Lost in the 21st Century
Posted:
03 Feb 2015 10:26 AM PST
Consumerism has broken its promise. Perhaps now
we can begin to reconnect.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th February 2015
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th February 2015
A woman walks into a department store. She takes in the racks and
stacks of stuff, the sugared music, the sale signs, the listless customers
shuffling through the aisles, and is moved – suddenly and to her own
astonishment – to shout. “Is this all there is?!”. An assistant comes round
from behind his till. “No madam. There’s more in our catalogue.”
This is the answer we have been given to everything, the only
answer. We might have lost our attachments, our communities, our sense of
meaning and purpose, but there will be more money and more stuff with which to
replace them. Now that the promise has evaporated, the size of the void becomes
intelligible.
It’s not that the old dispensation was necessarily better: it was
bad in different ways. Hierarchies of class and gender crush the human spirit
as effectively as atomisation. The point is that the void that was filled with
junk is a void that could have been occupied by a better society, built on
mutual support and connectedness, without the stifling stratification of the old
order. But the movements that helped to smash the old world were facilitated
and co-opted by consumerism.
Individuation, a necessary response to oppressive conformity, is
exploitable. New social hierarchies, built around positional goods and
conspicuous consumption, took the place of the old. The conflict between
individualism and egalitarianism, too readily ignored by those who helped to
break the oppressive norms and strictures, does not resolve itself.
So we are lost in the 21st Century, living in a state of social
disaggregation that hardly anyone desired, but that is an emergent property of
a world reliant on rising consumption to avert economic collapse, saturated
with advertising and framed by market fundamentalism. We inhabit a planet our
ancestors would have found impossible to imagine: 7 billion people, suffering
an epidemic of loneliness. It is a world of our making but not of our choice.
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