You are NOT what you buy
Everyday we are bombarded with messages saying ‘buy this and you will be happier, fitter or sexier.’ The message of the online Wiki book (www.citizenrenaissance.com) that I am writing with my friend, Robert Phillips, is that ‘you are NOT what you buy.’ We are for a shift away from extrinsic values, which encourage self-focus, acquisition, and passive consumerism.
As an alternative, the book proposes a renaissance of ‘intrinsic values’ such as personal (not economic) growth, emotional intimacy and active community involvement – the key to wellbeing.
Of course, such views aren’t particularly new but their urgency is being felt more than ever with a global depression underway, climate chaos approaching, and the impending peak of our energy and food supplies. Something has to give.
The idea of wellbeing is more complex than just ‘happiness’ – in fact, it is more about leading a flourishing, meaningful or virtuous life. The Greeks referred to this more holistic view as ‘Eudaimonia’ – a state where public and personal interests are in accord. In Aristotle’s view, to be a truly flourishing individual, you must be an active participant in the flourishing of community. Thatcher had it all wrong – there really IS such a thing as society. Not just in a self-interested manner, but in a deeper way which respects the lives of all.
The novelist Ben Okri summed it up so very well recently, when he said, ‘The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years’.
And how might we do that? Personally, I’m with Vaclav Havel who believes ‘that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It’s not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet.’ This calls for what Professor Tim Jackson of the SDC describes as ‘the re-emergence of some kinds of meaning structures that lie outside the consumer realm.’
Having worked closely with business and politics, my view is that right now there is a terrifying vacuum of values, vision and leadership in our political discourse. And it’s hard for business to do the right thing when it’s designed to make money and little else.
Our politicians are, to borrow a phrase from the wonderful Thomas Homer-Dixon, like drunkdrivers in the fog. It’s time that we, the citizens, took back the controls. A renaissance of grass roots citizen advocacy is all that can save us now.
Luckily, just the kind of renaissance we need is beginning with the kind of groups described by a friend of mine, Jeremy Leggett, as ‘scalable microcosms of hope.’ Websites like moveon.org, getup.org, localeyes.org, 38degrees.org and dosomethingaboutit.org mean online digital democracy is giving people a new voice and real politcal power.
And what does this citizen power need to call for? Well, it’s nothing short of a radical updating of our current operating system – no sticking plaster will do. Jeremy Paxman says we are witnessing the ‘end of capitalism.’ Our current form of corporate-consumer-capitalism has been shown to be a fundamentally flawed system. We urgently need a Green New Deal to act as a transition phase to a steady state, economic development (not growth) paradigm, which aims to maximise the wellbeing of people and planet – not the bank balances of the rich. And we must beware the snake-oil sales-people trying to flog us the dead-ends of green consumerism and cheat-neutral ‘offsets’.
Those are phoney solutions. It’s time to wake up, get angry (in a positive way), unite and become a citizen. It’s our only hope.
This article was first published in Sustained Magazine.
