The Education of Axel Heyst

[suomalainen]

When I say “there is an out” (to consumerism) I’m talking about the multigenerational project of cultivating the successor cultures to the current arrangement that will emerge over the next several centuries.

Maybe if you take the humans out and leave the planet to TSLA's AI.

One of my desires/visions for these future societies is that they will not be based on the logic of consumerism, because I think consumerism is a bad deal for most forms of life.

Define consumerism. By definition, life (of any description) requires consumption of resources. Any nature documentary talks about competition for mates and resources, regardless of the species. What else is life? This is why I say there is no out. The only out is if you remove biology.

I'm not banging on you for your high-falutin' thoughts. I just think you're being way too generous to future humans.

One reason that it’s basically impossible to fully decouple one’s lifestyle from consumerism is that you need the full support of societal infrastructure, and that doesn’t exist right now. That’s why I give a shit about the future successor cultures that will possess such an infrastructure! And this infrastructure won’t just fall out of the sky into the middle of an abandoned strip mall.

Is it just malls that is consumerism? What about mining ore, smelting it, making alloys and forging tools like an ax and a saw and "building your own house." Is that consumerist? To buy just the ax and the saw because you can't do the mining and smelting and forging on your own?

“demonstration of a good life at 90% energy/resource reduction from western baseline.” ... After that it’s something like “living off solar income and 95% of materials from industrial salvage”. I’m just throwing out numbers here as a hand wave in the general direction I think is a good idea, to give my sense of the shape of the transition. There’s a lot more to it than just energy and materials of course, and I’m just this dumb guy who is probably wrong about what it’ll look like anyway.

What makes it anti-consumerist? An absolutist would say zero %, no? So if you're not an absolutist, it's not really "anti-"consumerist? It's ... minimal consumerism? Not to speak for @7, but this is where my thoughts wandered as I read the exchange between you two.

[AxelHeyst]

Define consumerism.

Okay:

Consumerism is an economic and social system where the acquisition of goods and services is a primary goal, even beyond what is necessary for survival.

and

Consumerism is a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status.[1]

I am against consumption as a social and political organization principle and goal, and the internalized belief that consumption/spending money is *the* problem-solving method for living a good life (and all other problems one may face, for that matter).

I am not anti-heterotrophy:

A consumer in a food chain is a living creature that eats organisms from a different population.

...which is what you're referring to when you say:

By definition, life (of any description) requires consumption of resources. Any nature documentary talks about competition for mates and resources, regardless of the species. What else is life? This is why I say there is no out. The only out is if you remove biology.

Similar word, very different definitions and meanings! It's that -ism that does the trick, in the "doctrine or theory" definition of the word ending.

Is it just malls that is consumerism? What about mining ore, smelting it, making alloys and forging tools like an ax and a saw and "building your own house." Is that consumerist? To buy just the ax and the saw because you can't do the mining and smelting and forging on your own?

What makes it anti-consumerist? An absolutist would say zero %, no? So if you're not an absolutist, it's not really "anti-"consumerist? It's ... minimal consumerism? Not to speak for @7, but this is where my thoughts wandered as I read the exchange between you two.

My clarification of consumerism vs. heterotrophy obviates the need for a response to these questions, right?

[jacob]

Define consumerism.

Consumerism is not the same as consuming. Consumerism is the idea that increasing consumption beyond survival needs and indeed beyond previous levels of consumption is always a good idea both for the consumer (customer) and the producer (seller or industry). Being a complex cultural phenomena (ritual even: "your first car", "your first mortgage", ...), consumerism is strongly tied into how people value themselves and others. In a culture dominated by consumerism status is in a very real sense what you own or what you can afford (also see "conspicuous consumerism").

This is not a universal value though. The American Dream used to be about democracy, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but in its current form it's more about achieving certain consumerist milestones: owning a suburban home with a picket fence, a luxury car or three in the garage, and becoming a millionaire. If you have that, you have effectively "made it". Other traditional status alternatives might be in hailing from an "old family who has lived in the valley for generations". Status might also be tied to a position in society e.g. vicar, professor, or captain in the military.

It's not entirely certain what postconsumerist values will be. They often very much rest on having achieved a level of consumerism which is "good enough" but then realizing and accepting the "hedonic adaption" folly of chasing more goods. In the circles I travel, status is generally achieved by being an "interesting" person or perhaps more accurately having interesting ideas to share. Bohemian academic if you will. It's clearly not the only form of status. However, what is clear is that traditional markers like a big house, a high NW, or lots of stuff are not met with admiration but rather with an attitude of "IDC but good for you".

