How Much Is Enough? by Alan Durning
“Consumption, an essence of the profane, has become sacred. Attack goods and you attack the American way of life.”
--Alan Wolfe
All societies are unsustainable, at least to the extent that if they keep trying to do the same things they are doing now forever, they will not survive. As we race to become the most trivial society ever created, some dreadful things could awaken us from our stupors or make the stupors worse. If the critics of greed do not get their acts together, there is no shortage of groups out there who are able to take advantage of most situations, to serve their own excessive self-interests.
The toys and infotainment minions who speak glowingly of the future ignore a problem. You cannot build a bright future by filling the world with toys that tell citizens to jump off the reality train for colossal chunks of their lives.
Not only are the number of consumer alternatives increasing but the incentives to choose bad alternatives may be increasing as well and the incentives to choose good alternatives may be decreasing. The consumerist cant is just buy, and too hell with the consequences of the purchase and the pursuit of the purchase. As somebody once said, if you want to know your real values, look at your receipts. A product and a meaning to go with it are sold together.
As many have noted, there are plenty of candidates when comes to listing the flaws of excessive consumption:
· Causes self-identification with ludicrous logos, products, advertisements and celebrities. When they start giving out awards for infomercials, you know things have gone beyond ridiculous.
· Encourages individuals to be overly concerned with status and to create destruction in the pursuit of status. The pitch to the consumer: Buy our product and you will be free, happy, powerful, beautiful, hip, intelligent, purpose-filled and in control and attention worthy. Never mind that the reality is a little different.
· Creates ugly public spaces.
· Takes up too much of that valuable human window of consciousness. You can't think "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" and "What is game-theory?" at the same time. Action becomes habit and somehow more important things begin to fade.
· Increases Alienation. Alienation is marketed because people who are alienated are likely to seek relief in buying products to relieve the alienation, a temporary relief that once gone is relieved by the buying or more products in a spiral of alienation that often gets stopped only by really, really good distraction.
· Multiplies opportunity losses. Working for eight-cylinder cars, three bathroom houses and 100-channel cable versus other things tends to be mutually exclusive often enough even if it is not always mutually exclusive. Consumerism may keep some people from worse evils. People distracted with amusements may not be distracted with fascism, but there are better things, better choices. The possibility of a worse evil does not make excesses good.
· Increases sales of harmful products while reducing sales of beneficial products.
· Hinders the development of autonomy. The more influence toys have over you, the less influence you have over yourself. And the more you "need" toys, the easier you are to manipulate.
· Creates too much debt.
· Bad purchases become a habit. Green beans taste great to someone used to a 1800-calorie diet. They taste terrible to someone used to eating 4000 calories a day of junk food and who is 50 pounds overweight.
· Creates declining marginal utility for extra purchases.
· Reduces overall economic growth: Too little savings, Too high long-term interest rates, which restricts growth, too much of workforce devoted to unproductive activities such as advertising, bill collecting, repairing the damage of gambling related crime and so on. Blake Hurst claims that, "a survey of pathological gamblers that found that 75 percent of pathological gamblers have committed a felony to support their habit." There are about 1.1 million pathological gamblers. They commit $1.3 billion worth of insurance fraud each year, and carry nearly a six-figure level of debts.
· Keeps people shallow. The consumerist incantation: Indulge yourself in rotten things ignore the effects and argue there are no bad effects.
· Influences individuals to think that what they have is more important than what they do.
· Increases cynicism because airwaves are little more than a space for relentless deliberate deceptions.
· Encourages us to want more of the things that will not make us good or happy.
· Provides instant gratification, yet the instant gratification is not related to long-term benefit.
· Treats people as merely a means, yet claims that anything that people agree to is acceptable and not treating people as merely a means, but whether people agree is irrelevant to whether they are merely being treated as a means. It is often the case that one is treating others as merely as a means and they are treating themselves merely as a means.
· Want gets declared need. Need becomes must. Must becomes habit. Yet mere criticism of the habit is considered oppressive. According to the old cliché, do not talk about sex, politics or religion. Now that those things have become forms of therapy there is a new rule: Do not talk about the ethics of consumerism, as if talking about it two were a crime against America, autonomy or humanity. No matter the reality, one must state that one values individuals, families, communities, planet, humanity over money, power, and fame.
Much of the ideology that is sold along with goods is nonsense. As long as someone makes money it must be good for others and increase the overall economy. Products only liberate. They only improve happiness. What I intuitively want and what is in my best interests is automatically equivalent.
We always control objects. Objects do not influence us.
Go with the flow. Resisting causes anxiety.
Part of the population tries to earn money by convincing others into buying things that do not benefit them. Part of the population works their butts off to buy the things that do not benefit them. Part of the population devises schemes to get things they have tricked themselves into wanting without having to work--and the rest of the population says little.
Of course, excessive consumerism did not invent bad desires, and it may not even make them worse, but it does little to direct individuals to better things.
No one should suspend the judgments they need most because of homilies of popularity, inevitability and imitation autonomy. No one should make themselves weak, needy, diffident and dependent for the sake of faddish toys and services. No one should accept passivity, impulsiveness and isolation and no one should accept a culture being designed toward those ends.
One model has it that consumers are at fault. Another has it that sellers are at fault. Another has it that no one is at fault. Durning finds fault with both consumers and sellers.
While some of the causes in this book are laudable, it has major weaknesses. First, it is a laundry list of things consumed. It fails to distinguish among beneficial and harmful consumables. Consuming a thousand tons of something is no big deal if it has negligible toxicity and other harms.
Second, it fails to emphasize that the West produces about as much as it consumes. Products shipped to the West from poor nations are a fraction of the world economic total. Little from slashed rain forests ends up in Beverly Hills. Poor productivity by poor nations is a much bigger problem than consumption in the West.
Third, it lacks plans other than grass roots reformations. The Tightwad Gazette does not stand a chance against hundreds of billions in advertising dollars.
Fourth, practices such as recycling, organic farming and attacking nuclear power have low or negative expected values. Time and energies would be better spent elsewhere.
Fifth, it has a large number of appeals to tradition and inadequate experts. The scathing parodies of consumption in The Onion are much more hard hitting than this work. Not recommended.
book review article by J.T. Fournier
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