Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [130]
This connection is important, as the financial Elite profits immensely from high-interest consumer credit.
The free are thus enslaved via consumerist debt.
When Consumerist Gods Fail
It is important to recall the context of the current Depression: the U.S. has consumed trillions of dollars of goods and commodities in exchange for rapidly depreciating paper. Once credit/debt cannot be created exponentially, then consumption will fall in line with surplus production.
The marketing/advertising complex will still be flooding every nook and cranny of the nation and its media with messages to consume, but if few have surplus money and credit then it follows that few will have the means to buy, regardless of the persuasiveness of the millions of messages.
Thus it is not that the false god of consumerism will be toppled but that it will be abandoned--in many cases, most sorrowfully--by believers and adherents who no longer possess the surplus cash to offer the consumerist god.
The key factor in a consumerist-based identity is that someone profits by selling you an identity, character and sheen of status.
The idea that what you wear, drive, tattoo yourself with, load on your iPod, etc. has zero bearing on anything meaningful about who you are and what you value is subversive sacrilege of the highest order.
If "my stuff" is no longer "me," then who and what am I? And indeed, what can I sell you if all you really need to be "yourself" and happy is friends, minimal shelter, unprocessed food, homemade music, a library and an Internet connection and spiritual communion/worship? How much profit can I make selling you a used guitar, a DSL connection and a bag of carrots?
It boils down to this: when you run out of money, you switch religions from Consumerism to one of the good old spiritual standbys.
The known sources of happiness require little to no consumption:
1. health
2. friends
3. free time to pursue interests
4. spiritual communion/worship
5. exercise/sports/play
6. gardening
7. meaningful work (unpaid qualifies)
The experience of well-being has been so derealized that the sense of deprivation experienced at the loss of fine dining, Caribbean cruises, season tickets to the games, etc. is itself suspect.
We might even speculate that the experience of genuine happiness and well-being has largely been forgotten, or perhaps is an unknown sensation to media-numbed "consumers."
Since sustaining the simulacrum of consumerist "happiness" will cause much misery as the consumerist economy slides to oblivion, we might profitably ask if the happier choice wouldn't be to jettison the entire artifice of consumerist "happiness." Upon reflection, it was never real happiness after all; it was only a means to reap immense profits.
Dependency, Entitlement, Resentment and the State
There are few conditions more debilitating than dependency. Dependency leaches away self-confidence and leaves insecurity, self-loathing and a self-destructive resentment in its place.
There are two great ironies in Rise of the State (both Marxist/Socialist and Neoliberal Capitalist) in the past century. One is that the State's nurturing of entitlements (and thus dependency) has been "sold" to the citizenry as "providing security" but as noted elsewhere, it has effectively bought the citizenry's silent complicity in the Plutocracy/State's expanding dominance of the nation's assets and income.
The second irony that rather than provide security, this entitlement dependence has actually crippled the citizenry by fostering an amoral "game the system" mentality in which integrity is sacrificed for a perversely rewarding worship of victimhood. Those who sacrifice truth and integrity to file bogus claims are rewarded while those who tell the unadorned truth--such as, yes, I can still work in some capacity--are punished.
Those exaggerating their victim status--a form of outright fraud which