[suomalainen]

Understood-ish. As a lawyer, the squishy definition of "necessary for survival" is unsatisfying as is the grandfathering of "traditional displays of status", given that what is necessary is left as an exercise for the reader rather than objectively defined. As a result, I guess I will still cast my lot with @7 and suggest that "anti-consumerist lifestyle design" is an oxymoron.

Maybe another way to think of it is in the heterotrophy taxonomy. Some species only eat and mate, right? Others have playtime? Perhaps the distinction is that some people think spending resources on playtime is wasteful (i.e., "consumerist") while others do not? But in any event, if you're a member of a species with playtime and you have to do something with it, you're inevitably going to play with other things? And wastefully kill them / use them / consume them? Like a cat killing a mouse for fun?

[jacob]

Understood-ish. As a lawyer, the squishy definition of "necessary for survival" [...]

Food, clothing, shelter.

However, talking about how many pants that comprises is missing the forest for the trees. What's important in terms of the definition of consumerism is not the degree but the motivation. Consumerism means that the motivation is simply to consume more for the sake of consuming more. With consumerism, consumption is both the means and the end. If, say, the goal was military conquest or space exploration or establishing a society where democracy and liberty allowed the pursuit of happiness necessitated increased consumption beyond food, clothing, and shelter, it would not be consumerism. With consumerism, buying more stuff is the sole point.

[AxelHeyst]

Maybe another way to think of it is in the heterotrophy taxonomy. Some species only eat and mate, right? Others have playtime? Perhaps the distinction is that some people think spending resources on playtime is wasteful (i.e., "consumerist") while others do not? But in any event, if you're a member of a species with playtime and you have to do something with it, you're inevitably going to play with other things? And wastefully kill them / use them / consume them? Like a cat killing a mouse for fun?

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I think I see a bigger difference between consumerism and heterotrophy than you do?

Cat's gonna cat. Humans gonna human. Heterotrophy is what it is. I'm not against the consumption of resources. I (no longer) go in for the 'humans are an evil cancer by nature' schtick. Humans had playtime for tens of thousands of years without scorching the sky, befouling the oceans, or putting every other species at risk. (We did take a few other species out during 'pre-historical' playtime because, well, humans gonna human). I'm not pissed off that we're no longer romping around the garden of Eden. I just think it's dumb that we're torching the sky to buy lives we don't even really like and I think we should do anything else.

[suomalainen]

Consumerism means that the motivation is simply to consume more for the sake of consuming more. With consumerism, consumption is both the means and the end. If, say, the goal was military conquest or space exploration or establishing a society where democracy and liberty allowed the pursuit of happiness necessitated increased consumption beyond food, clothing, and shelter, it would not be consumerism. With consumerism, buying more stuff is the sole point.

Is this really a thing? Don't people buy stuff for [reasons]? Sometimes unknown? But it's a bit hard for me to think that consumerism defined this way is widespread. I also don't get out much, so.

I'm not trying to be obtuse (it comes naturally). I just must be missing something that you guys have discussed before, so I'm jumping into a conversation that is already well-past where I'm at. You can just ignore me.

[jacob]

Is this really a thing? Don't people buy stuff for [reasons]? Sometimes unknown? But it's a bit hard for me to think that consumerism defined this way is widespread. I also don't get out much, so.

I very much doubt people would put it in these terms as that would make it clear that they've been suckered. But yes, people buy more pants even if they already have enough pants. People buy a new TV even if their old TV still works. People remodel their kitchens every 10-15 years even if the existing kitchen still works perfectly fine, etc. People would indeed give [reasons]---regurgitating slogans they've been fed by the advertising industry. "I'm not buying new pants just to buy new pants. No, I'm buying new pants to express my personality and what a fun person I am". Ahh, but the fact that you express yourself by buying stuff makes you a consumer.

This rules most humans. Shopping equals happiness. You can tell the exceptions ("Millionaire next door"-types) by their rather high networths relative to their incomes. They simply don't know what to spend the money on. Consumers don't have that problem.

