On the Origin and Design of Consumerism, with Remarks on the Myth of the Free Market
Some writers have so confounded nourishment with consumption as to leave little or no distinction between them. They are not only different, but have different origins and purposes. Nourishment comes from our needs, and consumption from our wants; the former makes us stronger and more creative, the latter makes us weaker and more destructive. One encourages human ingenuity and flourishing, the other creates complacency and inequality. One transforms Nature and its resources into something greater, the other depletes Nature and its resources into something lesser. The first makes one a citizen, the last a consumer.
Nourishment is a blessing to humankind, but consumption even in its best state is a curse. Humankind originally designed the “natural” market to facilitate trade of nourishment between different peoples, to allow people to use their natural talent for creativity and transformation for the good of their nation and their fellow citizens. Now, in its worst state, the “natural” market has transformed into a “free” market and a global economy driven by consumerism, which is a system that perpetuates want. It fuels the desire for more: more safety, more security, and more surplus. What started as an economy to support life has now turned into life to support the economy. Trade in its best state is a simple tool that promotes nourishment; consumerism in its worst state is an intolerable addiction to consumption.
The true purpose of a market is to share for everyone’s mutual benefit and to exchange goods to satisfy the needs of a community. The true purpose of consumerism, on the other hand, is to create anxiety and voids that can never be filled in order to benefit the few. Consumerism is a system designed not to satisfy needs, but to perpetuate wants. If the impulses of the human heart were clear and self-sufficient, we would need no advertisements; but because we have become disconnected from our own selves and hyperconnected to a massive network of other selves, we rely on the global economy—the “free” market—to tell us who we ought to be and what we “need” and want.
To gain clarity on the design of consumerism, let us trace its history briefly by following a small number of persons settled in some isolated but resource-rich part of the Earth.
In the beginning, these people would be preoccupied with survival. Each person gravitates towards what they enjoy, which will naturally make them better at it. Eventually, the farmer needs a barn, which requires timber and help in construction. The tool maker needs resources to produce his tools. Each person in the settlement and surrounding areas will be skilled at one thing or another while lacking at many other things. This unites the individuals together into a community. The first market exists as a way to offer the extra things each person has to the settlement for the benefit of the community as a whole. Each person needs the results of someone else’s skills and expertise to flourish in their own way. As the community grows, each artisan produces what they and their community needs and nothing more. There is no reason to do anything but.
One year, a bad drought hits the area, wiping out a large amount of the food supply. The settlement realizes that a surplus would serve as a good insurance policy to protect them from such problems in the future, so they grow more than they need, save what will last, and preserve the rest. Over time, this surplus grows beyond what the settlement can use. Some of it even goes to waste, so when passing travelers want to trade things from their travels in exchange for surplus goods of the community, they are happy to do so. A kind stranger suggests they might prosper even more if they are willing to send their goods to other communities that might benefit from their expertise. This kind stranger encourages them to make as much as they can. It makes sense, so they oblige.
This kind stranger also happens to have goods from the other community that might make their way of life even better. Through his generosity, he trades with them the things they don’t have for the things they do have, based on the value he determines from his experience traveling. He even introduces them to a way of making trade between different communities easier. Instead of trading goods for other goods, they trade for currency: pieces of paper that give them the ability to sell their goods even if there is nothing available that they need right now. These pieces of paper give them the ability to purchase things later when they may not have anything to sell, the kind stranger tells them. These pieces of paper will offer them future security. And sometimes, if someone doesn’t have enough of these, he will offer some on loan to people he deems trustworthy.
He teaches them the ways they could use and why they might “need” the things he has to offer. This kind stranger then does the same thing at the next community. The kind stranger and those like him encourage communities to produce more goods for the sake of accumulating those valuable pieces of paper and for the sake of satisfying past loans, in some cases. Once the communities become convinced of the importance of currency and purchasing power, trading goods becomes outdated and old-fashioned. The sale and purchase of goods with pieces of paper becomes a sign of progress and then, the only way people know how to exchange goods and services. What started as exchange for the sake of nourishment turns into consumption of resources by producers and sellers and consumption of goods and services by buyers; the supply and demand are both manufactured by the kind stranger and those like him.
This is the origin and rise of consumerism. Its origin was in trade as a simple exchange of goods and services once necessary to promote human flourishing in communities. Its transformation into a complex exchange of goods and services for currency paved the way for its current state—an unnatural, disordered system designed to manufacture want for what would have been unwanted goods and services. We are not the masters of our desires; we are the subjects of their suggestions. When we forget how to be happy with ourselves, we are told that we can find it in things.
Not so long ago, we too were a budding settlement in a resource-rich land. The Gilded Age saw the minting of a new aristocracy from a concentration of capital near the end of the 1800s. From the Protestant work ethic of working hard to please God came unchecked accumulation and growth not for the sake of divine favor, but for its own sake. The idea of luxury as sin degraded. Money, not hard work, brought you closer to God. Surplus was supposed to be offered as alms for the less fortunate, but instead, it was reinvested in business, establishing a wealthy elite—a new aristocracy—which was more influential in government than ever before. This wealthy few evolved into the modern oligarchy.
Consumerism is built upon the tyranny of this modern oligarchy and its worship of growth for its own sake, hidden within a system too complex to find and remove the cancer. I draw my idea of simplicity from nature: The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered; with this maxim in mind, I say that though we are told that the complexity of the global supply chain is a triumph of efficiency, it is a triumph of deceit.
