“The world is becoming more materialistic.”
If I read one more cooly self-assured, flax-fed, self-proclaimed doctor stating the above adage in a book that promises to be “groundbreaking”, I may commit myself.
If you do not follow me, or are one of those aforementioned flax-fed: hang tight; I can explain.
First, let’s take a look at “the world today” to decipher if this increase-in-(problematic)-materialism claim may hold true.
It seems to me that in the last 10,000 years of humans living in large groups and poking seeds into the earth, materialism has more or less held on to its integrity. Wars have been fought over land, riches, ports, spices, and in the case of Troy, a woman, who did and by many accounts still does translate to a possession.There’s been incredible wealth for a select few, and some insane cases of blind greed. Still is. But there’s been a lot more poverty.
Serfdom never ended, it just took on new forms. Today every item in my room is made by someone who is more skilled than I and works longer hours than I ever will, yet earns a staggeringly lower wage than I will ever have to suffer. This is, simply, because I was born into the miniscule elite of the world (white, Western, two working parents, one university educated and the other a small business owner: a recipe for comfort) and they were not.
Humans have grappled with possessions, ownership and entitlement for as long as they’ve been around, and based much passed-down wisdom on their more problematic areas. Every prophet I can think of really dug talking about it. So why are those flaxy, and perhaps flaxen, authors drawing our attention to their assumed readers’ collective relationship with stuff as the cause of all suffering now?
I think that having the power and responsibility of owning things has always been a pretty big deal in human cultures world wide, and these authors see us elite living in a time of plenty (it’s the only time, for the elite). Plenty of choices, plenty of things. On top of this is the fact that new things are being invented and shipped around the world all of the time, and/or becoming affordable to new groups of people. So it’s not the world, but the world of those who can afford it, that is more than ever engulfed by material ownership – in other words, the people in the author’s tax bracket. And perhaps this engulfment becomes more and more as the rich get richer, as only the rich can do. And it is always, not so much now-more-than-ever, that this matters.
Materialism is defined as placing value on the ownership of material. “People these days think that the key to happiness is more things!” was the paraphrased punchline of a book I was reading in the bath tonight. It’s a good thing the book was being read to me from the safety of an mp3 on my cherished laptop at the time, or it would have gotten itself dunked.
Who, exactly, are these much talked-about people, and how do I contact one for an interview? Never have I met a person who actually believed that really, truly, happiness IS in owning a pair of shoes for every day of the leap-year. So what is going on here?
If valuing stuff has always been contentious, there have always been those who saw themselves as being above the strife, and the strife below them. These authors, I presume, would not consider themselves one of the foolish who they view as flocking like sharpy-dressed sheep to obtain the new iPhone to consume it like a heady elixir of hope, only to be perplexed that, once again, nirvana had evaded them. Sure, the men who write these books ARE sharply dressed, but it comes with all of those letters behind their name and the appearances they have to keep up, and OF COURSE they too have the new iPhone, but only because it was a wise, one-time investment in quality.
What it comes down to, Mr. Speaker, is that you speculate that while it is painfully obvious to you that consumerism is a tiring and self-defeatist attempt at contentment, all of those other people running around and looking unhappy must not know that? You, of course, are as human and uneasy as these people are, and own as much or perhaps more than them, but surely, YOUR reasons are as well justified as your dissertation.
You tire me.
And yet you dare to assert that, really, your findings are quite, quite groundbreaking. Revolutionary. That the unhappiness of today, it’s not inequality, it’s not conditions of endlessly cycling poverty while a few find themselves able to afford more than they could before, it’s not that people have been deprived of crucial help in their lives since they were born because there simply is not enough to go around and the feeling of scarcity seeps into every human interaction – it’s that people have way, way too much stuff, and it’s blocking their view of the divine.
Could we not be a bit braver and please just attack capitalism? Or trans-national corporations who’s incomes compete with small nations’ GDP? Could we not look at the social institutions that were built, before serfdom, to keep most people down and quiet while a very select few got away with countless murder? It’s not that people-these-days that have up and given themselves a stuff-complex and the next thing you know there’s a world epidemic of plenty. The term materialism doesn’t even make sense in the context of billions of people’s lives. What a slap in the face to point it out as the world’s “new” and most troubling problem.