By Aryeh Ronay
Consumer culture is part and parcel of our modern civilization. There are 7-11’s everywhere from Thailand to Alaska, Coca-Cola in the Amazon, Siberia and Tahiti, and it’s hard to even imagine the world without the consumerist ethos.
Yet, a growing movement has started to push against consumption, against the way advertising pollutes our minds and plastic pollutes our oceans, towards a way of life defined by meaningful connection, a relationship with nature, and a rejection of consuming as a primary way of being.
Consumerism Versus Anti Consumerism
Human life is all too often defined, measured, summarized, or reduced to economic life. Happiness is too often seen as a function of material well being or an affluent or easy lifestyle as opposed to fulfillment in non-material ways.
Who we are is defined by what we consume, what we watch and what we buy. And we even commodify ourselves: social media has become one of the biggest ways we interact with each other, where other people ‘consume your content’ instead of actually being with you in real life.
Wall Street is one of the centers of modern consumerism, which is why it was the site of one of the major protests of our time: “Occupy Wall Street.” Protesters gathered to rise against the disproportionate concentration of wealth in the hands of 1% of the population and the corruption and poverty that came with this inequality in consumption.
Anti-consumerism is a response to an economics that impoverishes humanity and the planet alike, as energy is poured into producing things people don’t need, indifferent to the environmental and social costs that come with this waste of resources.
Consumerism Via Advertising
Advertising has become ubiquitous today, leading to more than one movement to ban billboards in certain cities and other efforts to curtail the influence of capitalism and materialism on society. Psychologists are concerned about how advertising is affecting children, with 12 billion dollars alone being spent annually on ads targeting children.
Moreover, advertising is often subliminal, with product placement being used to normalize lifestyles based on satisfaction through possessions and through specific products and services. In June of 2021, a video went viral of the famous soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo removing coke bottles that had been placed in front of him for a press conference, and instead holding up a bottle of water.
Celebrities are often used to promote harmful products and so they also have a great potential for influencing consumers to live a more environmental lifestyle, reduce waste and heal the earth.
Consumerism Via Social Media
Since so much of our society and economy has shifted from in-person to online, so has a lot of advertising. Social media, which today is one of the main tools for communication, offers many resources for every advertiser looking to grow their business and for every website looking to make money off of the personal details of their consumers.
Consumers love using these free and addictive resources, but as the saying goes, “if it’s free, you’re probably the product.” Recent movies like The Social Dilemma show how social media companies take advantage of our data to influence our consumption patterns, our relationships and even to influence our political leanings.
In the U.S., up to 72% of adults use social media, and so it’s important to consider how these platforms are currently being used to subtly influence consumer behavior. We can also recognize the powerful powerful potential of these websites for fighting pollution, climate change and poverty.
The global influence of social media could be utilized to create a more sustainable planet, but responsible individuals from different countries and businesses will need to work together to clarify the values and message that people need to hear to shift their ideas toward sustainable growth.
Consumerism and Religion
Many religious holidays are full of consumerism, for example Christmas and Chanukah have become synonymous with shopping and exchanging material items. Others believe that consumerism itself has become a religion, with shopping malls replacing churches, CEOs serving as bishops and advertising the new evangelism.
On the other hand, religions can also play a major role in cultivating anti-consumerism, as religions work to maximize human happiness based on spiritual instead of material growth. Here we’ll explore a few religious ideas on anti-consumerism.
Anti Consumerism In Judaism
Commenting on a verse in the book of Deuteronomy, Rabbi Yuval Cherlow makes the following observation in the forthcoming Eco Bible Volume 2, “The earth testifies to how we live our lives. The failure to protect the environment exposes a society driven by consumerism and greed, one that knows little fulfillment and fails to restrain itself from exhausting the pleasures of this world. A society that destroys the environment lacks sensitivity for future generations. It espouses the philosophy that the prophet Isaiah critiqued—“eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die”—while abandoning its children and grandchildren to an unknown future.”
Judaism is not against consumption, but believes it must be moderated so we don’t consume too much. We find in Judaism the laws of the Sabbath in which not just work is stopped, but also economic activity. This is a powerful method of anti-consumerism, observing a day each week in which nothing is bought or sold.
Anti Consumerism In Christianity
According to William Schweiker as quoted in CONSUMERISM AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS, “the love of God . . . can limit the desire for acquisition precisely because what is desired exceeds objectification.” In Christianity, there is a focus on God over the things of the world, summarized in the verse, “don’t love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in them” (1 John 2:15).
According to Schweiker, Christians are called to love God, who is beyond objectification or acquisition, and this is powerful path to anti-consumerism.
Anti Consumerism In Islam
Yusuf Al-Khabbaz writes in Islam, consumerism and the environmental crisis about the concept of “zuhd” in Islamic ethics, which refers to “living with the real necessities of life.” Al-Khabbaz describes consumerism as part of a larger process of colonialism, that manifests not just in shopping but also in school, which teaches children “to be passive, to seek only what is being offered by the system, but never to explore new possibilities by moving outside that narrow structure, which is the real tragedy of consumerism.”
Al-Khabbaz proposes new forms of schooling and production as antidotes to consumerism as well as leveraging of Muslim buying-power to influence suppliers and, similar to Buddhism, breaking out of the consumerism spell.
Anti Consumerism In Buddhism
According to Bobbi Patterson as quoted in Combatting consumerism with Buddhist principles, “All of us are caught in this dynamic of consuming, and we think it will create a self, it will make us happy… But none of us gets a pass from the suffering we set up for ourselves in trying to be happy through the things we consume, without mindfulness.”
According to Buddhist philosophy, we are constantly trying to acquire material goods to find ourselves, but the search for ourselves can only be fulfilled through mindfulness. Awareness of breath is used as a powerful tool to become aware in the present moment and to break the spell of consumerism.
With religions working together, each drawing upon their communities and traditions to galvanize change, we can create a more sustainable world. We can shift our focus from consumption to spiritual growth and from stuff to relationships.
The stories we tell in our religions will shape the future of our society. Let’s tell the story of how we overcame an addiction to consumption and saved our planet.
* Featured image source
