Consumerism – Our Insatiable Thirst
Ben | 17.12.2003 10:35 | Liverpool
One of the hugest issues that will dominate your cityscape, if not your lifestyle and play a major role in your survival is consumerism. Britain’s society, along with most others in the western world is run, circulated and based upon the buying and selling of products. At some point or another, everyone will assist in the making of them; it is a factor that surrounds us and that limits us to the confines of western society.
Sometimes, there is never a given thought as to where food products come from; it is as if they appear magically onto our dinner plates. The nature of our society is that goods appear without question, transported from exotic lands or factories and consumed in exchange for a small amount of money. This transaction is often unquestionable; it seems simple enough, right? There is no harm in spending, everybody does it and everybody needs it.
“After having your breakfast - you have relied on half the world.” - Martin Luther King.
The consequences are very rarely seen, but they are coming into view. The tonnes of wood, the trenches carved out of hillsides and forests, the sweatshops, the factories, our polluted skylines, oceans, streets and homes. The effect is drawing closer to us and it is only a matter of time before our insatiable thirst for consumer goods, foods and lifestyles puts a noose around our necks.
At this stage it is not apparent, the production line is healthy and consumer confidence is growing. You’ll notice that in the UK consumer figures are only published in terms of percentages, an overall tally or estimate is difficult to amount but a rough estimate is at about 400 billion pounds a year, which is more than the annual US military budget. The vast, unimaginable scale at which the planet is being robbed of all resources at a quickening and dangerous pace is the rate that consumerism has reached. The millions of people producing goods under conditions that amount to slavery has doubled since last year, the rainforest depletes at a rate of 80 acres per minute, day and night, (since you first started reading the top of this article) and only 20% of the worlds population are consuming over 80% of the earth's natural resources.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
Incredible psychological pressure is put on you from advertisements. The bombardment is daily and thorough; no one walks past a billboard without absorbing its message.
Brainwashing you into believing you need products that are actually irrelevant to your life is an art form that has started the largest propaganda campaign in history.
248 Billion Dollars is projected to be spent on advertising worldwide in 2004. That figure could cure world debt overnight. Instead it is used to convince you into buying more products. The need for which is almost entirely fictitious. Why people in our society buy several items of clothing that serve the same purpose or insist on continually loading their cars with petrol stained with the blood of Iraqi women and children escapes me. The relevance is there in the news, just as the adverts are - glossy, cool or homely, the image will win you over, even if it costs lives.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” – Brad Pitt
Yet all this should not be your focus.
The concern is you as a consumer and what choices you have. What can you do against such a massive problem that affects everything? The guilt you feel when buying a mars bar just isn’t enough. Nor is contributing to charities or organisations that claim to solve the problem by throwing small amounts of money at it. There is no simple answer but when you look at the question in its totality, granted, it is difficult to imagine not buying food in a plastic wrapper or even contemplate not living in a home with hot water or electricity. It’s a matter of lifestyle and whether you, as an individual, can exist without being a consumer.
Deciding whether or not you want to remain a consumer is a tough, often leading to the inevitable question – “what alternative do I have?”
It is really impossible to know, there are billions of people on this planet who are born into poverty and have no hope of joining the “consumerist elite” but yet still manage to survive. It is easy in this country to find alternatives to food and clothes and shelter, there is no shortage of it and it’s a decision more than a necessity as to whether you want to pay for it.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi
Start to filter the things you don’t need out of your life, the products that you know you can live without are worthless, decipher what the hidden agenda behind advertisements are trying to say and start thinking about what real alternatives you have in your life.
mcabromb@livjm.ac.uk
Resources:
http://www.amnesty.org/
http://www.amaresearch.co.uk/ElecWholeEuro02c.htm
http://society.guardian.co.uk/publicfinances/story/0,12671,964126,00.html
http://193.202.26.196/bmwi_english/Faktenbericht_6/main_2003_05_abb_323_364.htm
http://www.controlarms.org/
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/index.htm
http://www.crimethink.com
http://www.verdant.net/index.htm#
http://www.davesite.com/rainforests/review4.shtml
http://www.enough.org.uk/
http://www.enrager.net
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption.asp
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption/Rise.asp
http://www.westland.net/venice/art/cronk/consumer.htm
http://www.buynothingday.co.uk/
No Logo, 2001 Klein, N
Small Is Beautiful Schumacher, E.F.
