THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER I - WHAT IS THE MEANING OF CONSUMPTION?

albertotang (46)in #money • 6 years ago (edited)

The drive for profit is one of the great passions of the soul, an irrational desire that goes beyond survival, security or pleasure. The desire to possess is something primary, something that is there, of course! It has cultural nuances, and at certain times in history it has been repressed or controlled as well as in others it has been encouraged.

While in much of the Middle Ages poverty was what religion and dominant ideologies encouraged as a moral ideal, with the rise of capitalism the idea of the accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of capital emerged as a virtue.

Then the same drive is having a change throughout the history of humanity, although human nature is more or less the same. We have emotional patterns that are roughly the same from the fifth century BC, or from the same Neolithic period. We observe how the same passion is having different expressions and going up and down and that is giving us the peculiarities of time, because they are times that are dominated by one or another passion.

Given that the current world could be divided, in a schematic way, in developed countries, developing countries and countries immersed in poverty, we are establishing differences in paradigms of accumulation of wealth.

This drive, therefore, differs, is no longer the same, for example, in the highly developed countries, in the developing countries and in the absolutely impoverished countries where, if there is any criterion of wealth, it would be, for example, access to drinking water or to basic goods, because according to UN figures, approximately one billion people live on less than one dollar a day, two billion with less than two dollars, and 1.5 billion people do not have access to basic services elementals such as drinking water.

And in the most extreme levels of poverty you even see greed as something that leads human beings to want to accumulate, to want to possess and exhibit symbols of wealth.

A search for status by unified people in poverty. A false and illusory status and a deep poverty, a poverty of the soul.

I consume then I exist vs. I must now exist

Consumption as a new behavioral disposition in the human being, which belongs to the rich as well as the poor, to rich countries and to rich societies as well as to poor countries and poor societies. It is a very important mode of human expression today, to which we must give a particular psychological reading to really understand its significance in the contemporary being.

I think there is a certain awareness in this absolutely globalized society about consumption, especially selective consumption. That is to say, we have gone from a practically compulsive consumerism in the 80s and a large part of the 90s to a selective consumption, that is, of mere products, we have gone on to acquire brands and therefore to identify with brands.

However, in Latin America there is a kind of mixture of genetics and cultures, according to which, for example, does not have that propensity that Anglo-Saxon countries have to the realization of capitalism.

The Latin American is a person much more given to the collective, to the family, to the friends, to the others, to the broad group. He is not possessive, although if he is interested in consuming, he does not tend to do so with the desire to accumulate but to distribute and spend.

That makes the difference, because capitalism is formed in the typical image that Weber paints us in the Protestant ethic: the individual is methodical, gets up early, works all day, does not spend anything and accumulates.

Possessive Individualism

The individual is the individual, particular being that possesses and that through this possession is that it achieves an identity. During the conquest and the colony, there was a historical moment in which Spain was the most powerful country in the world. It was said that in the empire of Charles V the sun never set because it embraced from the Philippines to America. Then the Spanish empire had all the conditions to be predominantly capitalist and in fact it was not, it was England, the first of them.

The practice of Habsburg Spain, is fundamentally mercantilist, was never an economy of production, but an economy of exploitation, I mean, the idea of the time was not to come to America to make productive instances but to appropriate the wealth.

This is how the evolutionary process of Western man has been largely concretized from a psychology where the individual belonged and was oriented through tradition, since it belonged to the family, the clan, the group, the city, etc. This was a collective psychology oriented to social construction, although that same evolutionary process contemplated, at the same time, the construction of an individual self.

This process is solidifying in a world that was animated, where the stones, the trees, the mountains had a spirit, the village had a life; It is what some anthropologists used to call the Law of Participation, where one participated a little bit of other beings and there were no clear limits between one's individuality, things and people.

