.  This one espouses that there are two main types of people in the world regardless of race, colour, intelligence (although this does help), language and just about everything else you can think of.  So, pull up your metaphorical stool, grab a literal glass of whatever takes you fancy, and listen in disbelief whilst I recount this saga of ignorance and wasted opportunities…

My theorem reads thus: 90% of the population of most countries in the world are morons who will do more or less what they’re told to do.  Fair enough, you may reason, that’s not too bad a thing or else – if the opposite were true – we’d have gangs of people running about causing mayhem, but there is, however, more to my argument than a simple sweeping generalisation and this is that these same people who do what they’re told don’t only do what they’re told from a governmental point of view, they do what they are told in a social sense by friends, adverts, “lifestyle” rags and TV programmes (whatever the fuck they are), films, more adverts, soaps, magazines, celebrities… the list goes on but I hope you get my thrust, which is that this 90% of people which I call “receivers” don’t seem to have very much in the way of sovereign thought and are a highly impressionable species.

This “doing what they’re told” involves simple yet cumulative things such as;

• Buying the “right” brand – and I hate the word brand and all it’s capitalist connotations intensely, but that’s another rant – of whatever tat they’re buying,
• Reading the tabloid paper with the highest tit-to-syllable count possible,
• Thinking the right (with right being the operative word, think “far right”) thoughts,
• Supporting a famous football team and ignoring the struggling local one,
• Eating junk food because “you know what you’ll get” (yeah, shite!),
• Thinking that it’s possible to get drinkable coffee from a jar or one of those absurd capsule contraptions,
• Shopping at supermarkets, even for “fresh” food, rather than local shops,
• Thinking there’s nothing else to music apart from the charts and Glastonbury,
• Disliking all Germans, despite never having met one in person (and not knowing Hitler was Austrian), whilst harping on about 1966 and sunbeds every ten minutes,
• Wearing the “right” clothes with stupid labels and/or slogans which mean nothing plastered all over them,
• Grieving over “the people’s princess” despite having never met her,
• Copying whatever their favourite – or the media’s current favourite – celebrity is wearing/doing/drinking/going/gibbering about,
• Drinking an “approved” beer, i.e. what passes in the UK for lager, none of this “warm flat shit”, as beer is supposed to have 10 atmospheres of gas pressure in it and be colder than a penguin’s arse,

…And a million and one other things – social engineering done not by the masters but by the very people themselves; any political science or social engineering writer would be bemused!  These may seem small things when taken in isolation but, add a few of them into a person’s social luggage, and you’ll soon find out that they mesh into the image of a rather familiar person – one who looks and acts like a frighteningly large amount of the people you might meet on the street, in your local or at work.

The final point I made is the one which most interests me as I’ve made an unempirical study over the last few years of people who drink mass-produced "lager" and other such execrable crud and will state here and now that this admittedly unscientific sample ticks all the right boxes in my theory – if you’ll excuse the scooping pun – by having some or more of the previous list of mindsets such as, for example, drinking Stella, eating McScum and taking their kids there for a “treat” (!), reading tabloid papers, hating immigrants (all “foreigners”, really), doing a weekly shop of ready-meals and additive-laden crap at a huge supermarket, going to the football, being proud of their shit car, listening to formulaic crap such as the Kaiser Chiefs or Franz Ferdinand and actually liking it, wearing “Bench” or other irrelevantly-badged clothing…

I could go on but surely you see what I’m saying here?  These people are the “receivers” of the world in that they take whatever they’re given and don’t care, know or want to know that there are much, much better options than the ones they’re already taking for granted as being the best on offer just because the TV, some celebrity or their mates’ peer pressure tells them that’s the case; it’s a very sad state of affairs all round when you think about it.  These are the sort of people who go on so-called – by the travel industry, not just me – “low-expectation trips” where all they hope for is to get pissed, insult some foreigners, maybe have a fight or two, urinate on a national monument and if there’s any spare time between these things maybe try and get laid.  Oh yes, and eat some chips and drink lots of lager which may mean, for the daring ones, the local beer (which is in all probability owned by a multinational and so therefore crap).

I know that my theory and ramblings up to this point is more or less common knowledge, or else why would we have hours upon hours of irrelevant, mind-numbing and downright tedious adverts on every media known to man – from paper to digital via every football shirt and bus stop in-between – to tell the unthinking horde what to spend their time/money/benefits/credit card on?  Okay, so my theory isn’t exactly earth-shattering in a road to Damascus type manner, as I’m basically surmising what is already in the public domain and being used by corporatist kak-peddlars to extract more and more money from the lower classes into the ever-grasping hands of the rich as we speak, but although what I say above is well known, have you actually thought about it and worked out how many of the people you know are one of these mindless drones?

The results can be surprising, although if you’re a scooper then you’ll probably be surrounded by the “other” 10% of people who fit into the next category of my theory, which is those who are the “takers” rather than the “receivers” of the world, those who don’t pay much attention to what they’re told to buy or consume by adverts, celebrities, the TV, newspapers or anyone except for people on the same wavelength as them whose opinions they respect – and even then they may disagree with them!  These people, and most scoopers fit right into this group in my opinion, don’t like being told what to like, drink, eat, where to go, what to do, what to wear, who to listen to, what to read and every other possible connotation of modern life: they form their own opinions based on experience and the few accepted wise voices and will do as they please – and if other people don’t like it then they’re the ones who are missing out.

If you think about your typical scooper I’m sure you’ll be able to see where I’m coming from by now with this rather long-winded argument, in that this 10% of the population which I classify as “takers” will have radically different opinions and even lifestyles than those of the other 90% who receive what they’re given and don’t ask many questions.  For example, a scooper may listen to Eastfield, Mortiis and Mad Sin (99.9% of normals will never have heard of these bands as they’re not in the charts and don’t play Glastonbury), read a paper which doesn’t consist entirely of tits, “bonking”, celebrity gibberish, immigrant scare-stories and more tits but will probably contain words of more than two syllables, drink real ale, malt whisky and other artisanal drinks rather than products of multinational corporations, shop at farmers markets and small shops rather than line the coffers of big supermarkets, eat organic and free-range rather than processed, additive-laden crap… the list goes on, but the difference between the two personality types, in my opinion, is about as polarised as it’s possible to be.

Obviously, the line between takers and receivers isn’t as clear-cut as I’ve alluded to and there will be a wide range of people who fit into both camps in some aspects of their lives and not others whilst some people will lean towards one camp or the other, but whichever way you look at it I’m sure you’ll be able to find some resonance in my theory and, more amusingly, see it in action the next time you’re at a beer festival or down your local – that bloke, reading a tabloid, drinking multinational crap, wearing "trendy" clothes, spewing racist bigotry… and that other guy with the socialist worker, drinking cask beer, wearing an obscure band t-shirt and espousing liberal views on world politics; they’re totally different types of people and, with that, I rest my case…

Have fun “taker” and “receiver” spotting…!

© Gazza 23/07/08.