The bookshop in the airport

I recently travelled between Brussels and Istanbul as a last-minute impulsive trip to visit my grandmother. A two-way flight that I have grown quite familiar with over the years. However, I did feel that this time around I started noticing aspects of air travel that I hadn’t before. It was especially the strange environment that is an airport that really struck me.

Thinking about spending hours on a plane makes our puny consumerist brains anxious and drives us to want to distract ourselves from the harsh reality of sitting in a flying metal container in the sky at outrageous speeds (quite a ridiculous concept if you really think about it). The capitalist system has taken note of this and promptly offers us a wide yet weirdly specific array of commodities. Airports practically serve a dual purpose as a shopping mall at this point, as there is something for almost anybody. What really sets off my mindless consumption patterns is seeing a nice little bookshop (this is true outside of airports as well). There is something about browsing shelves until I find the non-fiction or -if I’m lucky- the politics section and forgetting any kind of financial responsibility that truly worries me, yet not deeply enough to do anything about it.

The bookshops I usually frequent tend to have a curation that suits my interests, so often choosing a new book feels like having to choose a favourite child right in front of their face. What struck me about the airport bookshops, however, was that they were weirdly similar in Istanbul and Brussels. Sure, each one had a good amount of literature in their respective official language(s), but the selection of English books (which, for now at least, really rubs in our face the almost global acceptance of English as the standard world language) was almost identical. I could not believe my eyes. I, Yunus Poblome, was having trouble to find an interesting book to read.

Getting to choose between absolute literary masterpieces such as “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter and “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill made me scratch my head. The books either were “apolitical” (which generally just means complacent with the status quo most of the time) or all had a certain political narrative in common. It was almost like the airport curators were trying to tell me something. What I was seeing in front of me was not a random selection of best-selling books, this was pure, distilled ideology (in the Marxian sense, of course). I could simply not find any books that steered away from this ruling class ideology on the bookshelf.

I was being told that if I was poor, it was my own fault as an individual and that I was not making the right choices. On top of that, If I did want to make the right choices, I should be looking to what the rich do differently, not as an economic class, but as individuals. The rich, you see, are simply a swell lot of incredibly hard-working people who deserve their prosperity because of their work ethic. They have made better choices and are actively living more productive lives than you. Fear not however, as you can buy an array of self-help books that can turn you into the ever-productive capitalist machine you were naturally designed to be! Our capitalist society allows for upward mobility for those who deserve it. We all start off equal, you see, and at the end of the day your success in life is decided by how hard you choose to work.

The irony, of course, being that these books are being sold to millions of people who all have the exact same delusions of getting rich and breaking free of the proletarian chains they are bound to. Many people are blinded by this kind of subtle propaganda as those in power will always try to portray a system that benefits them as only natural and good. Even with the relative free speech we enjoy in the west, this ideology is still subtly being wired into our political thinking from the moment we are born. It is not noticeable at first, as most things generally align with its philosophy. Because of this, any kind of narrative that goes against ideology is initially rejected as it is not information or a way of thinking many are familiar with. I believe that this subtle yet sinister function of ideology has grave implications not for the freedom of speech, but for the freedom of thought.

I will soon be writing a longer inquiry about how I believe ideology functions in our societies. But for now I hope you have enjoyed this quick rant about the WHSmith in the Zaventem airport.