Do we need a consumer society or do we want an economy that respects the dignity of human life and the biodiversity of planet Earth?
We not only need, we have to demand a political economy that stops framing everything as mere resources available to be exploited and transformed into products.
Commodities are not "things" every product, well, item, device, etc, that we, the "consumers", acquire is extracted, exploited, looted somewhere on this planet, altering and destroying local ecosystems to give way to mines, wells oil plants, petrochemical industries and complexes, data centers, military bases, etc
The consumer society was imposed by the capitalist system as a way to sell superfluous goods and services. The main objective is to disseminate a culture of permanent dissatisfaction, it is not a question of satisfying people's needs but of stimulating superfluous consumption habits, generating dependencies and exploring weaknesses and filling emotional "vacuums".
"Putting nature at the center of the global
financial system" This article is part of: World Economic Forum Annual
Meeting from 22–26 May 2022
“Alleviating financial pressure in countries where nature is most at risk such as the Amazon and Congo Basins and South-east Asia, through financing arrangements including debt for nature swaps; and results-based payments for nature positive outcomes”
The actual intention of the global rentier class is
the appropriation and control of most natural assets and the financialization
of ecosystem services using partial debt relief (swap) as a sign of good will.
In practice, people will be removed from the places where they have lived for centuries, the management of natural resources and biodiversity will be transferred to transnational corporations, public/private partnerships, financial investment management companies and a network of complicit NGOs.
The main goal is the generalized control of nature through the process of financialization generating “economic” growth without economic activity, without producing real goods and providing essential services.
The financialization of nature will deepen social inequality, disenfranchisement, exclusion and human misery, a class of useful idiots will be carefully selected to serve them properly and the rest of us will become the useless class.
Consumerist culture must be denounced for what it
really is, frivolous and infantilizing culture. A culture engendered by
industrial capitalism at a time when economic growth in western countries was
connected to the performance of the real economy, which is not the case
anymore, at least in the case of the US and UK and to a lesser extent in other
western economies.
The production of essential goods and the provision of basic services must grow to meet the real needs of the populations.
It is deeply immoral and enraging having people starving when there is more than enough food to satisfy people's needs, while too many waste so much because they can afford it, we can call it free markets, supply and demand rules, but what capitalism really is: the normalization of barbaric exploitation, exclusion and unnecessary suffering for many people.
Sooner or later, measures to restrict consumption will have to be implemented. In fact a large part of the population experiences an existence of humiliation and deprivation, so that a minority can over-consume and be indulgent because they deserve it. Privileges are not an automatic reward for professional performance, a large part of citizens are not appropriately rewarded for what they give to society, because they are simply exploited by a system that rewards first and foremost those who are crucial to protect the power structures.
We live in a society in which certain classes of citizens are entitled to access goods and services that can never be democratized, and the worst part is that this is the prevailing mentality, a large part of the population believes in the capitalist myth of meritocracy, hard work deserves to be rewarded and hard work + cleverness must be exponentially rewarded.
Class based socioeconomic systems cannot be fair and egalitarian, there is not such thing as equal opportunities, even when there is the political will “to level the playing field”.
A class society is a rigged system, the further up one climbs the social ladder the more advantageous opportunities offered by clientelism, corporatism, lobbyism and all the tricks used by vested interests.
By the same token, there are several layers of filters to prevent the wrong people to occupying the wrong positions and play the wrong roles and when it happens, the purge valves come into action.
Class society will never be fair, neither for people nor for the environment, it is true for the capitalist system as for any other system. The conviction of entitlement attached to privileges functioning as rewards for services rendered to the "superior" classes to reinforce and consolidate the structures of centralization of power and accumulation and control of the wealth produced by the economy.
The cultural paradigm we call consumer society is simple to explain, to explore convenience as a means of making people increasingly dependent on goods and services produced and provided by others for their comfort. Addiction to convenience is a form of enslavement.
Compartmentalization and specialization are an island of myopic wisdom in a sea of generalized ignorance.
We browse the digital world where knowledge is at our fingertips, but in fact, most people have very superficial knowledge about what goes on in the real world.
From the exploration and transformation of natural raw materials and minerals, to the production and distribution of essential and superfluous goods and services, we depend on intermediation for almost everything we need and want.
The capitalist system is the paradise for “entrepreneurs”, the so-called job creators, on whom economic growth depends.
Hamster wheels and mousetraps of all kinds form network of opportunities accessible to the common citizen, as we live in democracies we are entitled to freedom of choice obviously conditioned by the need to survive within a system designed to exhaustively explore everything that can be turned into profit.
By democracy we must understand that a small minority of the population will succeed in life through legal means, which does not mean that their métier is positive for society and harmless to the environment, but we assume that at least is honest.
At a higher level, a more "sophisticated" class smaller in number but with the means to buy the intelligence, will and character of others to ensure the smooth functioning of a system that was designed to work in their favor.
Scruples and honesty tend to decrease as you move up the social ladder, the exceptions prove the rule.
The implicit premises in the ideological amalgamation of narratives that support what we believe to be true about life and society, from ordinary questions to the purpose and/or a meaningful life rarely correspond to reality.
Reality is made up of layers that require different levels of interpretation before being assembled into not only intelligible but also reliable knowledge. An extremely demanding task, which requires learning to read between the lines, look for what has been omitted, dismantle justifications, falsifications and so on, otherwise our cognitive system is running toxic implicit assumptions that lead us to make misinterpretations about everything that we take for granted.
Wrong assessments lead to inadequate solutions and what is more serious is that they lead us to trust the wrong people and the wrong ideas.
