Calling the Illness the Cure.

It’s back to the shopping mall theme. Something else I did in another shopping mall in another city centre quite a few years ago was walk around examining the window displays. I was doing it to address the question ‘how much of this stuff do we actually need?’ You can guess the result, no doubt.

And then I took stock of the hordes of people who were using this place with a sense of purpose, poring over the displays, going in and out of the shops with undisguised enthusiasm, chattering excitedly about their new something-or-other. I think it was then that I realised just what a powerful addiction the free market surge has caused. For all the talk of drugs and alcohol, shopping has to be the biggest addiction of all.

Like any other addiction, it traps people in a cycle of dependency. They get a high out of buying something, and then the high wears off so they have to go and buy something else. The system even invents an amusing name for it, so that it looks harmless and people won’t realise they’re trapped. They call it ‘retail therapy.’ What a curious state of affairs when we can create something that amounts to a sickness and then call it ‘therapy.’ How many people have noticed, I wonder, that product development is no longer about making things that people need, or even want? It’s about finding something to make that they can persuade people to want. And that isn’t so difficult because people are addicted to wanting. A large part of the business of trade is no longer about providing useful goods and services, but solely about making money for the entrepreneurs. In a way they’re no different to neighbourhood drug dealers getting kids hooked on heroine. Odd that we should give so many of them knighthoods.

And make no mistake, this addiction is dangerous. It’s particularly hard on people with low incomes, because they’re under ever-increasing pressure to spend far more than they have just in order belong and function. Poor parents are faced with a terrible dilemma at Christmas. They can no longer stop at buying their kids what they can afford because those kids will then be mocked and reviled for having less than the better off ones. So the people who can least afford the debt are the ones who have to suffer the greatest amount of stress for getting into it. And the same system that persuades people they have to spend, spend, spend, is the same system that comes down heavily on those who can’t afford to keep up the repayments. Sick indeed.

It isn’t just the poor, of course. Even the ones who are better off – in relative terms, that is – are living off debt these days. It’s a debt-ridden world. Those who tell us that we’re better off now than we’ve ever been are simply lying. They point to the fact that average wage increases have exceeded inflation; but they conveniently ignore the fact that people have to buy so much more than they used to, and they conveniently ignore the addiction they’ve created to make people live in a permanent state of wanting, and they conveniently ignore the debt levels. It’s hardly surprising that stress is so prevelant now.

Remember the old Christmas favourite?

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Now’s the season to be jolly.

Not any more, it seems. Two or three years ago there were billboards posted all over my home town. They’d been put there by the City Centre Management. They proclaimed, in very bold letters:

Now’s the season to be shopping.

I expect towns all over the country had them. Says it all, really.