How Would Jesus Shop?
Are you deeply concerned by much of what global capitalism has created, despite it’s wealth-producing potential? You should be, according to Benjamin Barber.
Global inequality has left the planet with two kinds of potential customers: 1) the poor of the undeveloped world, with vast and underserved needs but not the means to fulfill them, and 2) the first-world rich, who have lots of disposable income but few real needs.
While an earlier capitalist economy, backed by a Protestant ethos, was built around selling goods like timber and buckwheat that served people’s needs, today’s consumerist economy sustains profitability by creating needs, convincing us that Wii’s and iPhones are necessary. It has done so by promoting what Barber calls an ethos of infantilization, a mind-set of “induced childishness” in which adults pursue adolescent lifestyles.
Since basic human needs - food, shelter, clothing - have long since been met for most people in the developed world, marketing professionals now bang their heads together to reinvent and recreate goods in order to sell more stuff. Aware that most of our needs were met long ago, they set about eternalizing childhood desires and fabricating new adult ones.
Barber records a moment when purchased bottled water in his London hotel. Bottled water, in a country where clean water flows straight from the tap, is perhaps the ultimate in manufactured need. "Over a billion people are without drinking water," says Barber. "Why don't we find out ways to get the water they need to them, instead of new ways of getting water to us?"
All this makes Consumed sound like depressing reading. In many ways, it is, and the idea that Western shoppers are to blame for environmental and cultural degradation, even if they have been hoodwinked into buying unnecessary products, is a heavy cross to bear.
