And good riddance.
Acquiring goods to make ourselves more productive and our lives less brutal, is a virtue. Having the cash or credit to afford the means thereto, is a blessing. That capitalism made it possible is a miracle. That we have abused and wasted the resulting privileges and opportunities, is tragic. The culprits are us and the siren song of consumer capitalism.
Consumer capitalism started out well enough when it not only promised but also delivered excellent, yet affordable goods. Regrettably, it quickly grew into a monster that devoured its children by destroying the middle class as it went global. It hollowed out the labour pool in the west by offshoring production and then proceeded to automate furiously, further debasing the global labour pool. As I write, we now have dumb and unreliable AI algorithms displacing high wage jobs in healthcare, banking, finance, information technology, engineering and the law. As its swan song it gives us an economy that thrives on using fear to sell pseudo products. Consider the twin riders of the apocalyptic money grab, fake climate alarmism and manufactured pandemics. In the wings awaiting their cues are a trio of fake furies; aliens in ufos, worldwide famine and imminent population collapse.
I am struck by how capitalism has degenerated to where its outcomes mirror those of socialism, differing only in its opiate-like supply chain powered conveyer belt of inferior bread and pointless circuses.
Socialism - A Very Short And Biased Review
From all according to their ability, to all according to their need - what could be more ideal? Almost anything, actually, because that trite little slogan is a cynical and dishonest misdirection. It raises a straw idol for the masses to worship while self appointed elites grab power to control who, if anyone, gets anything after the elites get theirs. Since elites’ wants are never enough, the get-what’s-lefts eventually make it known that they have detected a rat. Everything goes downhill from there.
Orwell had comprehensively skewered the whole socialist idea in his epic “Animal Farm” back in 1945. Pity he did not live to do that for our degenerate form of capitalism.
So how is contemporary capitalism similar?
Because Consumer Capitalism
The verb consume stems directly from the Latin consumere "to use up, eat, waste". Therefore a consumer uses up, eats, or wastes.
Just like socialism, consumer capitalism seduces with virtue signals - a chicken in every pot, a car in every driveway, a cellphone in every ear, some Chinese crap in every shopping cart. From each according to their credit, to each according to their attention span.
During the late sixties and early seventies, the concept of consumerism as a social and economic benefit was strongly encouraged by government policy, enabled by investment in the production of consumer goods and embraced by a public flush with credit. The term came to cover the purchase of any and everything, particularly durable goods, even automobiles and mortgaged homes. To sustain growth, consumer products were commodified with short production runs, effectively treating them as perishables. Introduction of new features and embellishments enticed buyers into dumping old models for new long before their utility value had been realised. Thus planned obsolescence entered the vocabulary. The general public responded enthusiastically, setting off a kind of status-through-spending race that we called “keeping up with the joneses” but it was more like “may the devil take the hindmost” - and he did.
Consequently a codependent pathology spread; shopping as therapy. Producers make stuff that people want but don’t need. It’s hoarded for a while, then trashed, recycled, garage-saled or given to charity, which then hoards, trashes etc. A lot ends up on ebay as “new never used” in company with tons of the same stuff, “brand new unused”. A substantial amount seems to be accounted for by my local parish church, which collects and sends it at considerable cost to Malawi, where it is thought (by my church) that it will be welcomed as very good stuff indeed. Meanwhile, they (the Malawians) know they don’t need our crap - they already have their own, so when it turns up, they in turn horde, trash, recycle etc.
This pointless routine has resulted in an even more pointless habit; ordering and sending back - a retail powered infinite loop.
Thus consumer capitalism = wasteful capitalism.
In the same way that socialism leads the unwary down the path to serfdom, so consumerism has suckered two or more generations of otherwise sensible people into a kind of kickstarter for globalists.
Interestingly, the ultimate practitioners of socialist capitalism, communist China, have built rampant consumerism right into socialism. They financed this feat by reinventing mercantilism at the expense of the West, so they must be laughing, yes? Not really. A quick internet search for “lie flat” and “let it rot” shows that many young Chinese don’t want to be working long hours for the leavings of the powerful. Consequently China will be the first capitalist society to create great wealth for its elites without raising a middle class.
How did so many all over the world fall for it?
Because Self Actualization
Motivating masses of consumers to get on the treadmill of consumerism required some serious marketing psyops. Quite coincidentally, the high tech multinational corporate world of the sixties and seventies had become enamoured with the concept of self actualization as a way to motivate employees to show more initiative. This was to be the lever that the movers and shakers of the consumer economy seized for their own ends.
The Mazlowian Bandwagon
The phrase self actualization was coined by psychologist Kurt Goldstein, elaborated upon by colleague Carl Rogers and popularized by Abraham Mazlow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. Self actualization was touted therein as the highest level of human psychological development. I suggest we substitute “most corrupting” for “highest”.
Mazlowian theory may be illustrated by the notion that human motivation is driven by a hierarchy of five needs - not four, and not six, but five and only five:
Physiological
Safety
Love
Self esteem
Self-actualization
I could take a detour to debunk the idea. Instead I’ll save time and make the point with an illustration.
Nevertheless, there is an appeal to Mazlowian theory in that it speaks to human vanity, which is easy to exploit if the approach is simple and couched in flattering terms. To motivate society en masse to embrace consumerism required serious simplification of the Mazlowian message, combined with outrageous flattery disguised as virtue.
Both were realized by pushing the derivative nonsense of “you can be anything you want to be” and “everyone is equal”. It was, and still is done with slick advertising in which smiling and attractive people appear to live lives of joy and comfort, implicitly derived from a rich array of products for every purpose and taste. The grease was supplied by easy credit. Thus many were seduced into believing that keeping up fake appearances was equivalent to living a good life. Inevitably, retail therapy, the pursuit of leisure and eventually drugs, became the necessary and sufficient means for bolstering self-esteem. Self actualization never produced much that mattered. I refer to the streets of Philadelphia, Manchester or even some rural areas for a view of self actualization taken to its logical conclusion.
So there we have it; Consumptive Self Actualization, the necessary and complete motivation for Consumer Capitalism.
Consumptive Self Actualization’s most damaging effect is a particularly nasty form of inflation that debases the currency at the same time as it debases individual creativity and enterprise. Fortunately Consumer Capitalism is on its way to the dumpster as tighter credit and inflation start to bite harder. Unfortunately it leaves an incalculable amount of human debris in its wake.
The baby boomers could afford the excesses of consumer capitalism but they are retiring just in time for inflation to ravish their pensions. They will either liquidate all their assets before they die or leave a mere fraction to their kids and grand kids. It is possible that a backlash from consumerism might motivate society into relighting the flame of Western entrepreneurial work ethics. Standing on tiptoe on my soap box, I can’t see many signs of it. It will take much more than a backlash from pointless spending.
Even if we could turn back the clock, it would be too boring. It is much more likely that the migrants of our times will spark a reinvention of the world in the same way as the mass migrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did in their day. New blood will bring disruption and much destruction and pain to the existing social order but we may also hope for new vitality. What we need and I hope readers might point out, are the early signs of a new vitality showing creativity, compassion, industry, community, self reliance and above all, a backlash from bigness, globalism, selfishness, ignorance and idleness, powered by a great closing of the public wallet to consumption for its own sake.
If that seems too optimistic for you:
The 2020s will see a collapse of consumption, production, investment, and trade…almost everywhere. Instead of a cheaper, better and faster world, it will be pricier, worse and slower.
There is a global disorder coming, in which countries will have to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, and do it all with dwindling and aging populations.
Please, only good news in comments - if you have any.