Eddie, 10/30

While “buy buy buy” is the staple of our modern consumerism-driven capitalist society, I for one do not find it an especially surprising phenomenon.

Assuming that the theory of evolution is at least a little correct, our ancestors lived in the wild. There, people had to forage. The more they gathered, the least likely they are to perish in the cold of the winter. Even if we avoid the contestable question that people could identify characteristics in mates who could forage more, there is still the simple fact that people who got less stuff died more often. Individuals, families and subsequently clans who won more necessities, thus, garnered more success in nature and became the majority in numbers. In other words, we are all genetically predisposed to piling up stuff.

Though if we are descendants of those food-hording cavemen, then why are we not inclined to take our paychecks to Publix and clean their isles of creamed corn and Wonderbread? Because such an idea is a gross extrapolation of the mechanism of foraging, We do not simply collect. We are driven to obtain items which are of value to us. Our instinct is to get things which are potentially valuable or functional to us in the future. It is that potential which intices mothers to keep empty shoeboxes and fathers to drag old machines home from the dumpster. Objects intrigue us, usually, because they hold a promise of some form of useful application and that promise is how companies make us “buy buy buy.”

But with the idea that usefulness makes us buy, we are introduced to the concept that some things are more useful than others. Otherwise, we would be reduced to randomly buying whatever we see and be hopelessly unable to decide what we ‘want’ to buy. This ability to discern the usefulness of items is natural selection in our modern society. We are all familiar with the concept of taste. While describing what is tasteful is dreadfully hard, we can all agree that people with taste, at the very least, seem more knowledgeable than someone without. A person who spends four thousand dollars at Walmart on cheese and ham sounds a lot less flattering than someone who knows how to build a capable home theater system with his four thousand. I, for one, would choose the Sennheiser guy as my friend and not the Kraft guy. It is this looming, arbitrary and shapeless notion of “taste” which causes some people to fit more into society than others. Those who are less adept to buying are familiar with Foucault’s description of marginalizing and isolation.

I wish to take this chance here to state my belief in the role and responsibility of one educated in theories of culture. If we now know and agree that we are inclined to buy and are defined by such a mode of consumption, it falls upon us to consider what is beyond buying. What is the alternative to consumerism? How might we exist outside of buying stuff and having people buy our stuff? Can we even choose to not want to buy? Pondering those questions, I came to the chilling realization that I do not, currently, know what is outside the box. That bothers me, and I hope it bothers you too. We are trapped in “buy buy buy.” We must free ourselves.