Metastases of consumania

In traditional pre-capitalist era societies, power was purely authoritarian. God’s will or traditions were represented by a person (whether it was an egyptian pharaoh, a roman Emperor, or a tsar of russia), who ruled the society and the country based on those traditions.

However, as the market economy started developing, new power relations and laws appeared and finally, during the post-industrial era, turned these into a complex system of resultant powers – economic, political, informational, cultural and symbolic. An “impersonal field of power” appeared; it was hardly identified, but could have a profound impact upon a person. All this led to a situation when, at the beginning of the present millennium, impersonal power gained greater power over the personal.

As it is an inevitable consequence of a market economy it has so far aimed at searching for and saturating new markets. But as the number of markets is limited due to objective factors, its main purpose is crea-ting new needs (sometimes useless and pointless). A typical example of forming such “empty” needs is fashion, where the market capacity accounts for many billions of dollars. At the same time, the capacity of educational and cultural markets is significantly more limited.

Such needs can form a new lifestyle; completely different social connections and relations arise. We witness a deconstruction of general values and ethical norms. Traditional social cramps are being destroyed: the freedom from church, from family, from nationality, from traditions. Impersonal power only needs financial and labor resources to freely move around on a global scale. In order to enable this, a man as a labor unit has to get rid of any identity apart from a professional one: no religion, no nationality, no family, even no gender (in order to kill people’s sexuality completely, the bugaboo of sexual harassment was invented).

A person’s social status started changing through the lens of his or her consumer activeness, which is close to consumania. The essence of such consumania is the senseless automatic consumption of things whose utilitarian expediency is far behind their symbolic value. Things become attributes of success, social prestige and career growth.

Since consumania is, by its very nature, unlimited, such a way of life turns into a pursuit for more and more new false symbols of success, creating a sense of constant dissatisfaction (there always remain things that are yet to be consumed), unconscious anxiety, a fear of being left behind, to be out of fashion. In this way, the power of consumania limits a person’s freedom, restricting his self-realization to infinite growth of his consuming activity. This power increases the person’s disappointment about himself and the surrounding world that changes into social indifference, creating wild splashes of depression and blunt forms of schizophrenia.

Because the source of the disease cannot be identified by the consumer, it is not possible to treat it. Apparently, the person is bound to consume until his human nature is completely depleted and there is nothing to consume anymore. And only after the total impoverishment, when all natural resources have been used up, he will be able to refuse from the system of consumption in favor of the creative system (Jean Baudrillard).

Note: Natural disasters of the recent time (the typhoon in Thailand, the hurricanes Catherine and Rita, the earthquake in Pakistan) accelerate entropy processes, instill hope that, being faced with the threat of total depletion, people will more quickly pass on from an exploitative to a creative way of life.