In the last few posts, I’ve bounced around some ideas of what I think may well be essentials to help us find a way out of the ‘now we are in’.
That’s the ‘now’ of growing intolerance and a burgeoning enthusiasm for convenience, conspiracy and populism, all occurring alongside the simultaneous collapses of the global climate system and the earth’s biosphere.
That ‘now’.
My short play with these ideas has led to a few principles which are, in short,
To celebrate the individual’s own liberty over their mind, their views and their body’s destiny. Of the autonomy over our character, qualities and ‘usness’. Of the sovereignty of the individual.
A rejection of the placing of the wants and desires of the individual above all else. Hope lies in the placing of community, not the individual, at the very core of any human future. A community that is real, human, and face to face, not distant and digitally veneered.
Diversity of ideas, diversity of actions, diversity of people. It is in ‘experiments in living’, and celebration of colour, complexity and mess that our worlds, our communities, our ideas, our principles, our movements and our societies develop for the better.
The need to accept that changes, in any meaningful sense - changes in our world that last and differ to now - take an age. So long in fact, that those who start the change don’t see it, and for those that see the change, the story of that change is a story of history.
Perhaps these might act as some useful building blocks to find a way out. Or foundations at least, if not the building blocks themselves.
But wait.
For all my talk of individuals, a quick skim of a few articles online suggested to me that I’ve been using the wrong term all along.
Forget individuals. It is ‘consumers’ that are all the craze now. And an opinionated lot they are:
How did I miss this? Where could I have gone wrong, I wonder?
Delving a little deeper into these articles, I find all the reassurance I could need; it turns out, terms like “individual”, “member of the public” or “people” on the one hand are just other ways of saying “consumer.”
As interchangeable as fart and trump[6], you might say:
Sadly, there is I fear, something very, very dark at play here.
When I speak to my friends, no one talks about consumers. When I talk to community groups I work with, no one talks about consumers. When I speak to my local shop keeper or garage, no one talks about consumers. They all talk about people, some of them about the public, at a push maybe one or two might even talk about “Brits”.
No one talks about consumers.
But watch a senior politician speak and they use the term all the time. Listen to and read some of the media and there it will be again. Hear the wisdom of a corporate leader, and guess what? It’s there again. And, as the example above show, it is, so often, used interchangeably with person.
I worry a great deal that this is not a mistake. Not lazy language. Because the language we use so often gives away the unconscious biases and hidden priorities we hold.
Instead, I worry instead that this is a product of two more troublesome things.
One is a mindset within those with the greatest power that the only thing that matters is economic growth. That all decisions, all policies, all fights are viewed through the lens of growth. In that world view, the role of the individual is consumer. Ideas of justice, fairness, equality, happiness, meaning, value have no definition, except when provided through consumption.
Vision, dreams, ideas? These are worthless. Rest, pleasure, joy? These can be bought. Fairness? Beauty? The natural world? These are irritants.
Such ideas are hardly hidden in the UK now. After 14 years of hellish, gluttonous conservative rule, during which the only thing that could slow their destruction of the state was a global pandemic, we might have hoped for … maybe not “better” as such but at least “marginally less bad.”
But no hope there this time. We have a government of ‘change’ that promises, in any meaningful sense, more of the same. An obsession with growth[7] that, in the long-run, all science shows leads only to hell[8], and an awareness of our inter-connectedness with the rest of the complex living world we inhabit that would rate equal to that of a turd’s.[9]
Our leaders, as far as any one of us can call them that with any sincerity, are blind to all but money. Pound signs in their eyes and dollars coming out of their arses.
But there is a second, perhaps even greater worry I have about that term ‘consumer.”
It is that it’s used interchangeably on purpose.
The lobbyists and corporate kings and queens that have the ears of our flaccid senior politicians have been drip-dripping this term for decades now, using it interchangeably with the person, the individual, the ‘Brit’.
A rebrand, you might say. They certainly would.
If you label people as consumers, you focus, with some subtlety, on their individualism. It is their individual desires, needs, purchases and behaviours that become the focus. Give the consumer opinions, framed around how their purchasing choices influence and reflect their concerns, and you position consumption and individualism as the only role a person has to address issues like the collapse of the biosphere.
View us through the lens of what we eat, and buy, and wear, and can’t afford, and then there no need to be distracted by community or radical ideas like a circular economy.
The consumer is the corporate-friendly version of the individual. The bland-magnolia, sensible-car-driving, holidaying-somewhere-nice-this-year version of the vibrant human ape.
It is a subtle repositioning of the very nature of humanity.
Not so much one person one vote, as one burger one vote.
The corporate world, through the mouths of our politics, is disenfranchising our very being. We are being replaced not (yet) by robots, but by consumers.
This language is fundamental and dangerous. It should be avoided at all costs and called out where it can be.
So we have four principles above, and perhaps now a fifth: To fight for the person, and to trample the consumer.
[3] Brits want to fight climate change, but a third of consumers unaware of how to make homes greener | Ipsos
[6] If you’re reading this somewhere other than in the UK, you may not know, and may enjoy knowing, that over here, trump means fart.