[suomalainen]

I suppose. I guess I always thought of excess-consumerism (my preferred lawyering of the term) as people spending money trying to satisfy a(n unknown / unexpressed) psychological need - "Daddy never loved me, so I'm going to buy stuff to make me feel better", etc. Maybe I just wasn't refined enough to think of consumerism vs consuming vs heterotrophy (which was a new word for me) (which, incidentally, may be points on a scale?).

To @axel's original point, I am also so mired in my own individual problems (raising the kids, keeping my sanity), that I'm not really in the headspace of, like,

When @7 made the comment that an anticonsumerist lifestyle is an oxymoron, however, that’s the point at which I was no longer talking about a single individuals life scale.

When I say “there is an out” (to consumerism) I’m talking about the multigenerational project of cultivating the successor cultures to the current arrangement that will emerge over the next several centuries.

Perhaps this dovetails into a thought I've had, and I think an exchange with probably both of you in my journal a while back, about the difference between my thought of retirement (it's really no different that my existing life, other than degree of free time) while you (both?) are like, no, no, it's a difference in kind. You have the time, energy and resources for these higher-falutin'-in' thoughts. I'm just wallowing in the mud over here.

[AxelHeyst]

Not to beat a dead horse, but I firmly disagree that consumerism and heterotrophy are points on a scale. They are categorically different kinds of things: an ideology on the one hand and a biological mechanism on the other.

Re: hi-falutin thoughts— my child free status is part design and part bullets dodged, but insofar as it was by design, a major factor was the sense that “but if I have kids I won’t have time or energy to think borderline unhinged thoughts about the far future that will make people edge away from me at the parties I don’t go to. Hell with that! I’d bust at the seams!” [eta: part of my self-knowledge is that my cognitive equipment is not durable enough to withstand the rigors of parenting *and* live the inner life that’s important to me.]

[suomalainen]

Fair. You guys are obviously in 3-D (or higher) while I'm in 2-D on this topic. Thanks for INTJ:ing the thought to clarify the extra dimension.

And yeah, speaking of dead horses, I'm always going on about how parenting sucks. And I deliberately choose "parenting" over "having kids". If my kids ever read this, I don't want them getting a complex about me hating them. I just want to skip to the part where they're living their own lives and we get together occasionally for a metaphorical beer.

[7Wannabe5]

I definitely had more than one thought running through my head with my stance opposed to the term "anti-consumerism" and my take that "anti-consumerist lifestyle is oxymoronic." However, let me start with what is striking me most viscerally. If you study the history of consumerism, which however you define it, one must admit was never a philosophy in search of an expression, but rather a perspective and set of practices that developed as a consequence of technology moving production out and away from the home or small family business, with most immediate and striking result being that men's work was made a more efficient and social affair, while women's work became a more isolated affair and remained inefficient.

Therefore, it was hardly surprising that eventually goods, tools, and services designed to increase the efficiency of women's work became some of the first designated as "consumer" products. Meanwhile, the businesses outside of the home where the men were employed were also becoming more specialized, purchasing the goods, tools, and services required from other differently specialized businesses. However, the paper napkins purchased to stock the company cafeteria, even if produced at the same factory as the one's purchased by the housewife were not considered to be consumer goods. No, indeed! These napkins were the napkins deemed necessary to improve the efficiency and/or bottom line of the manly performance of capitalist production. Similarly, the washing suds used to mop floor of the restaurant where several bankers, their manly production once removed and only made manifest as notation on balance sheet, wined and dined on expense account charged to business rendered efficient to the point of being declared virtually frictionless by a fawning economist speaking now with the gravity that hard science had lent to his prophecies.

Anyways, it recently occured to me that the "consumer" is really just a mid-century middle-class American woman doing the best that she can within the cultural context and the work assigned to her. Sure, I can disdain her, like a long-haired pot-smoking hippie boy disdaining his Eisenhower era father until Tom Brokaw declared him a member of The Greatest Generation. I'm way cooler than somebody made happy by doing the work of shopping for new matchy-matchy living room furniture. I'm more interesting than that, or at least more interested in being interesting. They paved paradise and put down a parking lot and a mall full of stuff and more stuff and...wow, time flies, Joni Mitchell wrote that song when I was 5 years old, and there were shopping malls popping up everywhere back then, but now the only one around here is empty except for the check cashing place and a kiosk selling pot and vape paraphernalia. Remember the old Hudson's with the restaurant on the top floor? If we were good while Mommy did her shopping, Daddy would buy us scoops of vanilla ice cream in pretty glass bowls with chocolate cookies inserted to look like Mickey Mouse ears. We knew we were lucky, because in Sunday School they showed us a filmstrip of the hungry kids who live in tarpaper shacks in Appalachia, and we collected coins in little white boxes to help them out. And a girl could be an astronaut who drinks Tang in the SpaceLab too! If she wanted to be...