“After having your breakfast - you have relied on half the world.” - Martin Luther King.
The consequences are very rarely seen, but they are coming into view. The tonnes of wood, the trenches carved out of hillsides and forests, the sweatshops, the factories, our polluted skylines, oceans, streets and homes. The effect is drawing closer to us and it is only a matter of time before our insatiable thirst for consumer goods, foods and lifestyles puts a noose around our necks.
At this stage it is not apparent, the production line is healthy and consumer confidence is growing. You’ll notice that in the UK consumer figures are only published in terms of percentages, an overall tally or estimate is difficult to amount but a rough estimate is at about 400 billion pounds a year, which is more than the annual US military budget. The vast, unimaginable scale at which the planet is being robbed of all resources at a quickening and dangerous pace is the rate that consumerism has reached. The millions of people producing goods under conditions that amount to slavery has doubled since last year, the rainforest depletes at a rate of 80 acres per minute, day and night, (since you first started reading the top of this article) and only 20% of the worlds population are consuming over 80% of the earth's natural resources.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
Incredible psychological pressure is put on you from advertisements. The bombardment is daily and thorough; no one walks past a billboard without absorbing its message.
Brainwashing you into believing you need products that are actually irrelevant to your life is an art form that has started the largest propaganda campaign in history.
248 Billion Dollars is projected to be spent on advertising worldwide in 2004. That figure could cure world debt overnight. Instead it is used to convince you into buying more products. The need for which is almost entirely fictitious. Why people in our society buy several items of clothing that serve the same purpose or insist on continually loading their cars with petrol stained with the blood of Iraqi women and children escapes me. The relevance is there in the news, just as the adverts are - glossy, cool or homely, the image will win you over, even if it costs lives.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” – Brad Pitt
Yet all this should not be your focus.
The concern is you as a consumer and what choices you have. What can you do against such a massive problem that affects everything? The guilt you feel when buying a mars bar just isn’t enough. Nor is contributing to charities or organisations that claim to solve the problem by throwing small amounts of money at it. There is no simple answer but when you look at the question in its totality, granted, it is difficult to imagine not buying food in a plastic wrapper or even contemplate not living in a home with hot water or electricity. It’s a matter of lifestyle and whether you, as an individual, can exist without being a consumer.
Deciding whether or not you want to remain a consumer is a tough, often leading to the inevitable question – “what alternative do I have?”
It is really impossible to know, there are billions of people on this planet who are born into poverty and have no hope of joining the “consumerist elite” but yet still manage to survive. It is easy in this country to find alternatives to food and clothes and shelter, there is no shortage of it and it’s a decision more than a necessity as to whether you want to pay for it.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi
Start to filter the things you don’t need out of your life, the products that you know you can live without are worthless, decipher what the hidden agenda behind advertisements are trying to say and start thinking about what real alternatives you have in your life.
mcabromb@livjm.ac.uk Resources:
http://www.amnesty.org/ http://www.amaresearch.co.uk/ElecWholeEuro02c.htm http://society.guardian.co.uk/publicfinances/story/0,12671,964126,00.html http://193.202.26.196/bmwi_english/Faktenbericht_6/main_2003_05_abb_323_364.htm http://www.controlarms.org/ http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/index.htm http://www.crimethink.com http://www.verdant.net/index.htm# http://www.davesite.com/rainforests/review4.shtml http://www.enough.org.uk/ http://www.enrager.net http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption.asp http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption/Rise.asp http://www.westland.net/venice/art/cronk/consumer.htm http://www.buynothingday.co.uk/ No Logo, 2001 Klein, N
Small Is Beautiful Schumacher, E.F.
Ben
Comments
Hide the following 4 comments
The Economic Issue: The Heart of the Matter
17.12.2003 11:40
The conclusion I have come to is that although class and racism, and other forms of prejudice are very much at large in the world, and cause untold trouble in myriad ways, the heart of the matter is an economic one. The poverty that exists in the world, throughout the world, and in what is euphemistically called the Third world, is also the major problem in countries in the more modern and wealthy nations. And those countries on the cusp of wealth like those in Eastern Europe, large parts of Russia and the oil rich Middle East. The issue isn't that there isn't enough to go around, quite frankly, it is that too many of the world's resources are in the hands of far too few people. It is that simple!
