Discuss: The Gospel of Consumption

in the year-plus i’ve known about this article, i’ve told dozens of people about it. almost to a person, the response has been positive. the more we push back against those bent on this control of our society, the more we see their evil, single-minded intent: to enslave, coerce and manipulate. we are not bound by their design. opt out.

Two questions for all of us to contemplate, I suppose, are these.

How are billions of people to sensibly organize to respond ably to the destruction of the Earth that is now being perpetrated by those few million people who possess a lion’s share of the world’s wealth and the power it purchases? 

When are the super-rich to be held to account for having self-righteously institutionalized the ‘goodness’ of pathological arrogance, conspicuous consumption and excessive hoarding for the benefit of none others than themselves and their minions?

Steven took it further, and he’s right: to merely opt out, my words, is to allow the insanity to continue, is to further burden our children and heirs with misery. To speak out, to form responses to the current construct, requires a greater commitment to change. We must define the need for change as no less than an imperative, resolve to be unyielding, and promulgate awareness of this sharp polarization as standing in opposition to pretty much every tenet built into the existing society.

Perhaps it is time for many of us, starting now, to look not only to deploy these words from Mohandas Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world”, but also to live out this great man’s example of principled, non-violent, civil disobedience.

Perhaps constructive personal action and necessary social change are in the offing.

If the leaders of the global political economy continue to recklessly expand the large-scale production of food to feed an already rapidly growing population, then absolute global human population numbers will continue to skyrocket as they are now. The relentless effort to increase the world’s food supply appears to be a primary precipitant of a global human population explosion. A billion people are hungry on Earth in our time. More poor people live in our planetary home today than existed on Earth in the year of my birth.

Why not end large-scale agricultural production and everywhere encourage an increase in sustainable farming practices? Why not fairly and equitably distribute the world’s abundant food harvests so that the starving can fed? We have hundreds of millions of people who are starving as well as many too many millions of people who suffer from the ravages of gluttony. The human family could move toward more healthful living standards for all by redistributing available food resources.

The family of humanity is going to have to stop sleepwalking through life and immediately awaken, however difficult that may be, to the human-driven global challenges threatening human wellbeing and environmental health in our time.

Perhaps necessary change is in the offing because its occurrence must come soon.

Otherwise, I fear, the human community could reap the Biblical whirlwind, a storm blast of epic proportions, that gives rise to some kind of unimaginably huge and destructive global ecological wreckage.

This is latest post from my blog. I’m putting it here because I think it is so relevant to the discussion.

In the United States steel industry between 1982 and the year 2002 production rose from 77 million tons a year to 120 million tons. At the same time the number of workers employed in the industry went from 289,000 down to 74,000.

This is not an isolated occurrence. Similar statistics can be found in most industries in all industrialized countries. The reason is not complicated – better machines and greater efficiency means an increasing ability to produce more with less labor.

Surely this is a good thing. The only question is what do we do with it. How do we best realize the great gift our technology is offering us. For example, if the statistics for steel were more or less representational of productivity increases in all industries, that would mean we could sustain 1982 living standards on a 10 hour work week. I know it’s not as simple as that: there are many post 1982 developments that we would not want to do without and some industries have not had the productivity increases that steel production has (though some have had more). I’m just using this example to indicate the scale of what is happening.

We are not even coming close to taking full advantage of the possibilities that technology opens up. While our great productivity has resulted in large increases in living standards, it has also helped to cause two of our biggest problems. On the one hand we generate unemployment, turning the machine freed workers into the out of work. On the other hand we desperately start producing more and more stuff to create work for the unemployed to do. We have created the twin problem of unemployment and a global and personal smothering in excess stuff, when we could just be having more and more free time.

And please, not free time to drink more beer and watch more television. But free time to give our lives more meaning and transform the world.

Mr. Kaplan’s well written article ties together several historical threads to make an important point.  “We can break that cycle”, he concludes, ”by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need.”
But, we haven’t and it is unclear when or if we will.
Mr. Kaplan begs the question of why the ruling elite are able to persuade the masses to act against their own best interests.  How do we counter the marketing strategies of Edward Bernays’ intellectual descendants? Critics railed against the gospel of consumption from the outset as Mr. Kaplan does in this essay. Shortly after Kettering, Davis, Edgerton, et al articulated the tenants of the gospel of consumption critics appeared. As Mr. Kaplan references Arthur Dahlberg’s book (Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism) which appeared in 1932.
Clearly pointing out the risks and calling attention to the costs of the gospel of consumption was and is insufficient. Until we address this question, until we find an effective means to counter the gospel of consumerism, the nation will continue on its present course. 
Drawing inferences from Easter Island’s (Rapa Nui’s) collapse, Jared Diamond (Easter Island’s End, Discover, 1995) wrote that within modern, industrial societies “Corrective action is blocked by vested interests, by well-intentioned political and business leaders, and by their electorates…” Seemingly oblivious to the risk, we, like Easter Islanders, appear to be on a disastrous path.
Based on more recent archaeological work Dr. Chris Stevenson (Easter Island’s Controversial Collapse, Science Daily, 2009) wrote that “Societies don’t just go into a tailspin and self-destruct,” but adapt. True, but the inhabitants of Rapa Nui deforested the island and killed off most of the original plants, animals, and insects! In short, adaptation followed an ecological disaster when there was little choice – adapt or die.
So, what short of a disaster is required to convince us to turn off our machines when we have created enough? Or, will our descendants struggle to adapt to life on a nearly barren planet?

Perhaps the philosophy of the Native American is right…...

Summed up in two statements…

“You are imprisoned by everything you own”

and….....

“When you cut down the last tree…..poisoining the last stream…..only then will you realize that you can’t eat your money”

Not only as a species do we refuse to acknowledge nature…........we go beyond even ignoring it to the point of manipulation at the sure risk of our own peril….....

Economically speaking we are a very clever society that either lacks or refuses to acknowledge any wisdom in our judgements.