“Loosen the chains that bind us to a dysfunctional prison of our own making”. Tim Jackson on getting beyond consumerism
We are long-term fans of Tim Jackson’s work at CUSP - the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity. His new book, Post Growth: Life After Capitalism has been generating some great discussions and coverage over the last few months, and we collate some of it here.
First, an extract from a review of the book from Brave New Europe, showing some of its subtleties:
The attempt of Degrowth/Post Growth authors to convince that there is a good life beyond growth often seems like spiritual proselytising: the promise of a better future after the death of secular consumerism. This process demands self-reflection and that is anathema for consumerism.
As Jackson points out later in the book, this has been one of the positive aspects of the repeated lockdowns. Some people, cut off from the hectic frenzy of consumerism, have had time to do just this.
Jackson brings in an element that maybe makes more sense than the intangible good life through abstention, which is balance. Balance is a term that also has positive, if not an existential, connotation. For Jackson to define balance it is a question of addressing “the question of limits on the one hand; and the nature of our aspirations for the good life on the other.”
He does an excellent job of explaining this: “More is only better when there is not enough. When there is already an excess, it only serves to make things worse.” He illustrates this among other things with how capitalism has undermined our perception of nutrition resulting in massive obesity, which is a pandemic itself.
Balance necessitates setting limits, but of course capitalism only does so for others and in its own interests. Its credo with regard to national budgets has been that you cannot spend what you do not have, money does not grow on trees, we are burdening our children with debt. However during the Great Financial Crisis trillions of dollars were made available to save Wall Street.
This repeated itself with the onset of the current pandemic. During austerity while governments hectored their citizens to “tighten their belts”, they radically reduced taxes for corporations and the rich. Somehow money is always there for capitalist interests, but not for stopping climate change or restoring our health, education, and public transport systems, just to name a few.
As Jackson however himself clarifies “Power asymmetry is a poor place from which to introduce moral imperatives that appear to limit people’s opportunities” even if economic and material growth are not the same.
From above: “The question of planetary limits is real, we cannot deny them. But these limits are the root to the limitless…where our creativity can thrive without limits & we can be better human beings.” (Tim begins 24.25)
This discussion is with the social theorist William Davies for his Goldsmiths University podcast, PERC
And below is an excerpt from the excerpt of the PostGrowth book, taken from Fast Company magazine:
Consumerism’s most glittering prize is the promise of immortality itself: an earthly paradise of never wanting, never needing, never lacking for anything imagination can dream of. “The human animal is a beast that dies. And if he’s got money, he buys and buys and buys,” says Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “And I think the reason he buys everything he can is that in the back of his mind is the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting.”
Suddenly, we find ourselves in the grip of a powerful social logic. Economic structure on the one hand and human psyche on the other bind us into an “iron cage” of consumerism.
The first crack in the shiny surface appears with the realization that the system itself is rooted in anxiety. The economist Adam Smith called this the desire to live “a life without shame.” Shame magnifies consumer needs. Advertisers know this only too well. They play on the power of misplaced shame. “What does your car (house, holiday, laptop, toilet roll . . .) say about you?” they ask, in ever more beguiling ways.
In Smith’s day, a relatively modest set of goods could stave off social shame. He talked about the need for a simple linen shirt, “the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” Nowadays, the must-have basket of necessary goods has expanded massively, as indeed it has to do for the system to continue to work. Fast cars, fast food, fast sex, fast fashion. If we ever stop coveting the fruits of desire, the economy starts to fail. Unemployment rises. Instability beckons.
And this is precisely why anxiety must tip over into outright dissatisfaction if capitalism is to survive. Consumerism must promise paradise. But it must systematically fail to deliver it. It must fail us, not occasionally, as psychologists suggest, but repeatedly. Endlessly invoking desire. Relentlessly delivering disillusion. The success of consumer society lies not in meeting our needs but in its spectacular ability to continually disappoint us.
This might seem at first like a dark and hopeless conclusion. I don’t believe it is. It’s an essential recognition that consumerism is, and always was, a social construct. A necessary element in a story that is no more real than the tooth fairy. A fanciful but unfulfilling dream sold to us by the architects of desire in order to perpetuate the engine of growth. A historical cul-de-sac that has led us perilously close to disaster. But those lessons may still save us.
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,” wrote Maya Angelou. “But if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” As we stumble warily out of lockdown, searching for recovery and struggling to make sense of the economists’ confusing prognostications, we would do well to heed the lessons learned, not just through this pandemic, but from previous crises and from earlier recoveries.
Hitching our wagons once again to the myth of eternal growth is a surefire recipe for disaster. Consumerism degrades the environment. It divides us from each other. Ultimately, it undermines the happiness it promises to deliver. But to recognize this failing is to loosen the chains that bind us to a dysfunctional prison of our own making. From here we can begin to understand both why consumerism must eventually fall, and how to replace it.