Anyways, I am 100% behind the work you've assigned yourself and the lifestyle you are designing. I would join in myself, if I was younger and full of vigor. And it is my intention to continue to limit my own consumption to sustainable level and do what I can to help with the "babies." It is just that I am now feeling that it is somehow towards sexist hypocritical bullshit to point finger at the "consumer" while smiling along with the gleeful benzadrine-high chortling of the clowns in the self-driving midget cars riding in irresponsible (make that unresponsible) parade formation behind the float carrying The Glorious Producers of the New Gilded Age (and trust me, when it comes to smoking like a clown-faced punk in the boy's room, I have BTDT myself.) Producers good. Consumers bad. Yup, it smells just a little bit like manosphere spirit. But,wait, I forgot, girls can do double-entry bookkeeping too...hmmmm, if I buy some groceries to make dinner for my husband and kids then that is "consumption", but if I get taken out to dinner as a Girlfriend-Experience-Escort then I can enter it as Earnings from Production and I can still take the doggy-bag home for the kids. Or, even better, I can invest some Capital in the form of my fancy red dress and the push-up bra guaranteed to make E. Scrooge fail the marshmallow test and hire a girl who just got off the bus from Guatemala to GFE in my stead. And now at last, my hand in the marketbasket has become as invisible and frictionless as an aging banker's tender pink palm thick-greased with consumer-grade Crisco, as he seals and shakes on one last deal, and all the tiny, tiny, ever so tiny astronauts shoot right for the shuddering moon.

[ertyu]

Nice alliterations lately

[Slevin]

I would argue the consumerism is a systemic mechanism that can’t be undone though. Moloch, Gnon, and Gotcha demand their blood. Economic power is a multipolar trap pretty much akin to (if not more important than) defense spending, and economic power is necessarily expressed through consumerism (producing a bunch of things people don’t need to make the stock number and thus relative power number go up). Any country not willing to produce and consume as a force of economic power will be monetarily outcompeted and forced into irrelevance by one without those qualms.

Even us EREites are capitalists and waste generators by proxy, feeding the machine blood money to produce more unnecessary baubles, in search of profit margins + returns to fund our non-working lifestyles.

[AxelHeyst]

Yes. The interaction of multipolar traps and the logic of the Petri dish will be an interesting dynamic to watch unfold.

Brings to mind JMGs old essay about the different between a problem and a predicament. (You can solve problems; you can only respond to predicaments.)

https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/20 ... ments.html

[ertyu]

This might be a bit off-topic but how do you feel about JMG's entire magic/druid side?

[AxelHeyst]

At first I thought it was weird and maybe a problem as in something that undermined his intellectual legitimacy.

Then I read some of his essays and books about druidry and occultism in general was like “oh. Yep, it’s weird all right, but this does not constitute a problem.” It’s actually quite fascinating stuff.

There are some aspects of his thinking that I’m not down with, but that has nothing to do with his esoteric studies and practices.

[7Wannabe5]

Even us EREites are capitalists and waste generators by proxy, feeding the machine blood money to produce more unnecessary baubles, in search of profit margins + returns to fund our non-working lifestyles.

Exactly, but it also would have been irresponsible or not-in-alignment-with-INTJ-conscience for Jacob to assert that rolling exactly like somebody living in poverty, or like the moneyless man, or like Jesus was the way to go. As he noted somewhere, one assymetry that exists between consumption and production is that generally you don't have to fret about competition to the extent that you are producing for your own individual consumption. (Anybody who would attempt to extend this even to the level of the household has never had the experience of driving home in traffic after working all day, picking up the assorted individuals who are your kids and one of their grubby friends, and listening to them chanting, "McDonalds! McDonalds! McDonalds!")