The oligarchy needs complexity in the market to hide, to deceive. Increased complexity shields businesses and business owners. Increased complexity introduces more steps in the chain of production, each a place where they can extract a little more value. This complexity is designed to confuse us. This complexity is absurd. This complexity is unnatural. This complexity allows for the manufacturing of wants. The citizen becomes the consumer, the user.
When you buy a coat made from locally sourced wool by a local tailor, you know the origin and cost of the wool and the value of the tailor’s labor. It is a simple transaction and a simple operation: the resources are local, the business is small, and the supply chain is simple. But in the modern “free” market, the coat passes through a multitude of hands across continents and oceans. For the buyer, the transaction is delightfully simple, but the operation has become unimaginably complex: the resources are of unknown origin, the business is incomprehensibly large, and the supply chain is complicated. That complexity serves a purpose: to hide the true costs in the production and distribution processes. It hides the chemicals used to process the wool, the poverty of the tailor, and the fragility of the system.
The economy is so exceedingly complex that we may suffer for years without being able to discover in which part the fault lies. Some say in one and some in another, and every economist, financial analyst, and pundit writes a different prescription. Is it interest rates, unemployment, tax cuts, inflation, or something else that makes it so hard for us to afford the things we need? Without a responsible party, who do we hold accountable? There can be only one reason for such a complex system: to rob us.
The idea of a plutocratic oligarchy—the wealthy few ruling the many—in itself is ridiculous and anti-democratic. Our Declaration of Independence states that: All men are created equal. We are a nation founded on Christian beliefs. In the eyes of God, everyone is created equal as well. Whether you believe the Declaration of Independence or the word of God, our country was meant to be equal. Then how does the idea of an oligarchy, a small group of individuals that weren’t elected, come to acceptance? There is nothing equal about money buying influence in the government, buying power. Yet this is what we have. The nearly two billion dollars spent by billionaires in the 2024 elections is a good indicator of our reality.
And how does the oligarchy keep and grow its power? Through manufacturing wants, through manipulating the market to increase supply and demand. They are always looking for or creating problems for their goods and services to solve. Their enormous reserve of capital, of money, of factories, of influence, makes it easy for them to decide what we should buy. When our attention has been hijacked by social media, traditional media, advertising, and nostalgia, we are too distracted to notice. We are tired and hungry, and they have the solutions. Hyper-processed, hyper-palatable, craveable, addictive pre-packaged foods that we can’t pronounce instead of fruits, vegetables, and meats. Drugs to put us to sleep, drugs to keep us awake, drugs to numb us, drugs to stimulate us. Sex. So much sex everywhere. But notice that these make us more tired, more hungry, and more distracted, more ravenous. And this is all sold to us as growth and “progress,” an abstract term to appease us, confuse us, and reduce our questioning into how things actually work. And indeed, we do grow. We grow in our cravings for their “solutions.”
The oligarchy has even manufactured our wants when it comes to choosing our representatives and leaders. Legislation is supposed to protect and serve the average person, the “common man.” Instead, legislation has cleared the way for businesses to take advantage and manipulate a market. Legislation continues to give unequal tax breaks for the wealthiest compared to the common man. Trickle-down economics of the ’80s has only trickled into the pockets of the owners. Fines incurred are lower than the benefits reaped for breaking the rules making businesses incentivized to do so. The system helps businesses, and in turn, those in charge of the businesses first. How could this have happened if not for manufactured wants and deception of the common man?
The oligarchy is not encouraged to help, not incentivized to do so. The Protestant work ethic calls for the accumulation of capital, which the oligarchy has taken to heart. The limits on lobbying and campaign donations are no longer a discouragement against the corruption and influence of money from the ruling elite. When the president is a business man, can there be any doubt on where the power lies in our twisted democracy?
The idea of consumption has long been baked into what it means to be American. The predisposition toward consumption arises from what we’ve always known. The friction to change it is high. Billions of dollars are being spent to keep us consuming. It is easier to argue for what you know than what you don’t. The use of propaganda in this system has become more subtle, but it’s still there. The reheating of the same ideas for consumption, sequels, reboots, adaptations, nostalgia.
Some might say, “We have more freedom of choice than ever before!” Which to that I say we have more illusion than choice. We are disempowered from making real choices. We lack the energy and resources to explore all of the options so we must outsource decisions and autonomy. The benefit of choice becomes a curse of overwhelm.
We relinquish choice for the sake of our sanity. We purchase what we see, mistaking convenience for simplicity, mistaking algorithmic suggestions for good decision-making. We are removed from the goods and services we buy. We have been persuaded to surrender the “hard work” of making, mending, and creating, in exchange for the “easy work” of buying. In doing so, we have not gained luxury; we have lost our independence. We have become slaves to this convenience. What we thought we were choosing to save time, we now spend time to afford.
If we have no willpower to choose, we certainly have no willpower to dive into where or how a good was produced or the qualifications of those who provide the services we use. We know few farmers ourselves, so we cannot buy directly from farmers. We know little about growing food ourselves, so we trust labels and certifications. We once used physical currency to trade for food but now make invisible transfers of money we may not even have by just bringing one piece of plastic close to another.
The oligarchy offers none of this convenience out of a love for us citizens. It is not philanthropic, but egoistic. It is not a steward to the people, but devourers of them. Consumerism is not for our comfort or benefit, it is to steal our preferences and use them against us to rob us of our livelihoods. We have traded our skills as makers to become buyers. It entices us to relinquish our creativity, our self-worth, our agency for the comfort and ease of buying goods that will only last one season and subscription services that require regular payments whether you use it or not. It is time to reject the oligarchy and reclaim our sovereignty.
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