Dame Fashion And Lord Mammon Are Dictating Our Choices And Devastating Our Planet

The mammoth mountain created at our local landfill (upper left of the photo) is a monument to our addiction to having ever more of the latest and best. 

One of our problems in America is that we have an enormous capacity for producing goods but a limited number of consumers to buy them. So we’ve developed a massive advertising industry aimed at persuading us to buy more and more of what we don’t need and at a level our planet could never sustain for its billions of its inhabitants.

One way Madison Avenue addresses this first world problem is to convince us to constantly upgrade, add to, and/or replace what we currently have in order to keep up with whatever is considered the latest and the best--all in an effort to avoid appearing dated and out of fashion. This has long been true when it comes to our wardrobes, but it has become equally so when it comes to our electronic equipment, our vehicles and in the ways we upgrade and decorate our homes. And inevitably all of our refurnishing, refurbishing and upgrading will have to be redone when the next latest trend replaces the current one.  

Christopher Decker, in a piece published in the Wall Street Journal called “Selling Desire, Why Chastity is Bad for Business," notes that there was a time when consumers primarily made purchases based on the durability and cost of a product. But a consumer society has to reverse these old fashioned values, Decker notes, because if business is to succeed and the economy thrive, we need to be convinced that desires alone are sufficient reasons to buy things--and that these desires must be satisfied now, even if we have to max out our credit cards to do so. 

Thus the very notion of "chastity" has to go, he says, since it represents a mindset that runs counter to a throwaway consumer culture that urges us to get our our Visa cards to buy and use stuff with abandonment. And then the things we can no longer use, or which don't pass the current fashion test, we simply discard, sell at a yard sale, drop off at a local thrift store, or send to the landfill.

“The love of money (and what money can buy) is the root of all kinds of evil,” we are told, and our devotion to Mammon has become the primary religion of our time. 

And its destroying our planet.