“We all want. We all need. When want overpowers need, our perspective gets skewed. I say, want all you want—wanting motivates. However, need very little and you will almost always be satisfied.” (Pauline’s latest post made me think, and my comments on her post expanded afterwards into the stuff below.. They appear as by Hendrix, a mix-up there.)
Yes, but when I need very little, I don’t buy the shiny new car. When enough people think like me, General Motors goes out of business. The house of cards collapses.
In 1949, when war-time ration-books were finally ended in England, I would eagerly read National Geographic magazines from the USA. They had full-page colour adverts for Coca-Cola, which I’d never come across in real life, but which—because of the adverts—I started to desire greatly; also adverts for silverware to treasure as family heirlooms in the future (an odd concept to a child brought up in houses overstuffed with stuffy heirlooms); Hammond organs shown uniting the family in home music-making.
Meanwhile we still had bomb-sites where dwellings had been destroyed and not yet rebuilt; some children were still going to school without shoes. The satisfaction of wants was an enticing dream which took the mind away from unmet needs, and in some parts of the world still does.
Out of those very bombs and shortages (the sacrifice paid for challenging Hitler) there emerged a determination to meet the needs of the people, which took shape according to the blueprints of economist William Beveridge, who designed the Welfare State. Today Britons are guaranteed not to be left hungry, homeless or without medical care. The meeting of needs, in short, is taken for granted, like the air we breathe, the water, gas and electricity piped to our homes. Stuff to meet other needs is imported from countries where they work for paltry wages. The only growth, the only lively parts of our economy have been aimed at the creation and immediate gratification of wants. You must want, it’s your duty to civilization. If you don’t watch TV (how traitorous!) you are still bombarded with junk mail and flyers. Spend less on “discretionary purchases” and things collapse like a house of cards. Jobs disappear, flower-growers in Kenya or Belize go bust.
Till recently, no one had envisaged that en masse we’d want to spend less: inflation and growth were the wonderful boons with which money could reproduce itself with very little effort. “Buy now, before it goes up!” has always been a good slogan for shifting things that nobody needs. Commerce has striven for sales as if fighting the ultimate war of good against evil, though actually the spur is competition, not idealism.
“No money to buy a house? No problem! We can sell you the house and the money to buy it with too. Then we’ll sell your debt to someone else, along with the uncertainty as to whether you’ll ever pay it back. But it doesn’t matter! The value of everything goes up! Nobody loses!”
How shall the person of goodwill, who wants to help save the world, behave now? Shall Mr Obama and Mr Brown encourage me to buy things as before, so that people have jobs and nobody starves? Shall I buy a Hammond organ, silver-plated monogrammed silverware, or the modern equivalents, I don’t know, iPods, Blackberries, a replacement for the car that cost me £100? I don’t know where to start. I Google “must-have luxuries” for ideas. I start to have wants never previously imagined, such as a chocolate body-wrap massage.
It’s the lack of clear direction that bothers me. Will there be a reprise of the Dark Ages? In that “period of cultural decline or societal collapse that took place in Western Europe between the fall of Rome and the eventual recovery of learning” (Wikipedia), the barbarians were all over the place, leading to centuries of economic decline after the high times of the Roman Empire. I guess that was the era when Christianity was more of a comfort than ever before or since, and monasteries were refuges of sanity in a world on the edge of Armageddon. It doesn’t offer the same comfort and certainty now.
I admire the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and hoped for some guidance in his recent Ebor lecture in York. He was talking about the environment rather than the financial situation, but they are linked, for economists who don’t understand a remedy without growth are not going to help the planet.
He warned that God does not give guarantees of a successful ending.
Unless there is a change of heart in the human race, Dr Williams said, the world might meet several tragic fates including the final calamity of being asphyxiated, submerged, or malnourished through mankind’s folly.
The archbishop believes it is a reckless delusion to believe that the environment will regulate itself to be consistent with how we affect it.
He thinks that while the world can survive, mankind may not. The planet belongs to the Lord and the human race cannot own it and treat it however it wishes, he said.
(This summary by Alan Harten, Fair Home website. For the full text, see the Archbishop’s website.)
I wish he would tell the G20 Summit what the Lord wants us to do.
a wayfarer’s notes 
The bombed house was my grandparents'. When I first arrived there in August '46, it had been repaired. The town of St Leonards-on-Sea wasn't intended as a target, but bombers returning from London made sure to get rid of any remaining payload before crossing the Channel back to Germany.
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..while I was reading this the news said, “..the only place the poor can turn to is pawn shops.” Could wanting be a symptom of desperation? The rich lost the most money, the obviousness of their greed is how much they think they need?
