Renegade Yogi

A different kind of consumerism

I was having an interesting Twitter discussion with @MrTeacup about the “voluntary simplicity movement”.

He was stating that because the simplicity movement is merely a reorientation toward consumerism, it is still a form of consumerism. People are still constructing their identities around consumption. Where what we consume or who we consume it from defines who we are. And it will just make people feel more righteous to band with the movement, when real change needs to be made. Just like with recycling, which makes people feel good for doing something that does not save any energy and in fact costs energy, reorienting your consumption does not help but makes you think you are helping.

Throwing a band-aid on our culture by “voting with our dollars” is not going to solve the bigger problem. This is the conceit of capitalism. People say the free market is neutral, that it just gives people what they value at ever cheaper prices.

This is wrong. Putting aside interventions into the free market by the government, which complicate matters, the free market most definitely favors its own values independent of the values of the society in which the market is found. Values like efficiency, scale, and monetary valuation. And anything that help those.

Efficiency means interchangeable labor, only as much education as is required, robotic thinking, etc. Scale means selling people stuff they don’t need, planned obsolescence, and hiring more people. Monetary valuation means associating a dollar value on someone’s life, caring more about your property value than you do about your neighbors, and valuing a person’s worth in terms of their net worth.

These are not neutral. They have a real impact on our daily lives. We should be mindful of them, and try to see capitalism for what it really is. I tend to think that free market capitalism can be a force for good in the world. But it is merely a tool to help us create wealth. To help people get the stuff they need from the people who know how to make it. Problems come when the market starts driving our lives, when we are mentally enslaved by it.

It’s good to be mindful of what you need, of what is important to you, to others and to the world. Minimalism/simplicity is a perspective that can remind you of how abundant our resources are compared to our needs. And it too can become a new identity, an aesthetic, a blindfold. It’s easy to see that because it ends in “ism”. Don’t get caught up in a concept, any concept. The real world, beyond conception, is right here.