I was thinking about this when I read a very insightful post, "The Smart Growth Manifesto", by Umair Haque. No doubt kids are influenced by their television viewing and the marketing that saturate their lives. But these are just manifestations of the consumerist worldview that has shaped not only economic models and business strategy but also our social constructs. It informs the policies our government is crafting to cope with the current meltdown, and the public's perception of them. How else can stimulus and bailout become conflated in peoples' minds, unless stimulus is understood to be another form of pay-out? There seems to be little comprehension in our current thinking of the difference between income and outcome, and hence no understanding why a person would not want the chance to be one of the top sliver of society who own most of the society's wealth. According to JD Trout, we have this capacity to use our empathy selectively as long as we don't have to confront it:
Why do you think people tend to feel more empathy for a puppy with a hurt paw than for a person without health insurance?
Part of the reason is banal. Ease of visualization. The person without health care is likely to appear as a statistic, one among 50 million others.
Considering what 'smart growth' might look like when applied to your own business is both challenging and liberating. Successful outcomes don't require that you run your business as a philanthropy. But it does mean putting relationships (with customers, employees, suppliers) front and center, and using financials as the scorecards they are to run the business responsibly. It requires thinking about the investments we make -- in all of those relationships -- and not about consuming. I work in the retail sector: this almost sounds heretical. So be it. If we continue to use a consumption model, we can only expect remorse for allowing business to eat itself.
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1 comment:
Good post, Dionne. It's difficult to get one's mind around the way we've internalized the consumerist (as opposed to 'consumer') model we as a society have embraced for so long, and how that model has contributed to the mess we're in. It's difficult, for me, at least, because we are stuck with the basic human condition on the one hand, i.e., that we must indeed consume to live. And that requires that businesses like Weekends Only be there in some fashion, to facilitate that requirement i.e. I need furniture to sit on and sleep on, etc. I can't go to North Carolina or wherever every time I need a new chair. On the other hand, as the Smart Growth article points out, consumption for consumption's sake, or more to the point, for the sake of some vague idea of 'growth' is clearly a dead-end street in a world of (real or imagined) resource scarcity. On yet another hand, growth, to some degree and in some fashion, is probably a positive value in many, if not most instances, as it facilitates job creation and continuity. And so, yes, this is a huge set of concepts and this is precisely the time to begin to examine them. But where to start? The four pillars of smart growth outlined in the article seemed a little vague to me, but I think it's a good start. I think also that your idea of connecting the concepts of growth and consumerism (as opposed to consumption) to the question of how these memes have become so internalized as to be seen as somehow fundamental or second nature is an important one. If we don't look at how the society (increasingly globally) sees and interacts and is affected by these concepts, we really stand no chance of articulating an alternative route through the morass we find ourselves in and into the next phase, a more humane and circumspect capitalist model.
Regards,
Theo
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