The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [111]
We need to chart a different course. Let’s start by challenging the fundamental assumption that producing and consuming Stuff is the central purpose and engine of our economy. We need to understand that the drive to overconsume is neither human nature nor a birthright. We need to object when we are identified as “a nation of consumers”; individually and collectively, we are so much more than consumers, and those other parts of ourselves have been relegated to subordinate roles for too long. To help us see a way out of this consumer mania, it helps to understand just how deliberately the culture and structures promoting consumerism have been engineered over the last century.
THRIFT THROUGH THE AGES
I’m certainly not the first to have argued for restraint in our resource consumption, even long before we were so seriously butting up against the planet’s limits. Consider for a moment these examples of how our revered sources of wisdom in cultures around the world, from ancient to contemporary, renounce materialism and embrace sufficiency as the right way to live.
Buddhist: “Whoever in this world overcomes his selfish cravings, his sorrows fall away from him, like drops of water from a lotus flower.” (Dhammapada, 336)
Christian: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)
Confucian: “Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.” (Confucius, XI.15)
Hindu: “That person who lives completely free from desires, without longing... attains peace.” (Bhagavad Gita, II.71)
Khalil Gibran: “The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.” (The Prophet)
Islamic: “The best kind of wealth is to give up inordinate desires.” (Imam Ali A.S.)
Jewish: “Give me neither poverty nor riches.” (Proverbs 30:8)
Liberation Theology: “The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.” (Gustavo Gutiérrez)
Native American: “Miserable as we seem in thy eyes, we consider ourselves... much happier than thou, in this that we are very content with the little that we have.” (Traditional)
Shaker: “Tis a gift to be simple.” (Elder Joseph Brackett)
Taoist: “He who knows he has enough is rich.” (Tao Te Ching)
Thoreau: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” (Walden)
The Construction of a Consumer Nation
A century ago, the economic, political, and social life of the United States was not so single-mindedly focused on consumerism. Yes, people bought things, but that was balanced more evenly with other activities and goals. What caused the shift to overconsumption?
As Oberlin College professor David Orr writes, “The emergence of the consumer society was neither inevitable nor accidental. Rather, it resulted from the convergence of four forces: a body of ideas saying that the earth is ours for the taking; the rise of modern capitalism; technological cleverness; and the extraordinary bounty of North America, where the model of mass consumption first took root. More directly, our consumptive behavior is the result of seductive advertising, entrapment by easy credit, ignorance about the hazardous content of much of what we consume, the breakdown of community, a disregard for the future, political corruption and the atrophy of alternative means by which we might provision ourselves.”44
In other words, in the United States in particular, there were a lot of resources to take, we thought it was our right to take them, and we figured out slick new ways to do so. As capitalism (see the introduction for more on capitalism), with its incessant need for profit, developed into the dominant economic model, a culture of consumerism became necessary to support it.
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