I consume, therefore I am

Feb 24, 2009 Editorial

The news from the developed countries is so unremittingly gloomy that it almost makes one want to fill some barrels with foodstuff and ship them up north.
Almost. Because even a moment’s reflection brings home the reality that it simply does not make sense to evaluate the condition of people in those countries by ours.
A stagnant or even shrinking US economy still offers its citizens a lifestyle that would, and should, boggle our imagination.
The Japanese economy has been “stagnant” for over a decade but it has not noticeably affected their standard of living – yet the policy wonks are pulling their hair out to “get their economy moving again”.
What’s going on here? If people in a country can by and large obtain all they need for a healthy life – food, shelter, clothing and the opportunity to form healthy and loving relationships – what else do they want?
And this is the crux of the matter: there is a world of difference between what one needs and what one wants. While needs are basic and limited by our physical demands, wants are infinite and limited only by the individual’s imagination.
So we have a “beauty” industry in the developed world that dwarfs all the medical budgets of all the rest of the world combined. The model of “development” that most of the world now pursues is in imitation of the western variant in which one does not consume (in the widest sense of the word) merely to satisfy needs but to actually define oneself. The new God is consumerism and in a parody of Descartes, the mantra is now “I consume, therefore I am.”
This reigning deity has to be distinguished from the run-of-the-mill consumption, in which all of us have to engage. It must also be distinguished from over-consumption in which all of us may occasionally lapse – but then suffer, at least, a twinge of remorse.
Consumerism, like all “isms” is a full-blown ideology, in which the goal is to continuously seek new objects for gratification. And revel in it. Marx, of course, famously foretold of this eventuality – the fetishisation of things – but then, we are assured, Marx is dead.
Even in China – the last communist state left standing – the leaders are not only exhorting the masses to get on the bandwagon of consumerism but actually throwing money at them to get them hooked. And to think that the British have been excoriated for over almost two centuries for selling them opium to achieve the same end.
After the Great Depression of the thirties was finally “solved” by the Great War of the forties (bullets and armaments fuelled consumer demand), none of the leaders saw any wisdom in Gandhi’s observation that since the world’s resources were finite, models of “development” ought to factor this constraint in.
The post WWII world was quickly organised so that the raw materials of the newly “independent” nations could be shipped up north to satisfy the God of consumerism there. G-5 was born. After the “oil crisis” and the other intervening crises – occasioned by other countries attempting to join the consumerist religion – we had G-7, then G-8. We are up to G-20 with the present, and putatively, “greatest crisis” since the thirties.
There has been one meeting last November and another scheduled for April by G-20 to “fix” the crisis. However, neither the interim plan announced last November nor the agenda for April mentions how the essential contradiction of consumerism in a world of finite resources will be addressed.
We can therefore expect that the new, expanded G-20 grouping will do exactly what their predecessors did before: arrange a new world order so that their citizens will be facilitated to improve their consumption and then full-blown consumerism, at the expense of the now 170 countries not at the table. Those of us in the backwaters will be told to be happy that very soon, if we cooperate, we will be able to ship our bauxite, timber, sugar, rice and other primary products up north, soon.
Of course, the prices would have hit rock bottom by then. But such is the price of progress, in the service of the God of consumerism.

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