On a global scale, the effects of poverty can be seen in political, military and even religious conflicts worldwide, and in the struggles between those countries that have abundantly, and those countries that do not have very much at all. The difference between an average person in the poor developing countries and the modern wealthy nations is in itself almost unbridgeable, let alone the differences between people in the same nation states. And let us bring this argument to the West, to Europe, right here to Britain. What do we see in Britain? Well, a nation that is the 4th wealthiest in the world, which really means that certain people in Britain have or command the 4th largest amount of resources in the world. Do we see that this has brought a more equitable society, or that in our abundance we have become more genuinely liberal and concerned about those less fortunate than ourselves? All points seem to argue towards the negative! It is true that poverty in Britain, in the main, is not poverty in Eastern Europe or in far poorer developing countries, but poverty is still poverty, lack of opportunity is still lack of opportunity, and a lack of basic resources is a lack of basic resources wherever you are. What I am driving at is that poverty and class, and a lack of basic justice is equally an issue in the West as it is in other parts of the world.
We have to ask ourselves why in the 4th wealthiest country in the world, there is still poverty and chronic unemployment and bad housing and hospitals closing and the like in some areas, and why other areas and other people are living abundantly and in many cases have far more than they ever need or will ever spend in ten lifetimes, let alone one!
The real crux of social justice rests on a fairer re-distribution of wealth, wages, resources, etc etc, not in some hippy-dippy or Communist way, I mean when we as ordinary people, Working Class people, Black People, anyone at all generally excluded from the wealth creation process has a chance to move on and move up, and get a fairer living wage for his or her labour. The start of this is a movement to demand and fight for, amongst other things, a better and fairer minimum wage, a proper pension for ALL British pensioners, a fairer tax system where your tax is assessed on your ability to pay and how much you earn, and such things where basically those who have in abundance are paying more in tax than poor people. All the other arguments hold less water because if you have a fair wage coming in, and there is less of a gap between the haves and have-nots, many of the so-called class struggles would melt away. It is not enough to go on marches and demonstrations and the like, it is that to really change society we have to challenge the very unequal resource distributions that exist. It is also that we try to buy goods and services from businesses, firms, supermarkets and even corporations that treat their staff well and pay fair wages, and try in our own small way to boycott greedy firms and corporations and the like. In time, there WILL be a 'Campaign for a Fairer Society' and it would not hurt at all if it hinges on a fairer re-distribution of wealth and resources.
Timbo O'the 'Pool
Tim Hughes
3 day week
17.12.2003 14:34
Rampant consumerism may be good for the people who get all the moeny from it at the end of the day but it trashes quality of life for most people. I must agree with the Brad Pitt quote above.
Don't get me wrong, I like having stuff but equally I could manage without most of it and am not willing to work like a nutter until I have a nervous breakdown and a heart attack at 55 just to get more of it, get the latest model instead of the one I have which works perfectly well or to indulge in any sort of keeping up with the Joneses.
I've always found that people are more impressed by something cool when it's a one-of-a-kind or they've never seen it before rather than being the most expensive type of something. that's why I've gone off Camden market a bit. It used to be easy to find something odd there which people thought was cool when they saw it because they hadn't seen every other person wearing/using it. Now when you go there, most of the stuff is still a bit odd but you'll find exactly the same stuff in at least ten other stalls/shops.
Rampant consumerism and capitalism has done that so you now get mass produced trendy rubbish instead of individual things.
Afinkawan
The myth of the 'trickle down' effect
18.12.2003 11:57
The testimony of Richard Oastler, speaking to a government Select Committee in 1835, arguing the case for protecting wages and working conditions:
"... If the wages were higher the labourer would be enabled to clothe himself ... and to feed himself ... and those labourers are the persons who are after all the great consumers of agricultural and manufacturing produce, and not the capitalist, because a great capitalist, however wealthy he is, wears only one coat at once, at least, he certainly does seldom wear two coats at once; but 1,000 labourers, being enabled to buy a thousand coats, where they cannot now get one, would most certainly increase the trade ..."
Makes perfect sense to me.
Maria Ng
A satirical link
19.12.2003 13:16
'A Note of Appreciation from the Rich'
Maria Ng