Consumerism 

  It all comes down to seeing what is important in life and what is not. What we make important is telling, and what we discard as unimportant equally so. The truth of what we do and do not make important does eventually come back to us in terms of our health, happiness, and the success of our relationships. 

     Today consumerism seems to have taken by storm the first position in many people’s lives. Concern over buying that next car, new house, furniture, electronics or whatever is what makes the world go round. In fact the world economy depends on it. The world’s economic order is being held together by the consumer (especially the American one), who if ever decides to stay home, will plunge the world into an economic slide that the present world system cannot possibly hope to survive. Is consumerism, economies based on it, and capitalism, the system that promotes it, really the truth and highest importance to human life? Asked another way, are we responsible for what we consume and the consequences of it? 

The real point to consumerism is seen 
in the consequences it brings.

     Though each person has to decide for themselves what is important in life it is helpful to see that many people’s choices have been programmed into them by television, marketing companies, and by society itself. If consumerism really is not the highest truth or best organizing principle of life it will fall in on itself and create a collapse in civilization that will make the great depression look like a mild economic/social bump. As Argentina, and the drug lord war in Rio de Janeiro are only now beginning to suggest, as well as the continuing devastating conflict in Palestine, the world divided into those who have and others who have not is not sustainable in any kind of civilized way. 

The problems of consumerism are compounded 
when it is paid for via debt formation.
It is compounded when the consequence is 
in the destruction and pollution of the environment.

     The years ahead will give us plenty of time to reflect on what is really important in life and what makes life pleasant, harmonious and sustainable over the long run. When it comes to thinking about others, about the future, our children, it is the long run that matters. It’s only been the last two decades or so where this lesson, for example, has come home to cigarette smokers. Yes, pleasant in the short term, it kills in the long. Is this what we have done by basing our economies on consumerism? And this question has to be seen in the context that consumerism is something that only about a billion people get to enjoy with special emphasis on the top 500 million. The topic of consumerism take us directly into distribution of wealth issues and the very nasty trend these past decades for wealth to become more and more concentrated in few and more wealthy hands. 

     It is my contention that we are just beginning to see an awakening of consciousness in the fundamental issues because the consequences of all our mistakes have started to fall down on civilization like a `slow´ moving avalanche. The trends are becoming more visible and thus it takes less intelligence and insight to divine out their ultimate directions. Eventually in mass we will have to become concerned and put our consciousness on what is really important and tune to the real messages that life is offering. Though there have been many who have warned us, as a society we have not listened, throwing as usual the most intelligent and creative people aside in favour of political, power hungry, corporate and legal style personalities.