Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.” A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.

Opportunity hoarding is the term for this, and it takes the form of admissions procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking, and all sorts of credentialing. Conveniently, we don’t tend to think of these barriers as a means of protecting our class status, but as necessary measures to gauge intelligence or ability or commitment or excellence or hard work.

Credit creates the illusion of equality, in that we can all buy the same things on credit, but we can’t all pay the debt back.