The Consumer Spiral

The tricky part about critiquing late stage capitalist consumerism isn't thinking about it, it's talking about it. We live in a world that can no longer afford it's costs, consequences, and horrific toll on most participants but people have been living with this particular cancer for so long that they can't see any suggestion to the contrary as anything but communism.

So we recoil from the conversation.

Yet here we stand, sinking up to our throats in a thick slime of uncontrolled income disparity, poverty, diminishing opportunity capped with climate change placing an impending need on us to pull together if we're going to survive as a species.

But like a pretty flame, we paw at the false promise of unrestricted wealth heedless of the burns it inflicts on almost everyone who touches it. It lures millions into impoverished complacency; men and woman spending meager incomes month to month in hopes that eventually their 'temporary' financial disadvantage will right itself leaving them the riches they feel entitled to.

We're so enthralled with the fire that when we see someone pull free of the frightening desperation and uncertainty to the point where they reach basic financial stability it feels like we've seen a winner in this horrific and oppressive system; that winner having ahieved what national productivity suggests should have been theirs and everyone else's all along.

Staring into the false flame, we're rendered blind not just to better ways of doing things but where we're going.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was left open and vulnerable to capitalist exploitation without the experience, administration, systems, checks or balances necessary to protect itself from those savvy enough to loot and pillage the country and establish not just markets but fast track those markets into deeply corrupt oligarchy. In so doing, the country most opposed to capitalism became a predictive warning of our possible future, a multi-billionaire led empire ruling over an impoverished declining population that fended mostly for itself day to day, person to person, sometimes without even basic government services.

This is our destination if we don't change it. This is where the road ends. Men like Trump would see us fighting one another and cheering from the sidelines while we sink into a permeant stasis as a self-perpetuating expendable resource for the pleasure of those rich enough to enjoy the product of our labor.

We have to stop staring into the flame. The conversation has to happen. The conversation has to lead to change. The change won't be easy or comfortable, but it needs to start soon.

There's too much at stake.