There is maintenance of sustenance but concepts of desire can make wanting pathological..
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I have a subscription to WIRED magazine. A long while ago, it seemed to be a good magazine that tracked interesting trends and interviewed interesting people.
Over time I renewed the subscription again and again when my daughter or other children sold subscriptions to assist with school funding of one kind or another. As a result I have had an ongoing subscription for several years.
In this time, the magazine has become more of a sales tool for new gadgets. It appears that pressure from their advertisers has re-directed the focus of the magazine to consumer driven topics.
For the last 2 years, when I receive one of these magazines, I start by ripping out all the advert pages that have no articles on either side. This leaves me with nothing but articles.
I am a bad consumer. I was once a very good one. I am bad, in the sense that I do not uphold my responsibilities in terms of purchasing the wants vs. the needs.
Part of this behavior comes from dissatisfaction with the products that are offered. I am not as enamored with the new gee-whiz gadgets that so many others seem to be unable to live without.
I have made too many purchases over the years that had no lasting power. They were either over-hyped, or broke too soon.
I have more interest in seeking out things in second hand shops that were made years ago. They are better quality and the reviews came in long ago. Easier to find the wheat through the chafe.
My Dad always bought a Chevy. He trusted the brand to deliver and was not disappointed. I have a Honda with 325,000 miles on it. I'd like a new car, but I am wary of them.
I am happy to be a good consumer of products designed and built with the customer in mind. Not so happy to consume only to keep a company alive that is only interested in profit and/or lining the pockets of it's executives.
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I like the way you've taken something I've oversimplified and brought it into reality. Neoliberalism has become a complicated political way of life. It is obvious that we cannot solve the current financial and political problems using the same techniques that got us into this mess. Time to throw the baby out with the bathwater and get a new baby. What that will be is up to us.
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I get a chill of pure terror when I hear people speaking of “fixing the economy so we can get back to normal.” “Normal” was never viable as a long term plan; only by sweeping under the rug the problems of ecology and the limiting barriers of resources could we have gone on such an unnatural binge.
It was never “normal” and now we need to face up to it.
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Love is not needy, or greedy.
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But V, love is whatever people who use the word say that it is. It's not a registered trade mark owned by those who consider themselves spiritually aware, who can dictate to the rest of the world what it means, just as PepsiCo would prosecute anyone misusing the name “Pepsicola”.
In many people's usage, “love” is certainly associated with neediness and greed. And in this mixed world they live alongside the mystics who, when they experience divine love, are able to live in poverty and openheartedness.
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Hayden, I'm so glad you said this. That thought was behind my writing of this post.
The stable solution to the world's problems must embrace an end to bingeing.
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“Time to throw the baby out with the bathwater and get a new baby. What that will be is up to us.”
Pauline, I am glad you approve of my post which is a baby out of yours.
I think Nature in its wisdom is not relying on us to conceive the new baby. It's taking things into its own hands: cruelly of course, but Nature is like that.
It's going to be up to us to feather the nest to make it less spiky.
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Charles, thanks for speaking on behalf of consumers, and not being in denial about it like some of us idealists.
You may be interested in a strange anomaly I heard on the radio news this morning. Second-hand cars are going up, new cars are going down, in short term, so that a company which specialises in car prices has noticed that in at least one case the same car can be bought more cheaply new than second hand.
It's a temporary blip of course, as car manufacturers & dealers can't go on discounting them for ever in order to tempt buyers.
Me, I go for quality, and seek out things that last for ever. My wife is winning a campaign to get me to throw away old frayed shirts though.
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Brad4d, do you mean the poor are pawning their valuable to get cash because they can't get credit elsewhere? Well I don't know if this is in order to satisfy wants or feed their kids.
We have here a top banker Sir Fred Goodwin who wrecked his bank RBS with the biggest loss in British corporate history but he resigned his job to get a pension of £700,000 for life, and refuses to give back any of it, despite becoming the most reviled man in Britain, deeply shocked at having the windows broken by protesters at his Edinburgh residence.
I don't know about US so much but over here (many blame Margaret Thatcher) the mentality of greed was made respectable and praised since some time in the Eighties; as if the money-motivation of entrepreneurs and speculators was somehow good for society as a whole. That doesn't worry me in itself so much as the possibility that people can sacrifice their inbuilt discrimination and common sense in order to harmonise with the zeitgeist.
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my dear vincent,
this is easily the best post you have ever written, in my opinion. you know much much more about economy than i previously thought (blame your modesty) and the good part is you know the 'philosophy' behind it. the best part though is to communicate it in this way. very impressive writing pal. very very nice.
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