Consumerism has gone on steroids - by RM

Among the items which received major coverage in the press recently was the launching of the new Apple iPhone 5.  There was an incredible frenzy among large numbers of people around the world to be the first to get this upgraded Apple iPhone . We saw people sleeping in front of stores just to be the first in line to be able to buy this new gadget. How crazy can you get?

The public seems to have grown immune to these sorts of scenes but in reality this iPhone madness was another typical example of consumerism on steroids. 

Even US tourists visiting Europe from America have been overheard, when discussing their European holidays with friends at home, that their major gripe was that malls in Europe were not up to US standards based on the abundance of goods and low prices.  

Some people have become so addicted to shopping that they become irritable if they don't go to a store on a daily basis. 

How have we become so addicted to consumerism? Maybe the answer lies with the news and communications industry. For if consumerism is the bullet in our demise, then undoubtedly the media is the best weapon to get the bullet to its target.

Indeed the media for some time now has become on of the most powerful tools coming to us in many different forms, including the Internet, TV, Radio, Press. It literally goes with us now everywhere we go. Consequently it has become a bigger than life influence on what we think, do and what we buy. 

What makes it even more complex and obviously dangerous is that the media at large is not independent anymore but controlled by large corporations. They mainly look at their bottom-line and not the moral consequences of their reporting anymore.

At one time, the home at least had a natural defense to protect children from this media guided onslaught of consumerism ....it was called parents. They at least had some kind of control over the avalanche of commercialism. As parents they had the authority to decide what their kids watched, ate and did while living under their roof. 

Unfortunately, with the ever increasing numbers of divorced and dysfunctional families, single parent households, working parents and "new generation" parents who believe that giving in to everything their kids want will make them happy, that safeguard has just about become extinct.

Consumerism has also created havoc with individualism and privacy. Facebook and a variety of other social media services and search engines, who in their corporate statements pride themselves to respect your personal privacy, actually make it technically very difficult for you to control what becomes public knowledge or not.

Case in point was the birthday party of a teenager in the Netherlands who did not set her privacy settings properly on Facebook. What had been planned as a small birthday party for friends and family became a nightmare turning the girl's birthday party into a "free for all" battle between some 4000 drunk teenagers, hooligans and the local police.

Consumerism also has a hypnotic effect on your life. Even though you might be thinking – “Just because it’s on TV or in the latest news report doesn’t mean I am forced to go and buy it”, in practice that is usually not the way it works out.

The process basically works like Chinese torture - "drip - drip" - a constant bombardment of images about wealth, material possessions, body images, etc., and before you know it a person slowly gets brain-washed to the point of thinking, “well if everyone else has one of those, maybe I need one too.”  That is how the process works - in one paragraph.

Unfortunately and sad for us is that our consumption focused behavior will eventually be our demise. As American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” 

Maybe the most important issue that people need to realize is the impossibility of endless economic growth. The Ponzi-scheme economy that has been sold to us is no more real than a pie in the sky. Once that delusion is gone, we can probably begin to imagine and build a truly sustainable economy.

 

EU-Digest

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