Here’s an interesting article written by Amitai Etzioni for The New Republic and reprinted in Utne Reader, on the subject of society getting too weighed down in consumerism.
One might not agree with all his conclusions, but he does a good job of describing what he calls the “social disease” of consuming beyond need and the suffering that results.
Here’s the link:
“Get Rich Now. The economy will never be the same. It’s time to rethink our definition of “the good life.”
The article sounds a lot like the prophets railing against Judah & Israel leading into the captivity by Assyria. The implication that the redistribution of wealth by taxation is liberalism, a suble slide into communism. The real culprit here is the fiat money system we have in place, now, which allows the unjustified expansion of the circulation of paper dollars, becoming more worthless at each roll of the printing press. Our world is awash with paper dollars becoming more worthless as our material government prints more and more to satisfy the greed of that most private of corporations, “The Federal Reserve”. To return to monetary sanity of what was in place prior to the usurpation of the “Central Bankers”, i.e. The Federal Reserve System, in 1913 would do more to change our culture than anything suggested in the article. A sober look at the real causes of our financial situation does, however, “turn us, like tired children to the arms of Divine Love”, where the unit of value is Love and the spending of it increases our value and satisfaction by spending it freely. This consumerism is welcomed.
And along with the ideas put forth in the article, read the CS Sentinel article titled “Home Is Where We Park It,” in the Jan. 11, 2010 issue. It has given me much to ponder!