Discuss: The Gospel of Consumption

How could one generation go so wrong? Evidently, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, increasing per capita consumption, and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors. We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of ‘real’ endless economic growth and soon to become unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it and the success of any manmade economy depend. My not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves.

Never in the course of human events have so few members of a single generation stolen, consumed and hoarded so much wealth at the expense of so many other people. We have mortgaged the future of our own children. We are the “what’s in it for me generation”. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay”.

Perhaps my not-so-great does live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them.  Remember, silence is golden. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our ‘inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire. We never lie but also never tell the truth as we see it. The “thing” that matters most of all to us is “the only game in town”.  We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms and any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations a finite planet naturally imposes.

We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations. Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre. Most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed. Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save the global economy, life as we know it and Earth’s body.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

I think Steven broke it real good
overall.
Peace

I think Kaplan addresses the main problem in the community: People no longer have time to talk with each other in an empathetic manner. They don’t share a concern for the landscape because they don’t get out to enjoy it with each other. They collapse in front of the TV, where they hear only about the economy, as if it were something that will sustain us.

Myself,I am seeing everyday
all the board the bad effects
of to much tv and sitting around
being lazy and pathetic.
It’s a form of brainwashing for
sure and a lot of people are under
some type of spell related to
all this consumerism and matrialism.So I think females or
parents who are single,they need
to start throwing and out and
getting all this excessive
electronic madness out of their
house and start to buy lo tech
toys for their children.
That will save a a few,but a lot
will keep on doing the same thing
which will keep being exploited
overall by some of these companies.

The greedy people in dark, pin striped suits who have pillaged the capitalist system and ruined humanity’s political economy by turning it into a gambling casino and stealing its wealth for themselves and their minions are the same people who are now warning honorable people not to dismantle the global economy. What is wrong with this picture?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

Billions in bonuses and bailouts for the “wonder boys” on Wall Street.

Precisely what have these self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe been doing for billion dollar year-end paydays?

Yesterday we found out.

In recent years “the brightest and best” have perfected the rule-making governing the manipulation of ‘free’ markets and the institutionalization of fraudulent financial instruments and business models.

What still mystifies me is this: What have these heirs of Ozymandias done in 2008 to merit this self-enrichment?  More manipulation and more fraud for more ill-gotten gains, I suppose.

wow! I am on the other side of the world in Australia and I these sentiments express my thoughts and beliefs exactly!

Let’s aim for shorter working weeks, so we can build our families into healthy ones, and our realationships and communities into valuing, caring and ethical ones!

I have already left a lucrative profession recently to do this and have seen the benefit to myself, family, relationships with friends and communities!

Well written piece and it truly sums up our quandry in America.  We have allowed the system to rob us of our productivity gains to the extent that inflation adjusted wages have not increased in 35 years.  Meanwhile in the last 20 we’ve increased productivity by 40% per labor-hour.  This is ludicrous and is tantamount to theft by these unethical free-wheeling corporations that threaten our very nation.  Our financial system, our energy system, now our automotive and manufacturing systems, have been mismanaged and downright looted by treasonous good-old-boy networks of inhumance greedy individuals for which no expletive is damning enough.  Their febrile ethics and limitless greed has us all caught in a cycle of pissing away our lives in a pathetic attempt to “get ahead” on a hamster wheel leading to nowhere.  Meanwhile the lack of meaningful family and community time is destroying our youth, causing pandemic stress and lifestyle diseases, and captivating our minds, gluing them to the most base level of existence, the end result of which is the inability to recognize the horror we are perpetrating on the world.  Were we to limit our consumption, and really be paid for our production, we might easily survive working four hours a day, or for those who wish, have one partner stay home.  What a concept!  A wage that supports a family.  How did we get duped into thinking that equal opportunity for women meant a third the pay (in purchasing power terms) for everyone?  It’s as if work is the goal itself, rather than the means to a life.  Work to live, don’t live to work, and by god don’t live to buy.  We should all spend five years boycotting this consumer model and buy nothing more than the means of subsistence.  While consumers are individually weak, if we acted in concert we could bring this twisted hell of a system to it’s knees and rebuild it as a true democracy where the employee and citizen is the true benefactor of our nations wealth, not the cold-hearted shrouded aristocracy that now runs our shadow government.  Burn them down I say.  Nationalize their ill-gotten gains and begin again with some morals for crying out loud.