Economic life in the US and Europe is very different now to what it is here but what is happening there is infiltrating into our economic life here. Australia might be in the middle of a huge mining and energy boom but we are also having a consumer downturn here.
An article posted to one of Transition The Grove’s Forums this week talks about what is happening with consumption in the US and discusses sustainable consumption. It has some ideas in it that are worth us thinking about together.
The article “We’re Spent” by David Leonhart from the NYTimes argues that the great consumer bubble has finally burst picking up the sharp reduction in consumer spending as the primary cause. Consumers are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.
The data cited in the article are compelling. Consumer spending dropped almost 7% in this recent collapse.
Q. What are our current figures here?
Inequality has also reached record levels just like the drop in consumption. The wealth needed to consume has shifted dramatically into the hands of the rich who do not spend it proportionately as the less wealthy would if they had it.
Patterns of consumption can be explained by a number of theories in play in academia. Tim Kasser ties it to the dominance of extrinsic values that push us to consume to support our images in a culture where outward signs signal who we are.
Let’s pick up on this idea that much of our consumerism is driven by an extrinsic value system – that is one external to our intrinsic needs and drives – to support our images in a culture where outward signs signal who we are.
This meshes in with another discussion that has been going on in Australian media and locally recently about ‘beautiful people’. The idea of ‘beautiful people’ is heavily pushed through all our advertising and visual media. Air-brushed images and ultra-selectivity drive our choices of who we allow to represent us in visual media such as television and cinema and created images in games. The Weekend Australian Magazine recently had an article on web-dating sites that have ‘beautiful appearance’ as a criterion for joining – there is scrutiny before admission.
This is a eugenically-based class system much like what Hitler created: selection around a goal of physical perfection while relegating all other ways of living to oblivion.
This is an overt example of a wide-spread phenomenon that we all live with. The ‘beautiful people’ are systematically privileged in employment and socially throughout our culture. This results in easily measurable disadvantage for the rest of the population. Income differentials on this measure alone can be as high as $10000 a year. So this ‘beauty myth’ becomes something we strive for.
But along with the pressure to strive to be a ‘beautiful person’ (and most won’t make it) comes immense pressure to consume to purchase the outward signals to others of who we are.
Thus our vehicle choices are driven with a large component of display to others of who we are of the wealth and status we hope they will assume we have. Even when we incur considerable debt and even greater impoverishment of our time to purchase the item.
Our clothing our choice of homes and furnishings and many of our entertainment choices are similarly designed to create outward signals to others of who we are.
This is a culture and status built on Having on consumption.
The most extreme cases I’ve come across were some women whose ‘job’ it was to be ‘beautiful’. It was literally a full-time job that they worked at every day of the week and it cost in the order of $1000 per week. They worked hard at keeping fit and visiting hairdressers nail and beauty parlours spending time on their make-up and buying stylish clothing. Their customers were their rich husbands. Having a beautiful wife was so important to them they were prepared to support the cost to achieve it. It was a created product.
Sustainability demands that the world stop consuming [u]in the way we do today[/u] because we are literally using up the planet’s resources and running out of stuff to make all the consumer products we buy and then churn through to waste and entropy.
But the qualification about the way we consume is critical. Not all of our consumption is the same. We don’t have to be locked into the massive consumption driven by the need to display to others that we Have.
There is another form of consumption that is based on meeting our intrinsic needs to be fed clothed and sheltered. This is an inevitable consequence of living and cultural existence for humans. If we stop this form of consuming we will die.
Consumption that incorporates the extrinsic cultural Having displays as distinct from consumption for our needs to live and Be results in inauthentic behavior and the persistence of the Having mode of life that is consuming unsustainably.
A shift of the cultural values toward those that produce authenticity and Being is essential if our species is to have a future.
GDP levels and growth rates can never measure this kind of flourishing well-being essential to sustainability.
Our community here in the upper Kedron Brook valley is neither a very wealthy nor a very poor community. We are blessed with relatively low levels of inequity between those with the most and the least financial wealth. The barriers to mixing socially in this community aren’t that high. Our local shops provide us with few opportunities for purchases based primarily on outward display of what we Have.
That is not to say that people in this valley community don’t purchase and consume. But we have to commute outside our valley to do so on any scale. It is quite possible to live here in our valley with a simple level of consumption primarily focused on simple needs and a life of Being here locally. Most of us aren’t ‘beautiful people’ but we can have fully valid lives and belong here anyway.
We can afford to be brave in this community and not feel that the vehicle we are seen dropping our child at pre-school in determines who we are. We can afford to explore other ways of being and consuming here safely. We can discover who we can Be here in our valley.