It’s simple, stop taking ‘candy’ from strangers. Curb your consumption & the rest will follow
When I was growing up in the 1950s, most of us were taught not to accept candy from strangers — and not because candy isn’t good for you (that was a separate lesson).
Nevertheless, in the world we are currently living in, without realizing it, we now do this all the time — irresponsibly purchasing whatever our hearts desire from people we don’t know and corporations that can’t be trusted. Parental fears are confirmed, for molest us they do — this ‘candy’ they offer us is frequently larded with all sorts of booby traps, like razor blades in Halloween apples.
It pollutes the world, defiles our bodies and sullies our souls. Like children in a ‘playground’ we’ve become junkies, with pushers who ‘use’ as well.
We are so out of control that we are literally consuming the planet and converting our desires into horrific atrocities which recklessly incite corrosive fear, further spiking our unassuageable desire.
But as consumer sheep, when you allow desire to guide you through the forest, you’re going to get eaten by wolves.
The gargantuan pachyderm sucking all the air out of the room, yet still willfully ignored by the collective whole, is runaway obsessive compulsive consumption. Due to denial we are no more conscious of it than breathing, — and indeed, it has become the ‘breath of life’. It is our ‘life support system’ and we are loath to pull the plug. If we hadn’t been conditioned so thoroughly to be domesticated consumer livestock, the connection between consumption and environmental destruction would be as blaringly obvious as a mariachi band — and for some of us it is.
When we appeal for ‘humanity’ from the fossil fuel industry, corporations, wealth and power, we are not speaking a language they understand, while our unabating tacit consumption becomes the silence of complicity, providing license. And so, they continue to cater to the darker nature of ‘humanness’ — desire and greed. Like seismographs, they only respond to pressure. What they listen for is a seismic shift in the attitude and actions of the masses. When we call for them to change, while at the same time continuing our consumption unabated, we are sending mixed signals. To them this says ‘business as usual’, which they will always defer to.
I often write about our consumer culpability in diaries and comments on DK and the average response is ‘crickets’ — as if I’m whispering at a shooting range. Some stalwart ‘consumer advocates’ will however, make a vain attempt to defend their shopping ‘privileges’, mostly by proclaiming their assumed innocence and shifting the blame to the ‘product pushers’ and their enforcers. At times they’ll try to bolster their case by describing their perceived helplessness in the face of the ‘unassailable’ control the aforementioned wield.
Recently, in the comments to a diary I posted on the folly of ‘Zuk’s bunker’, I wrote about the power of boycotts in the 1960s. I was immediately informed of the low probability of this feedback method to influence our current consumer business model.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/21/2230721/-Tombs-of-rich-powerful-Zuk-s-Meta-bunker-survival-follies-The-limits-of-privilege
This opposing view went something along the lines that as “all the brands” are now conglomerated into the holdings of “the mighty” few and produced in “a couple” of overseas factories, this would somehow stymie boycotting. Rather than wade into this, I chose to walk around it and get to the savage facts of collapse.
I responded;
“Perhaps, but it’s way past time we ‘up our game’ and ruthlessly cut unnecessary consumption to essentials. This means no more impulse buying, feel good buying, buying junk because it’s cheap, appeasement buying, novelty buying, ‘one use’ buying, compulsive buying, boredom buying, etc. etc. We are creating geographic features with our excessive waste, throw away upwards of half the food produced in this country, have closets full of clothes we rarely wear and have created a hugely profitable ‘storage’ industry, because we can’t let go of things we didn’t really need or even want long term.
All of this excess and waste is at the core of environmental collapse and we need to see that and wake up before our we swallow ourselves whole :-( “
I recognized in this aversion to boycotting, similar responses that any talk of cutting consumption have elicited in the past and the high probability that such thoughts are a form of rationalization based in avoidance.
By putting such arguments forward, consumer gluttony becomes a ‘problem solved’, allowing the consumer to return to convenient pre-programmed behavioral patterns and avoid the discomfort brought on by questioning these compulsions. This is denial generated pushback of the kind employed by the addicted. Without closer inspection, it appears plausible, and that will do for the time being — at least until someone sticks their finger in the ‘wound’ and the construct crumbles.
