Why we're in this mess

How the system gets us

From "The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard"
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

The average US person consumes 2x as much as they did 50 years ago. Back in our grandparents' time, she says, stewardship. resourcefulness and thrift were valued. I noticed that myself when comparing the way my grandparents lived to the way we live today- canning and saving and using everything. Some of that frugality trickled down through my own parents, which probably allows me to see things this way. All this wastefulness was considered sinful just a couple generations ago.

For all the stuff we take home, 1 percent of the total materials that flow through the system (from extraction of raw materials to production to retail to home to landfill) is still in use 6 months later. There was a major shift after World War II because industry wanted to keep up the wartime boom. And retail analyst Victor Le Beau (sp?) summed it up thus:

"Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."

And it was around this time that planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence became standard. Industrial design journals from the 1950s talk openly about how fast they can make products break and still retain consumer confidence.

Other statistics: National happiness peaked in the 1950s. We now work more and have less leisure time than any time since feudal society. The average home size has doubled since the 1970s. The average person produces 4.5 pounds of garbage a day, two times as much as 30 years ago. For every garbage can of waste we take out of our houses, the equivalent of 70 cans of waste were filled upstream in production of those goods.


And the system is self-sustaining

There's an interview with a former member of the British Parliament, Tony Benn that appears in the movie "Sicko" (2007) by Michael Moore.

Tony Benn: "What democracy did was to give the poor the vote and it moved power from the marketplace to the polling station, from the wallet to the ballot." And he states that the reason Britain adopted national health insurance after World War II was because they realized that "If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.... I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world, far more revolutionary than socialist ideas.... Because if you have power, you use it to meet the needs of you and your community.... And if you're shackled with debt you don't have a freedom to choose."

Michael Moore: "It benefits the system if the average working person is shackled with debt."

Tony Benn: "Because people in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote.... If the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people who represented their interests it would be a democratic revolution. So they don't want it to happen. So keeping people hopeless and pessimistic.... See I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all, frighten people. And secondly, demoralize them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern, and I think there's an element in the thinking of some people- we don't want people to be educated, healthy and confident because they would get out of control. The top 1 percent of the world's population owns 80 percent of the world's wealth. It's incredible that people put up with it but they're poor, they're demoralized, they're frightened and they think perhaps the safest thing to do is take orders and hope for the best."


So we're unhappy. We're scared. We recognize that the whole thing is a house of cards. Just one thing happens- an auto accident, an illness, a fire- and our whole illusion of happiness is gone. We can't make a living. We can't pay the bills. The house is gone, the cars, our friends... There is no safety net. We've watched enough others go through it and we are glad it was them and not us. But yet, we've been convinced it would be too expensive for us, too much out of our pocket to have a national safety net. Welfare mothers would take advantage of it and there wouldn't be enough of our hard-earned money left for us.

Better that we have as much spare change as possible to buy more stuff and keep the free market spinning 'round, because that's where our paychecks come from after all.