Wants and needs

Jun 24, 2008 Editorial

The precipitous rise in food and fuel prices over the past year has worked wonders in focusing the minds of our fellow Guyanese on the value of money.

Faced with the prospect that even such basic mundane items such as rice and flour may be soon out of reach of the average worker, old and almost forgotten distinctions between wants and needs are rising to the fore.

In Primary School, we had all been taught that the basic needs of mankind were food, clothes and shelter.

Love might have been mentioned but that was given short shrift – some did claim that it “made the world go around” but then we learnt about gravity and orbits. All else were wants, with the implication that they may be dispensed with.

But what the average citizen is finding out is that the latter is easier said than done. Between the time when the basic needs were defined and today, our worldview has undergone quite a shift.

And this is not just a consequence of a widening of the list of needs by scientists such as Abraham Maslow with his inclusion of “higher-order” needs such as “self-actualisation” not to mention medium levels ones such as security etc.

We are referring to the revolution occasioned by the introduction of “consumerism” and its facilitator, money as a feature of “modernisation”.

Karl Marx pointed out the danger early on: “The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my — the possessor’s — properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality.

I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness — its deterrent power — is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet.

Therefore, I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor.

Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.”
Take the old, most basic need for food. Somewhere along the way we tied what we ate to who we were.

And what we ate was determined by the money we had. In the colonial days, the Europeans decided that they would rather eat old, soft, sprouting Irish potatoes than the yams and cassava that provided the same carbohydrate nutrient values and we followed suit.

So today, we import millions of pounds of potatoes annually because we decide that we “need” just that source of carbohydrate. But we’ve gone a step further today.

The TV beams the advertisements of the developed world directly into our living rooms and the old “colonial” mentality on food has deepened to levels that are astounding.

Even the markets in the countryside now offer fresh strawberries, cauliflower and broccoli flown in from “overseas”.

And so on for clothes and shelter: we cannot just buy jeans; they must be Calvin Klein jeans.
Clothes, food and shelter now literally “maketh” the man – and the woman.

In the worldview of consumerism, consumption becomes an end in itself and demand for particular products is dictated by impulses far removed from the basic needs.

The specificity of consumption – which has to be facilitated by the possession of money – becomes the yardstick of an individual’s worth.

One therefore fears somewhat that the well-meaning efforts of the government to persuade citizens to grow more food in their backyards may founder since it is impossible to grow those foods that deliver the requisite “status”.

The initiative misses the whole point that the consumption has to be conspicuous, not only in terms of the quantity of money expended but in the public nature of the transaction. We are not asserting that there are not real problems presented to many in our country by the skyrocketing prices in the marketplace.

The point we are attempting to highlight is an old one made by the authorities since the seventies: we have to wean ourselves away from the rampant consumerism that impels us to equate wants with needs.

In addition to the “grow more” campaign we have to initiate a “get real” campaign that resists consumerism’s subversion of our liberty and turns us into automations of insatiable consumption. And it is not just about food: Will the shirt jac ever replace the suit and tie?

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Wants and needs

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