All the world's a stage

The image says it all. You can have it all, all you need is money even if reality tells you otherwise. Why is this so? It's because we MAKE NOTHING ANYMORE. After the impact of deregulation, courtesy Ronnie Reagan, where corporations were encouraged to offshore in order to gin evermore profits for corporate stockholders while creating modern China, the country became a shell of itself, cored out from the inside out. Which means we have no real money so the substitute  is ... be sold stuff you don't need with money you don't have. - George Carlin

All the staging is a means to an end, and everyone in America is nothing more than a means to an end: close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many. 

You know how realtors stage a house to increase its marketability: first, they remove all evidence that people actually live there. (Of course a vacant house is ideal for staging because there's none of the messy real-life stuff to deal with.) 

All the clutter of everyday life must be moved elsewhere so the house can look like a bloodless furniture showroom. In other words, fake. 

Then various tricks /cues are employed to activate the sense of "home": induce the "smell of fresh bread" in the kitchen, adorn rooms with vases of fresh flowers, and have a few fake "family" photos set on bookshelves. 

It gets better ...

"Fake" is now itself fake as the meta-marketers seek to undermine the concept of fake to sell the idea that what we recognize as fake is actually real: we're told that it's the real thing that's been hidden from view that's fake. The photo on the shelf of the fake family is real, we're told; what's fake is the actual real photo of the messy real-world family who actually lives here. 

Given that everything is staged, trust has been completely destroyed. To trust anything being presented as a means to an end--i.e. a con, a scam, a sales pitch, a fake scent of fresh bread, etc.--is to be a chump. 

Staging is no substitute for reality. The frauds, cons and scams are failing to keep the simulacrum world glued together because no matter how expert the marketing and how great the desire to close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many, reality intrudes right when the deal's about to close and the whole absurd contraption collapses in a heap. 

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As you like it - Shankespeare