Citizen versus Consumer
What the above seems to tell us is that we are going to be happier people and have a happier society if we are more “Citizen” than “Consumer”. As we will see in Chapter Seven research like the ground-breaking Happy Planet Index show that some countries have already got this right.
For the sake of this paper we use the terms “Citizen” and “Consumer” as shorthand to illustrate an original shift from broader Citizenship values to a society increasingly fixated on relative materialism:
The intrinsic values of our “perfect Citizen” include personal growth, emotional intimacy and community involvement. These are also values that determine how happy we are and that tend to lead us away from hyper-consumption of “stuff” and the concomitant damage to the planet, towards more meaningful sources of fulfilment.
Our “perfect Consumer” lives their life defined by extrinsic values such as self-focus and selfishness and acquisition of material goods or image and position. These people have lower levels of personal Wellbeing, reduce the Wellbeing of those around them, over-consume and have high concomitant responsibility for damage to our planet. Of course, they are not “perfect” at all.
Everyone exhibits traits from both “Citizen” and “Consumer”, but we believe that we now live in a society made up of people exhibiting more of the “Consumer” than the “Citizen”. This preponderance of the “Consumer” in all of us is simply not sustainable.
We believe that we now live in a society made up of people exhibiting more of the “Consumer” than the “Citizen”.
In much of our consumption habits we no longer consume for the sake of delivering to real needs such as hunger or warmth so much as for abstract, created, extrinsically focused desires. We no longer so much consume products, as lifestyles and attitudes associated with brands.
Our “hedonic treadmill” means that:
- Because we have become so fixated on relative materialism and extrinsic values, our Wellbeing is dropping.
- Because this Wellbeing is dropping our lives feel more and more empty and so we search in vain for something to fill the void.
- Adverts and marketing messages bombard us with suggestions that this void can be filled by brands, so that is what we seek.
- But the shine soon wears off the next sparkling bauble in what is known as “hedonic adaptation”.
- In a perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience we chase after the next bauble and therefore lock ourselves in to the pointless soul-destroying hedonic treadmill.
- We cannot continue consuming anything like the same amount of material and producing its concomitant waste as we have in the past.
Levels of falling Wellbeing combined with intra- and inter-national envy and inequality are such that we are reaching a social tipping point that could bring chaos and revolution.
As Professor Peter Victor says: “We are not born consumers and employees but that is what most of us become. We are socialised through our families and educational, religious, political and media institutions, to adopt norms and values essential for the economy. Some people resist the pressures to consume and some, often through the fortunes of birth, have sources of income other than regular employment.”
It would seem that more and more we find ourselves in what Victor Frankl called in Man’s Search For Meaning an “existential vacuum” in which we suffer from a life with little real meaning. This leads us to be “vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money.” In Escape From Freedom, Eric Fromm examines how we will resort to “escapism” or withdrawal from experiencing “real life” of which our current materialism, overeating, compulsive gambling or TV watching and computer gaming are merely further numbing our awareness and alienating us from life. As we show in Chapter Five, this escapism also manifests itself in a disengagement from politics.
