Overconsumption and Its Ideology: The Issue of Our Time

When is a good consumed? The word consumption was originally used in the context of food. It's obvious when a bagel has been consumed. You can extend this easily to other things like a bottle of soap, which while (hopefully) not eaten, is eventually used up. In the most general sense, a thing is consumed when it ceases to add value to the person who owns it. When you stop appreciating a painting you've put up, the painting is consumed. Overconsumption then, is the habitual consumption of things which need not be consumed. It is acquiring things with value, only to go on and destroy that value at the soonest opportunity. What could drive someone to this?

I put it to you that overconsumption is an ideology, a set of motivations and beliefs about the world which are often invisible to the person who holds them. In fact, it's the dominant ideology of our time. The success of nations and governments is measured near-ubiquitously by GDP, a major constituent of which is consumptive spending. If we don't consume what we have, we can't possibly hope to buy more, and so the economy will stagnate. Everything in the capitalist world is geared around consumption, around destroying the value of the things you own to make room for newer things.

Those who overconsume typically react very badly to the idea they should consume less. They will respond to the suggestion as if it were an accusation, and indictment of their very way of life, because in many ways it is. Though few would admit it, many are in practice hedonists, who appear to believe in pursuing their personal pleasure above all else. The idea they should ever have to go without even the tiniest desire is far too much to ask of them. While this attitude may be innate to some extent, much of it is instilled by society and we can better understand it by examining the society that created it.

The Marxist term commodity fetishism is quite relevant here, if poorly named. Perhaps it might be called amoralification if someone came up with it today. It is the practice of separating a good from the labour used to create that good. We see this all the time in our lives. Imagine your local supermarket. It likely presents to the consumer a clean and sterile environment. There is little trace within the shop of the origin of the goods it purveys. And the goods themselves have been diligently homogenised through exacting formulas. Two chocolate bars may have been produced in totally different factories, but will use a recipe so precise you cannot tell one from the other.

Is the origin of goods relevant to the customer? The illusion of the shop exists to convince you that it is not. That the information being withheld isn't relevant in the slightest. Even the very premise of a supermarket obscures the relationship between consumer and producer. It seems as if the goods within simply appear on the shelves, and there is no sense when buying something that you necessarily have to interact with the process of its production. There is a complicated system of supply chains and inventory management that exists to completely insulate us from their origin so it doesn't bother us or stop us from buying. This is the foundation of illusion of amoral consumption.

If a person came up to you and offered to enslave some children in Africa to make you a chocolate bar, you'd no doubt be mortified. Yet the same thing might happen when you buy a chocolate bar from the shop. The inventory management software will record your purchase, and in turn signal that approximately one extra chocolate bar needs to be stocked, which in turn requisitions the relevant suppliers to produce it through the same means. A better way of looking at shops might be to imagine that all the goods are free, and you pay not for the item itself, but for a new one to replace it. If you follow what happens to the money you spend on something, this perspective is closer to reality than it initially seems. Yet it is very difficult to see this. Few products will admit the circumstance of their creation because doing so would almost certainly ward off a section of buyers. Then the process of shopping itself makes it seem as if, since the product already exists, no extra damage could be done from buying and consuming it. The sum total of this is the view that there is no moral implication from buying a product.

The attachment to the amoral belief is strong, because it must be strong. Admitting fault in one area, no matter how small, makes the contradiction clear ushers in questions about every other. Discard the belief entirely, and you will see the rows and rows of shops that line the very highest, most expensive, and most central areas of our cities not as the sanitary and helpful purveyors of goods, but as great temples of sin to our new plastic gods. Look upon the shelves ye mighty and despair. Even the tiniest thing has moral implication. The goods you've purchased already become personal moral failings. Shopping becomes perilous and challenging, fraught with tough decisions and moral tradeoffs. The mind is averse to difficulty, it has limited capacity for making decisions. Once you've decided a certain number of things in a day, you run out of juice and can't decide anymore. A great state of cognitive dissonance must be created, not because people don't know about the evils that go into making the products they make, but because a world without amoral consumption is simply too much for most to bare. Companies are more than willing to seize on this and provide us the amoral fantasy, to hide those things they don't want to see so that they can profit and we can buy.

It should be noted that there is a key difference between the lack of knowledge and the rejection of knowledge. People may well be aware that the things they buy do or might cause great harm, but they choose not to pay attention to those thoughts. They exitist in a state of cognitive dissonance where they are at once aware of the truth and unaware of the truth. What's performed in shops is a genuine act of deception in some cases, but in other cases an act of theatre. If the shop pretends there is nothing wrong with what you buy, then you can pretend there is nothing wrong as well, and everyone is happy (except the people who made it, whom you cannot see).

So we see this is the root of much hedonism. If there is no moral implication to buying things, why shouldn't I have everything I want, the moment I want it? The longer you hold that consumption is amoral, the more embedded you'll become in ideas hedonism and gluttony.