As these few “mighty” are a major part of the problem, hitting them in the pocketbook, might just help. Many corporations, as well as the one percent, are profit driven and bottom line tightfisted. They panic if they see their earnings moving in the wrong direction. Their brand and self-esteem is totally invested in wealth and assets, with little ‘diversification’. They are controlled by an almost morbid fixation on money and accruing it. The slightest fluctuation in the needle can solicit an outsized response, as their avarice knows no limits and anything that adversely effects it ‘rocks their boat’. Cutting into their bottom line will usually get their attention.
As for their products being produced worldwide, the decimation of the environment is a worldwide emergency worthy of urgent and immediate global disruption, and although cutting production will bring varying degrees of deprivation to the ‘slaves of the mighty’, the alternative is total economic and environmental collapse, which they will not survive.
We have long since run out of viable alternatives for getting a handle on greenhouse emissions quickly enough to stave off the runaway freight train of environmental collapse. The only safe way to achieve this, provided we have enough time left, is to follow the example gifted to us by the Pandemic Shutdown and using it as a model, ‘reboot’. Climatologists have called for dropping CO2 emissions ASAP for nearly two years now and each time they ‘shout out’ their proposals for doing this, it takes on clearer outlines. Because climatologists have been driven by desperation to ‘cross the line’ into suggesting policy, their increasingly vehement ‘calls to action’ have begun to fall in line with my proposal for ‘reboots’.
‘Devolving’ the world economy by reversing direction away from our current and very destructive ‘constant growth’ model, has been being discussed by at least one prominent economist, as well as others and appears to be gaining traction.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/18/magazine/herman-daly-interview.html
At this point, devolving the economy can only be accomplished quickly enough to be beneficial by partially shutting down this growth — while remodeling the economy along more stable, sustainable and equitable lines. This in turn can only be achieved by cutting consumption to essentials. You might think of it as economic liposuction, cutting out all the fat — the production of which consumes world resources unnecessarily, while defiling the environment with tsunamis of toxic ‘runoff’ and avalanches of discarded waste.
Unfortunately, in the developed world, people are largely spoiled and narcissistic, with an ingrown sense of privilege. For the most part, they still suffer from ‘pandemic fatigue’ and the thoughts of having to face the ‘terrible hardships’ of those times again cause their minds to shut down.
They lack the perspective of what hard times can really be (see Gaza and Ukraine) and have, as of yet, to comprehend the magnitude of the ‘hard times’ environmental collapse will bring.
Ignorance and denial shield them from the red-hot-poker of full climate crisis awareness. And so instead, they worry about economic stability, and distract themselves with frivolous entertainment and the constant prioritizing of personal concerns — conveniently ‘forgetting’ that the environment is all inclusive; being inseparably global and personal.
Their life is about to be obliterated, and they are no more aware of this, than an anthill about to be stepped on. All they need to do is look up and see the bottom of that shoe blotting out the sky.
One way or another consumption will be cut as priorities radically shift to survival. Our sacrosanct economies will give out under the pressures of the collapsing environment.
Far better to act now, and embrace the sacrifices and hardships that will come as reparations for our self-centered consumer gluttony. We will be sacrificing for our children and enduring justly inflicted hardships to earn the chance to preserve something of this world that we have so badly ravaged.
Sadly, so much of humanity has already been subsumed and seduced by the pleasures of consumption that they have ceased to care (if they ever did) about the future. They have become so desensitized, by having their desires constantly pandered to, that they’ve lost a critical form of collective empathy. The common refrain that; “at least it won’t happen in my lifetime” has become the mantra of inaction and avoidance, while growing into a monstrously callous and self-centered response to this crisis of future survival we have created for our children.
Narcissism is a form of sociopathy, and in a world steeped in it, one is hard put to find qualities such as pro-active caring and more importantly genuine altruistic responsibility, without which care becomes hollow.
However, there are signs of change with more and more people escaping the confines of denial and taking environmental action. The simplest way to join them is by cutting your personal consumption as much as you possibly can, before it is hacked away by the machete of a climate running wild.