It doesn’t require the possession of very many brain cells to realise that happiness has nothing to do with having things. Happiness is about being comfortable with who you are, where you are, and what you’ve got. So how does that square with the modern mania for economic growth? It doesn’t.
Economic growth requires that people constantly want more. In order to achieve that, the marketing system bombards us with messages subtly telling us that we must have this, that or the other in order to fit in and be fulfilled. It requires that we be uncomfortable with who we are, where we are, and what we’ve got. It forces the gullible into a perpetual state of discontent. It even glorifies fatuous phrases like ‘retail therapy,’ so we can smile and not realise that we’re being conned into what is the greatest addiction in the history of mankind. It mercilessly grinds down the poor, and leaves the better off in a constant state of wanting. The only ones who escape the process are the tiny number of mega-rich people who have more money than they can ever spend. And even some of them fall into the trap of pointlessly coveting even greater riches.
I groan every time I hear the politicians and economists tell us how wonderful everything is because the economy grew by X% this year. And when the economy goes the other way, the consequences are hideous to behold. They’re just two sides of the same problem.
The human animal has only four material needs: food, fuel, clothing and shelter. If we have those, all we need do to be happy is convince ourselves that it's enough. Anything else is a bonus. Simple.
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4 comments:
capitalism is such a sick system...the other day at the grocery store i saw a large, wooden cut-out decoration that proclaimed “GO GREEN,” and i started thinking how completely ironic it is that the environmental movement has become so perverted by consumerism. i’d thought about it before but this was the first time it struck me so powerfully--a pointless piece of crap sign made from part of a tree, probably constructed in china, transported to boise idaho and put up for sale to be purchased by someone who needs a chintzy emblem to remind them not to be wasteful. or to show to others how superior and un-wasteful they are. it continues to deeply disturb me.
We get such mixed messages, don't we? The environmentalists say we must must consume less (which I agree with,) but we're bombarded at every turn with messages telling us that the only way to live a successful life is to consume more. And the politicians sit in the middle, pushing one view one day and the opposite one the next. They know the bottom line, of course. They know that the way to political power is to promise the electorate more spending capacity. Back to square one; and I can't see it changing until there's a radical shift in what people consider important in life. I suspect it's going to take a massive economic collapse and/or major environmental catastrophe to bring that about.
i’m all for revolution...i was watching a documentary the other day about the petrocollapse, it scares me but excites me at the same time. i’m so curious to see what the world would look like after a severe energy crisis. and i agree, i think all those extraneous things need to be stripped away from us by force before we’ll be able to fully realize what’s actually important in life. politicians are corruptible and powerless and just as dumb as everyone else, and people will be complacent until resources dry up.
the distortion of the environmental movement bothers me so much because it demonstrates with no room for uncertainty the strength of capitalism. along comes a movement that runs perfectly counter to the market--one that tells us to consume less and consume wisely. it’s totally unacceptable, right? so it had to be turned into something that would actually drive the market and preserve the status quo rather than driving change and preserving environmental resources. and it was turned that way, very successfully. it was transformed from a fringe movement with its priorities basically in order to a mass movement/fad, environmentally conscious in name only (in fact i think the word “conscious” is an added irony to the whole situation). we’ve made some changes for the better but overall we’re not living sustainably, we’re just behaving in ways that minimally impact our current “standard of living” and allow us to comfortably sustain our bad habits just a bit longer. i don’t see any way that capitalism and environmental preservation can coexist.
The pessimistic side of me feels that we've gone too far now. Societies all over the world have been structured in a way that relies on unsustainable consumption. And capitalism seems definitely to have won the day.
On the other hand, I think there's a glimmer of hope. I sense that today's young people are more thoughtful than earlier generations, and there's a chance they'll instinctively restructure things and avoid too much suffering.
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