Hyper consumption is in our genes
Question from the Internet:
“Since when has hyperconsumption become in vogue?”
Hyper consumption as you call it became in vogue relatively recently, especially since the American-style Western society has become the gold standard everybody is aspiring for.
But this has always been in us in potential, as we are all born with an insatiable desire for self-fulfillment. This desire is our matter, engine, but it has been developing gradually for millennia - starting with the first Human civilization in Babylon - until it reached its peak through the “American Dream” we all dream about.
And now this dream is turning into a nightmare, as - especially as Covid-19 removed our ability to keep our overconsumption system alive with different manipulations - we have to face the fact that our way of life is unsustainable.
We also have to recognize - also with the help of the virus - that we evolved into a globally integrated, interdependent system where Nature’s laws of integration operate.
Thus we need to swallow the bitter pill and accept that we will have to change how we live, on what values, goals, aspirations we build our societies upon.
This time - instead of our own inherently self-serving, self-justifying, exploitative program and the ideologies, systems we design - we need to choose Nature’s integral, mutually responsible, mutually complementing template as our design for Humanity.
Since Nature’s laws are not optional but obligating we don’t have a free choice in the matter, but we can choose if we adapt to them consciously, willingly, purposefully changing ourselves and our way of life, our we change by increasing blows, deepening crisis, threat of disasters.