A young man was trampled to death today by a crowd of greed-maddened shoppers in a New York City suburb ( http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-11/29/content_10428646.htm). Leon Rosselson’s song “A Proper State” (http://www.myspace.com/leonrosselson), in which a woman named Betty Ball is crushed to death by shoppers, trying to get hold of a fashionable sale item in a department store, has proved prophetic. You can hear he song on his profile or on mine, and I recommend it highly.
A few months ago, at the height of the vicious election campaign, I had a revelation about why some US citizens are so irrationally afraid of having a Muslim or even a Jew or Buddhist as President…. It’s the economy. It’s well known that the “fourth quarter”, a euphemism for the Christmas shopping season, is the time when the economy goes from loss to profit each year. If the commercial version of Christianity were not the national religion, consumers might stop irrationally spending more than they make in the last quarter of each year, and the economy would crumble.
Of course, now the economy is, in fact, crumbling, and people have every reason to wake up and stop spending, but what is the government and press striving to get us to do? They’re urging us to make “Black Friday” a success by spending and spending. They’re bailing out the financial institutions that caused the problem.. nobody’s talking about ending the religion of consumerism; instead we’re being urged to redouble our faith in this failed religion.
The way I see it, the failure of the banking system a couple of months ago showed that the capitalist system as we know it was a colossal failure, with its boom-and-bust cycles that mean all the apparent gains of the boom-times are illusory, since the wealth created in those times is invariably destroyed in the down-times. This is hidden by treating the destruction of the natural systems that we all depend on as outside the balance sheets of the system that is destroying them at an ever-increasing pace, for profit. Endless growth is not healthy, and the sooner we switch to a sustainable, steady-state economy the more likely this planet is to survive. To sustain the illusion of endless growth, people are taught from an early age to think that keeping up appearances by consuming more than they can afford is more important than our own survival, our own self-interest, and the survival of the place we all live.