So, what if everything you ever loved was manufactured?

Your religion, your politics, your family, your lover, your art, your music, your food, your drink - how much did you really choose, and how much was just what you were conditioned to desire?

There is no greater emblem of the fabrication of desire than Coca-Cola, the canonical objet petit a of our planet.

The devil don’t make nothing better.

Introduction to Desire

Why do you do what you do? Žižek employs the Lacanian notion of desire as a lack, a void that can never be filled. Lack, yes, ladies and gentlemen, is Lacanian - you, you are now witnessing the transposition of the mental, the internal opening a chasm in the neurosilical fabric of the technopsyche.

Indeed, marxocapitalist analyses lend to capital position of the master signifier of the Oepidal other ether, symbolizing the retraction of the phallic id’s ideal marriage of the same spacetime shakti of the binary’s 1’s surasha superego superposition pushing the anthropological principle’s free will’s collapsing on a zygote’s zenith.

Man wants what he cannot have, and takes what he can get.

You want a Coke, but the restuarant refuses to be exorted by the Coca-Cola corporation (CCC), so you barrel through into a Pepsi.

On Desire

Of the Buddha

In Buddhism, desire is the root of all sufering.

Four Truths (Noble) include:

1. Suffering Truth (Dukkha) (dissatisfaction, pain, impermanence): is a characteristic inherent existing in realms cyclic (samsara).

2. Origin Truth (Samudaya) (source, arising, or “cause”): Suffering (dukkha) arises together with Craving (taṇhā). While Craving is translated traditionally in languages Western as ‘cause’ of Suffering, then Craving also can be viewed as factor binding us to Suffering, or as a reaction to Suffering, trying to escape from it.

3. Cessation Truth (Nirodha) (cessation, ending, restraint): Suffering can be ended or restrained by abandonment or cutting off connection with Craving; abandonment of Craving will liberate from bondage of Suffering.

4. Path Truth (Magga) (path): Eightfold Noble Path is path leading to abandonment, cessation of Craving (taṇhā) and Attachment, and liberation from Suffering (dukkha).

On Epicurus

The avoidance of suffering is the highest bliss.

Desire’s Ambition: Ambrosia

On Coca, Psychologically Manifested Physically

Vin Mariani

Before Coca-Cola, there was Vin Mariani. Thomas Edison, the pope, and a whole bunch of Georgians walk into a bar…

Before Coca-Cola, there was Vin Mariani—a Bordeaux wine infused with coca leaves, the elixir of emperors and inventors. Picture this: 1863, Angelo Mariani, Corsican pharmacist, blends the “divine plant” of the Incas with fine French vintage. Seventeen milligrams of cocaine per ounce, marketed as a restorative for the weary elite. Thomas Edison swore by it, toiling through all-nighters with Vin-fueled vigor. Pope Leo XIII, that pontiff of progress, awarded it a Vatican gold medal and carried a flask etched with his likeness. Even Ulysses S. Grant, in his final days, sipped it to steady his pen for memoirs.

Before Coca-Cola, it was charcuterie for the veins—cured coca leaves, aged in oak, sliced thin with sophistication. Users reported euphoria, clarity, the didgeridoo’s drone turned symphony. But whiplash? Inevitable. The crash followed the high, addiction the allure. By 1904, U.S. regulations curbed its cocaine kick, but the template was set: desire commodified, bottled bliss with a bitter aftertaste. Mariani’s ambition? Ambrosia in a glass. Reality: a hook that reeled in the soul.

Coca-Cola, born in 1886 from John Pemberton’s cocaine-laced syrup, a nod, or was it a trumpet’s toot, to the Italian Peruvian stallion, shed its narcotic skin by 1903 but its premise lived on, refreshment’s Bob Marley redemption song, the somber soma of the United States’ capitalist perfectioning empire.

3" x 5" : Italian Metal Etchings of Vin Mariani

bottle-bird-back

bottle-bird-front

man-back

man-front

Coca Cola, The Modern Soma

Mad Men’s denouement drives home the advertising business’ coup d’etait, the manufactured desires’ root muse oozing desire finds solitude in the capturing of the completeness of the transfiguration of the hippy movements’ eye-opening chakras via the merchandising of said cultural-capitalist conjuring.

It’s not a drink but the idea of imbibing that transcends a concept’s innuendo — “hilltop” - a multicultural chorus crooning unity in defanged fructose cavity brew.

Desire dreams of ambrosia—the gods’ nectar, immortality in a sip. But history serves up mortal proxies: elixirs that promise transcendence, only to deliver the whiplash of crash and craving. From papal tonics to ad-agency soma, we’ve bottled our lacks, labeled them luxuries, and guzzled down the illusion.

Diet No Caffeine Gold Coke

The general rule about an algebra is the existence of the null element. And desire’s econometric communiqués are no different. Unorthodox as they come, the Coca-Cola company has even cashed in on capturing desire distillate.

No longer selling the physical soma is enough. The soma’s sedative, or should say, psychoactive stirring is now, for all intents, sat neutered, yet it still sells. The fact is, 1 + 0 is still a hair shy of zero, but it’s “One”, still!

Bubbles burst into fleeting aspirations, amor-fati of satiation.

20oz Diet Cream Soda

Drumming up models of various backgrounds with orange hair and red makeup solidifies the genius of the CCC’s marketing ideology.

Desire manifests soda as the (soda)-fication of a slew of of carrot-topped models. Thus, the consumer becomes desire re-selling itself. The human salient features vibe-transmute into flavor, reducing the subject to the object of their own desire, the ouroboros of simulacrum-consumer-producer collapses.

So when you pry open the gas station ‘fridge of dreams’, and grab that 20oz Diet Cream Soda, fancy yourself couple isotopes away from a pope’s pinnacle of pleasure and put that in your pipe and smoke it, only to find the ash a secret ingredient of the formula.

Yet, did not Jesus turn water upon wine, did he not, or did you confuse the same analogy of the free market of vin mariani into a modern Bolivian’s syncretic Catholic birthing ceremony to beseech La Sante Muerte?

My God, pass me a fucking Marlboro already.