I remember a moment of awakening for me about three years ago. I found myself walking through a Walmart. I was like anyone else in there — looking around for what I came for, but also scoping for things that I didn’t even know I wanted yet. I turned a corner at one point onto a main aisle, and there on my right side for about thirty feet was a rack from the floor to a foot above my head of nothing but chocolate and candy, all at discount prices. I don’t know what triggered it, as I’d probably walked that aisle ten times before, but this time I stopped and stood there gobsmacked. For the first time I saw the rack as this immense wall of decadent delight, strategically positioned so that people walking toward the checkout would be tempted to make a last-second spontaneous grab for a special treat. My first thought was that it was a fairly effective way to suck an extra couple of dollars out of a customer’s pocket on their way to the checkout. My next thought was something along the lines of: My god…. Look at all of this shit.
We are so blessed with such a massive overabundance of stuff that we can’t even see how utterly spoiled we are. This is not normal. This is so over-the-top it’s sickening. And I wasn’t just thinking about the particular Walmart I was in. This wall of goodies or something similar was playing out over and over and over in every Walmart everywhere. And not just Walmart, but every department and big box store everywhere. And in order to keep those shelves constantly stocked, there had to be a massive mobilization of resources to do it. And as I looked around at the clothing, and the electronics, and the picture frames, and the DVDs and on and on and on, I became convinced that we take far too much for granted. And that we take far too much. We have been conditioned to accept that unlimited decadence is the norm that we have absolutely no idea how good we have it. We “deserve” it. We don’t even see it as decadence. It’s just our “way of life”. Someone from a desolate corner of Africa or from the slums of Calcutta would see it differently.
Three years have passed now and this idea has matured in my head, helped by a lot of reading and self-evaluation. I’m growing increasingly uneasy with the way our industrialized society does things such that it is impossible for me to go into any large store and not shake my head in shame at the culture of entitlement that we have enrobed ourselves in. That is the state of mind behind this blog. I’m working to understand the root causes of this state of existence, reading, exploring my thoughts, and trying to find a way of living that is less impactful. I want to find a way that, hopefully, others will also embrace, starting small and spreading exponentially through word of mouth (you tell two people, and then they tell two people, and so on…) That is the overarching dream. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. It’s even difficult to imagine an economic system that could work, even given an entire continent of people fully willing to participate in a new way of living. What would that new way look like? At this stage I have no idea. I don’t think that anyone does. Yet the most urgent challenge that faces us today is to find the answer to that very question. We must find it. We must.
I think people won’t stop until the personal consequences of their over indulgence smack them in the face. I’ve had family and friends who lost their jobs during the recession, but on the balance, I wonder if the global recession isn’t a good thing – a wafe up call for everyone.
Remember last Christmas when a Walmart employee was crushed and trampled to death in the states by the hords of shoppers looking for a deal on Black Friday. I was sickened by it. However, not everyone seemed to feel the same way. I remember they interviewed one of the shoppers shortly after the incident. She justified it by saying something like, “We don’t have much money because of this recession and things are expensive … what are going to tell our kids?!?” Well, lady… try telling them EXACTLY that. Maybe they’ll get the message, because clearly you haven’t.
*Great* comments. I did a quick search for followup information on that Walmart incident and came up with this well-written blog article: http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/wal-marts-black-friday-tragic-death-jdimypai-damour. That article has some good links out to other related things as well.
The only way to do it is to make people want to do it. The only way to make people want to do it is to make it more pricey. It is right and proper that people are motivated by economy. The problem is that the price of a thing rarely reflects its cost.
Take chocolate for example. The cost of those low, low chocolate prices is that people in West Africa are forced to work as slaves to grow cocoa. If they try to escape, their hands are chopped off with machetes. The life of a human in West Africa has virtually no value, so the prices stay low. Chocolate is something that is actually very difficult to buy without funding something terrible.
In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn says, “The world will not be changed by people with old ideas and new programs. The world will be changed by people with new ideas and no programs.” A few people, incensed about the chocolate injustice, might found a “fair trade” chocolate line (in fact I’m sure one exists), but that is a program, which in Quinn’s words is about as effective as a stick in the mud is to impede the flow of a river. As long as the economy of buying chocolate is what it is … people in Africa are going to continue to be mutilated so we can glut ourselves on chocolate.
So we have to make chocolate more expensive somehow. Or at least we have to make the cost of enslaving and mutilating people to acquire chocolate non-profitable. That is actually very difficult to do when we are dealing, as we are, with multiple sovereign states. Economic sanctions is one way. That could be somewhat effective, to a point. It will certainly be more effective than a private “fair trade” chocolate company. But I still think it’s a program.
And people won’t WANT their governments to do it. There was recently a HUGE uproar by candy companies about some cost increase in high-fructose corn syrup (can’t find a link at the moment).
I have a lot more to say but I’ll end here. In the final analysis, the only problem you have to solve is, “how do you make human beings unselfish”? Should be pretty simple.
The way you make human beings unselfish is by showing them the benefits of acting as part of a community — the way the Leavers lived. Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to quantify or visualize the returned benefits of such systems. Everyone is happy, yes, but everyone is the same. We live in an age of “me”-ness and invididualism which makes that kind of a system an alien and revolting concept. The die-hard capitalists shouting “Communism!” don’t help.
How do you convince people of the benefits of a Leaver society? God knows. But I think it’s only by small acts that larger changes will happen. We either find ways to live better, accreting small change onto small change, or change will be imposed on us in a manner not of our choosing.