Passage 3 Consumer Hell
消費(fèi)主義與反消費(fèi)主義 《衛(wèi)報(bào)》
[00:01]After this 60-year feeding frenzy, Earth itself has become disposable.
[00:09]Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions
[00:15]that sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail
[00:22]by how well they make money go round, regardless of
[00:26]whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it
[00:31]as a sacred duty to encourage the country's most disgustful spectacle:
[00:39]the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night,
[00:44]then stamped into the shops, elbow,
[00:48]trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk.
[00:55]The madder the riot, the greater the triumph of economic management.
[01:02]The British government is now split over product placement
[01:07]in television programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw,
[01:15]the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers,
[01:21]and advertisements will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to discover.
[01:29]Though we know they aren't the same, we can't help mixing growth and wellbeing.
[01:36]GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living.
[01:43]Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption
[01:51]by the wealthy improves the lot of the world's poor.
[01:56]Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem
[02:01]with gross domestic product is the gross bit.
[02:05]There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted
[02:12]as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from,
[02:19]social good. A train crash which generates ?1bn worth of track repairs,
[02:27]medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure to be as beneficial
[02:36]as an uninterrupted service which generates 1bn in ticket sales.
[02:42]Most important, no deduction is made to account
[02:47]for the depreciation of natural capital.
[02:51]You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution.
[02:56]But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system:
[03:02]it permeates every aspect of our lives.
[03:08]Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us
[03:13]in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the "I'm not a plastic bag",
[03:20]or like the profitable new books on how to live without money.
[03:25]At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to withdraw,
[03:31]but that didn't work.
[03:33]Instead they used "the slower but infinitely surer methods" of conditioning:
[03:39]immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood.
[03:45]A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.
[03:51]This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme:
[03:57]the Earth itself becomes disposable.
[04:00]This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles
[04:06]than any restraint on pointless spending.
[04:09]That we might hop from one planet to another,
[04:13]consuming their resources then moving on,
[04:16]is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect
[04:22]than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
[04:27]So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness
[04:32]and wellbeing rather than growth? We might come together
[04:37]for occasional rallies and marches,
[04:40]but as soon as we start discussing alternatives,
[04:44]solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism.