While we have seen what enables consumption, especially the kind that greatly damages the environment, we have not seen what motivates it. Yes, you can buy whatever you want, but why would you consume it instead of valuing it? The answer lies in the Buddhist conception of desire. Buddhists have noted that many people don't desire things so much as they desire desire itself. The desire for one thing quickly fades once you have it, and so you find a new thing to desire and the old one is consumed. You're trapped, always on the cusp of having what you want, of being happy after the next purchase or pay rise, if you could only have a little more.

Modern psychology and neuroscience give credence to this view of human behaviour. The driving force behind it is a chemical in the brain, one of which I'm sure you're all vaguely aware: dopamine.

Dopamine is not a happiness shot. The popular conception of getting a hit of dopamine whenever you do something enjoyable irks me to no end. It has only the vaguest relation to any real science. What's more, a good understanding of the various neurotransmitters can be greatly helpful in better understanding the emotions caused by them. There are many neurotransmitters responsible for the various ways you experience pleasure and joy, and what's more, dopamine may not even be among them. This scientific oversimplification robs people not only of objective truth, but of a deeper self-understanding that may come from it.

With that short rant out of the way, here's how dopamine relates to this cyclic desire people feel.

Dopamine is a chemical produced naturally by the brain, it roughly corresponds the feeling of excitement or anticipation. It is released in advance of an expected reward, and spikes the highest immediately before you get the thing you want, at which point levels rapidly drop. If you've ever purchased something on the internet and felt a kind of buzzing feeling as you just can't wait for it to arrive, that's a very strong dose of dopamine. You might find yourself repeatedly checking a delivery tracking app as if doing so will somehow speed it up. This gives us a good hint as to the biological function of dopamine, which is to motivate actions. If we imagine a hunter seeing a dear, dopamine is released in their brain at the potential reward of a good meal, and it spurs them to take fast action to secure that reward.

Dopamine is one of the most important chemicals for our daily function, and one of the most powerful due to its strong ties with motivation and action-taking. For instance, if you've ever started a long task you might feel a rush of motivation at the start of it, only to have that fade into tedium and monotony as time goes on. The difference between the flurried start and slow tail is the presence of dopamine, pushing you to act. Many in the professional world make illicit use of amphetamines (such as Adderall or Ritalin) or other drugs which flood the brain with dopamine to put them in a manic and hyperactive state which allows them to work harder, ignore things like tiredness and hunger, and generally have motivation for things they may not want to do.

Most of the things we classify as addictions are also driven by dopamine. From things like drug use and problem gambling, to checking your phone frequently, and yes, shopping and consumption.

One of the characteristic properties of addictions is when the object of addiction stops being enjoyable on its own merit. Studies have shown that people addicted to slot machines actually dislike winning. This is because they are pursuing the dopamine high of potentially winning, and as I mentioned earlier, dopamine spikes just before an anticipated reward. Once the person wins, they're no longer anticipating anything, the dopamine subsides, their flow is broken, and they are left having to pick up a small pile of change which is almost certainly less than they put into the machine.

We can see naturally how this transposes to overconsumption. Someone who overconsumes is chasing the dopamine rush that comes in anticipation of a new purchase, but the item itself fails to live up to that promise, so they must go and buy a new thing to anticipate how much better it will be than the last before they set it down on their counter and discover that it too was just another piece of trash. This is the key process that transforms purchasing an item into consuming an item. A person who buys things because they expect to get genuine value out of them is almost definitionally not an overconsumer. The distinctive pattern of overconsumption is being excited to purchase a new good, then almost instantly adding it to a pile of trash where it never brings happiness again.

While the typical overconsumer fits this pattern closely, that is they are a person who doesn't consider buying goods to be a moral act, and who is pursuing anticipation in place of actualisation, there are other motivations. A common one is hoarding. Many, especially those who have experienced periods of scarcity, feel a sense of security in stockpiling goods. This hoarding tendency is a less common kind of overconsumption, but illustrative of the fact that not all overconsumers fit neatly into the mould I've laid out here.

Some people are just really hungry and so they buy a lot of food. Some are in a state of dissonance regarding the morality of consumption, others simply never to the time to think about it. There are many subtle intricacies to each individual. Withstanding that, I believe these two factors I've discussed to be the most important and widespread, and as such the most important to change.

The topic of change is daunting. Looking at these two factors, what must be done is immense. A great many people must be saved from addiction and taught to live a more fulfilling life. They must be brought out of some of their most strongly held beliefs through much cognitive dissonance. The entire goal of society, that is economic growth, must be fundamentally rethought as it acts in opposition to these points.

There are few political movements that serve this goal. Most popular political parties agree that the broad direction of society should be is growth, and agree with the system of capitalism used to create that growth. Even socialists, who are opposed to capitalism, are often acting out of desire for growth. They hold that they are being robbed by the rich and that the growth of society must be more fairly distributed. This may well be true, but their fundamental desire is to consume more and to stop those who prevent them from doing it. These philosophies all have their roots in a time of scarcity. It is only relatively recently that our problem switched from having too little to having too much, and politics has not caught up.

