Thinking About: Consumerism

I came to the opinion some time ago that the idea of consumerism is one of, if not actually the definitively, stupidest ideas that humanity has ever come up with. Yes, it’s even more stupid than religion – and that’s saying something. The thought that a persons primary role in life is to consume the fruits of industrial capitalism, with everything else as garnish, honestly disgusts me. I feel like standing in the middle of a shopping centre and shouting “I am not a consumer, I am a free man!” The concept of consumerism is, I think, directly responsible for the deep shit the world finds itself in – both economically and environmentally. We are being constantly extolled to buy more stuff we don’t need with money we simply don’t have. The only way to finance this is to borrow money against the future in the hope that there will be enough money in the future to pay for it all. Well guess what – there isn’t, hence the problems, the unemployment and the deepening crisis we’re in. The whole system depends, so we are told, on ‘consumer confidence’. In other words, if you feel it’s OK to go out tomorrow and buy that new car then everything will be fine and we can go on as before until the end of time. What an incredibly stupid way to run a planets economy. Did someone, or groups of someone’s, really sit down and think up this idea and expect it to work in the real world? Our economies are based on the abilities of businesses and governments to convince us that everything is OK enough for us to keep spending with confidence. The moment that spell is broken, and we look around us and see the reality of the situation, the whole system is irretrievably fucked. Guess what sports fans? Apart from those with their heads in the sand (or elsewhere) and those with their fingers in their ears, singing “la, la, la, I’m not listening” ever louder every day, everyone else realises that the system is well and truly broken. The efforts – from quantitative easing and other equally bizarre sounding initiatives – to ‘stabilise the markets’ aren’t working because more and more people are waking up to the fact that capitalism (or whatever system we’re actually living with at the moment) is inherently designed in its very fabric to make the rich even richer and to work the rest of us to death to pay for it all. Some of the proposed measures to ‘save the system’ could hardly be more blatant – tax cuts for the rich (they are after all the job creators of society) and pay freezes or cuts for the rest of us (you know – the ones who actually work in their factories and their offices making the actual money). To save an already broken system they honestly propose making the divide between rich and poor even larger than it already is. At least they could offer to kiss us before we get repeatedly fucked. The world wide protests against the capitalist colossus should not have come as any surprise to commentators who have witnessed the growing desperation of an increasingly impoverished population. When backs are against the wall the only option – if you don’t want to just lay down and give in – is to fight back. What good it will do is hard to tell. These are early days and it’s very difficult to predict tomorrow’s headlines especially these days. We have already seen some of the so-called free nations responses to understandable frustration and anger at austerity measures aimed at them to pay for the mistakes of the banks and other institutions that are walking away from the disaster with bonuses intact. The cynical part of me knows that history shows that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The more optimistic part of me wonders if it must always be so.