Then there was in the West an evolutionary process of many centuries of construction of individuality, where the soul was removed from the universe of others, of things and was concentrated in the human being and thus we became the only ones who had a soul, we became individuals clearly separated from the natural universe, from the animal universe; that process reaches its climax in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

From there, we witness again as an animation of the world, where limits and individuality are no longer so clear, and all the psychic energy that is concentrated in the individual from now on to the world begins to flow again. The consumption process has to do a bit with that psychological transformation.

By immanent necessity of the growth of the new economies, they begin to establish rules of the game for the globalization, in which the States have to be circumscribed to a quantity of globalizing specifications, because this stage of capitalism coincides with the technological and computer expansion. Historical moment in which the State has lost substantial weight in relation to large companies and the expansion needs of the globalization process.

The individual lives between being a citizen before the State and a consumer before the market economy. When the State loses its preponderance, the citizen, therefore, is left helpless.

Then, when the State loses its functions or when it is diluted or weakened, the citizen begins to build his own existence, takes charge of himself and in that existence he builds, as a consumer first of all needs that the State previously provided him .

Thus we have gone from the citizen to the consumer of basic needs as a private insurance for his family, on the one hand, and on the other we see the conformation of selective consumers where the product no longer prevails but the brand.

The capitalist production gave the possibility of providing a great diversity of objects that could or offered the possibility of differentiating the way to satisfy the same needs that we all have, the need to eat or the need for security.

Consumption becomes your main language

The interesting thing about the phenomenon of consumption is that objects become a coin of psychological exchange. The object acquires a symbolic value, through which you will begin a psychological exchange between your individuality and the world. And it is there where the consumption acquires that complexity that it has nowadays, because the objects end up taking characteristics of personality and the personalities end up acquiring characteristics of the thing.

Consumption has become the fundamental language of human being's exchange with society. The object of consumption is a currency of exchange between the individual and the world. And, then, that object of change acquires a symbolic value of such magnitude that it begins to have a practically autonomous existence, because the object of consumption no longer represents the object itself, but becomes a total experience, and what the individual will acquire through the object of consumption, is not a specific object, but an exchange of messages with the other person, with respect to who he is, what are their interests, what are their activities or what is their identity as a person. And all this will be a language as underlying, silent, through the object, without us having to express it.

We do not consume to simply satisfy a need, we are consuming to talk to the world, with other people, and we relate to other people through that object of consumption.

In marketing techniques, for example, lifestyle stratifications are nowadays made. From the point of view of nineteenth-century Western individualism, we could obviously say that there is a current weakness of the self, of individualism, of the construction of an autonomous self, totally isolated. And in that sense now and again if there is a need for belonging, there is a stronger weight of the collective than of that autonomous individual of the nineteenth century; in that sense, it would be a weakness. But, on the other hand, we could simply see it as a pattern of difference, although always the individual has sought to belong.

The difference is that now there is a currency that is the object of consumption. In short, before you wanted to be a gentleman, then you came and you ascribed yourself to be a gentleman. Today you get belonging to the order of knights, via the consumption of certain objects that will tell you that you are a knight of the order of such thing.

Then, the object is acting as a mediator, it has become a transitional symbolic object between the human being and the world as an expression of exchange between the two. So what happens ?: Consumption becomes your main language, your main means. It is as if through the connection with objects is that people have the experience of life. So, there is a weakening in the sense that the experience of life is mediated by an object.

But, the other way as we could also see it is perhaps as in a very unconscious connection through the object with the outside world, where we are trying to connect with the outside and, failing to do so consciously and individually, we do mediated through objects, right?

In that detour, the objects begin to form a world of signs that are there marking, touching complexes, needs, motivations, emotions. That world of exhibits suddenly takes autonomy, like the same money. Money suddenly comes between the object and the buyer and that money at a certain moment takes autonomy over everything.

I believe that the object of consumption has been a bit like that; It replaces that need to see the world through symbols encoded in those objects, it became a necessity in itself.

So what is the meaning of consumption?