To be honest it’s difficult for me to describe what I mean when I say consumerism. But getting people goods they need is not in and of itself consumerism. Consumerism is like the military industrial complex. It creates problems to feed a bloated production machine that consumes more and more because it benefits those in charge of the whole thing. And so consumerism leads our culture to believe the person with the new watch is cool and we all believe we must work day in and day out to compete in an endless game of consumption.
That is very different than, say, manufacturing electrical transformers and cabling so a new town can have electricity. In the middle the line is not clear but we can focus at first on the extents.
They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades. I see the process you describe, despite it's perceived but necessary inefficiency, as resulting in a system that delivers the most progress and the most resiliency. There's a reason that self-driving cars are being invented in one place and not another. The driving force behind that reason is much more important to preserve than any incidental waste or excess along the way.
> They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades.
The soviet system was an authoritarian one and I am proposing a free market solution. I am basically just saying people can save money if they band together and buy machines which provide for their basic needs. But also it would all be open source, and like software it would be updated as needed.
Actually the example with cars was just an attempt to explain consumerism. I might as well just paste this definition in to this comment like I just did elsewhere.
"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions."
given this universal truth, the question isn't 'how do we limit our wants, and our desire to induce others' wants to fuel our own wants?', but rather 'how do we repurpose this innate desire for the greatest collective good?' capitalism tries to provide one answer: redirect greed into productive drive by rewarding economic novelty and efficiency. however, even that idealism has been subverted by the political economy and the complex interactions between government and business, to the detriment of social harmony.
[0]: note that what we all really want is to be at the top of the monkey pile, and everything you're talking about are various proxies for how to tell where we are in the pile. we're never going to overcome that with solutions like 'end consumerism'. you're literally working against human nature with that line of thinking.
A LOT of that came from received culture growing up in California as a boy in the 1990's. I no longer want to be at the top of a pile of monkeys. I want my daily labor to support others in my community (broadly) rather than working to enrich a few people who will own everything and control our economy.
I think if you grow up in a society that tells everyone "greed is good" then you're going to think being greedy is human nature, but actually anthropologists know that societies have again and again existed based on mutual support of one another. I am simply suggesting we drop this "greed is good" mantra and focus on helping one another. And I think it can be more economically efficient when you value each person's life more or less equally.