I would like to propose a new politics, the politics of temperance. Not as in banning alcohol, but rejecting excess. This is to be based not in economic growth, but in the rejection of growth. The core values of this new politics must obviously be the complement of the three issues which hold us back. They are happiness, care, and sustainability. Happiness is the opposite of desire. When we pursue happiness we do things for the value they bring us, instead of getting excited by an imagined value which never comes. Care is the opposite of amorality. We must care for others in the things we do, instead of carelessly purchasing things and taking actions which cause others harm. Sustainability is the opposite of growth. Pursuing an endless increase in consumption can never be sustainable. The human species already consumes too much.

I see these politics growing in some areas. Minimalism, veganism, environmentalism, zero waste, personal independence/do-it-yourself, eco-socialism, all have echoes of temperance. The most identifiable aspect of it is a conscious rejection of harmful things that might bring pleasure.

I can't tell you who to vote for if you hold these politics, because only a small number of people do. There are is no success to be had from a political party appealing to such a small constituency, and the message is a very thorny one to those who don't agree. The reaction to being told you must have less, you must experience inconvenience and do difficult things is usually negative. And of course every moneyed interest is opposed to changing our focus away from money-making.

It seems then, that personal advocacy should be the first goal. To live a temperant life yourself, and to seek out and form connections with those who do the same. It must also be advocated to others in your personal life. A useful tool for this is Moral Foundations Theory. It holds that there are six moral foundations upon which most people operate: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Liberal people tend to focus on care and fairness, while conservatives prefer loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Effective advocacy must then be tailored to the person and appeal to their moral tendencies.

Care

Care is self explanatory as it is already covered.

Fairness

As I've stated before, acknowledging sustainability means we must also be fair with how we apportion our limited resources.

Loyalty

One can emphasise how loyalty to a certain group may be interrupted by excessive consumption, for instance a person who is loyal to their family aught not waste too much money buying things for themselves.

Authority

There are many authorities which preach against excess. Religious figures are often a good choice when deferring to authority in this case. Scientists can also be a good group to appeal to as most agree that current consumption is excessive, but beware the many people who view scientists as suspect.

Sanctity

Perhaps one of the easiest and strongest motivations for temperence is sanctity. The goods we buy often pollute the air and water, destroying the sanctity of nature and making these things impure. Personal sanctity is also often violated by excessive consumption, through directly ill health or indirectly through a less fulfilling lifestyle.

Liberty

People with a strong belief in personal liberty often reject the responsibility that comes with temperence, so it is good to remind them that their liberty is often contingent on the actions of others. You aren't free to breath clean air if your neighbour is burning rubbish in their garden, and you aren't free to enjoy nature if it is destroyed. Likewise many of the forces pushing consumption infringe on people's liberties. They often exploit workers in poor areas, and they often manipulate consumers by lying or hiding information, preventing them from making the decision that's best for them personally.

The good news of advocacy is that you don't have to do a lot. The foot in the door phenomenon is the principle by which people will be much more open to making large changes after they make small ones. Getting someone to reduce consumption just a little, or to care a little more about sustainability will not only have the effect of helping them and others, but will also make them far more likely to take further steps in future.

Realising these ideals will be hard work, but we are lucky in that their believers are people who naturally want to work hard for what we believe in. I hope that the many fairly disparate groups who practice these principles will naturally see their common ground and come together to enact broader change. But I also worry that such collective movements will be corrupted away from their difficult message to gain mass appeal. We must remain vigilant for those who wish to use our passions as a springboard for their own ends and ensure that those who lead us are practising what they preach. Excessive scepticism of outsiders is unhealthy and limits the spread of our message, but we must remain insistent on the key principles and keep those who follow them at the core of the movement.

I should like to highlight two harmful practices in this vein. Suppose a person says I've been trying to cut down on plastics in my life, but I'm not going to stop buying plastic straws, I can't stand the paper ones. One response might be that's very selfish of you, don't you know the damage they do? This is shaming and only likely to turn the person away. Another response might be that's okay, we're all human and need to do we want sometimes. This is also wrong. Plastic goods are harmful, especially something as frivolous as a straw. Instead, try it's good that you're trying to cut down on plastic, hopefully you can find more ways to reduce in future. It is not justifying, but also not chastising their behaviour. Always be focused on the big sell of future participation, instead of getting caught up in current failings. Failure is expected but should not be encouraged. Do not focus on creating shame for something bad, but do not try to assuage the guilt that should natural come from it.

As a final note, I do not know if these goals can be achieved. I'm not sure what a society that follows them would look like. Perhaps advertising would be banned? Certainly rules regarding pollution would be more strict. It's not often you hear these things discussed. With the many basic failures of society and government, it can be difficult to think of the big picture and what the future holds. There is a great change I want to help bring about and I don't know if it can be done, just that it must be done.