However, the funny thing is that if you think about it, the Earning/Spending ratio we often rely on here at ERE central is actually towards a post-modern value-free, morally-relativistic model. It provides no judgment related to how/what/why the money is earned or spent, except to the extent that it clearly promotes "producerism" over "consumerism." This ratio applied alone does not even force you to make your own values judgments, because it is towards a materialistic perspective on materialism. It doesn't speak to whether I prefer to spend $100 to take my daughter to see Moulin Rouge (Truth! Beauty! Freedom! Love!) at the theater or to upgrade my IPhone 6 or even whether any given expense is necessary beyond the theoretical reality that I may eventually be no longer able to make spreadsheet entries if my only option for eating is to spend some money (the actual reality being that there is way too much affluence/waste in the U.S. for any able-bodied dumpster diver to starve to death.) In fact, if necessity=survival and as usual the "everybody doing it" requirement is lifted, $0 would constitute strictly necessary level of "consumerism" give or take for "access to modern medicine aiding survival."

If I consider the ways in which the best, most complex, general models I know of, "ERE" and "Integral Theory" differ, one thing that pops out is that Integral Theory overtly considers the Subjective and the Intersubjective right from the get-go. And this is also what Vicki Robin overtly brought to "YMOYL" within a model that lacks the overall complexity of ERE. Each month the individual practicing YMOYL makes a values judgment related to each expenditure. YMOYL also does not apply values clarification to production activities, likely because Joe Domiguez worked in finance and Vicki Robin inherited much of her wealth. However, to the extent that anybody has actually made their own decisions related to production for market beyond themself-as-individual-consumer, it is no more difficult to make values judgments related to production decisions/activites than it is to make these judgments for consumption decisions/activities. I would argue that "consumerism" is mindless, ill-considered consumption and "producerism" is mindless, ill-considered production, and neither feels subjectively good to engage in over the long-run. For example, when I went from dealing in used books to making profit from retail-arbitrage of miscellaneous crap, that's when I started feeling like a benzadrine-chortling clown-faced punk working a string of slot-machines. And, one sure way to know whether you are producing/profiting in alignment with your own values is to ask yourself whether you like and respect or intend to care for the consumers who are your customers. If you put this aside, then you are just pimping without purpose or engaging in "producerism." And, yes, this is almost unavoidable within the current paradigm, but "almost" isn't "always" and the same trends that are likely to force an end of "consumerism" are just as likely to force an end to "producerism" or even individual "producerists" as we all recently witnessed. Why not take the risk and do it now and beat the rush?

[jacob]

I do find purist insistence or discussions of definitions somewhat unrelatable/unproductive. Throwing the baby (investing/money) out with the bathwater (consumerism/capitalism) is rather impractical as the Moneyless Man demonstrated.

The role of money and investing in ERE is to "render unto Caesar" (H/T Joe Dominguez). There are certain things in contemporary society that effectively only can be paid by money (unless you want to make not-spending-money your entire life focus). Engaging with the consumer-machine is pretty much the only way to get that money (again, unless you want to make not-engaging your entire life focus). Spending that money only in "approved" ways is null and void because the money will quickly circulate into unapproved channels as the receiver spends it elsewhere and so on.

I often think that purists are part of the problem in refusing to do anything unless it can be done perfectly. This is a very convenient way to do nothing but complain about the status quo or "the other".

[7Wannabe5]

Throwing the baby (investing/money) out with the bathwater (consumerism/capitalism) is rather impractical as the Moneyless Man demonstrated.

I agree. Investing is a form of production that can be conducted in a mindful, well-considered manner, in alignment with one's own values. Money is efficient mechanism for mindful, well-considered trade conducted in alignment with one's own values. When money is considered in terms of resource conservation it is serving as a proxy for waste, so when trading with a stranger on the open market, assumption that usual fraction will be "wasted" is valid. However, more information about trading partners may allow for adjustment and this would also apply to investment opportunities.

There are certain things in contemporary society that effectively only can be paid by money (unless you want to make not-spending-money your entire life focus). Engaging with the consumer-machine is pretty much the only way to get that money (again, unless you want to make not-engaging your entire life focus)... I often think that purists are part of the problem in refusing to do anything unless it can be done perfectly. This is a very convenient way to do nothing but complain about the status quo or "the other".

I respectfully disagree that I (or any other Type 7 on the planet ) am a purist. I fully intend to keep spending money on musical theater tickets, cookie ingredients, and brand-name hair color. I think that this all just seems more impossible from an extremely individualistic perspective. For example, I am currently effectively rendering property tax unto Caesar by providing a well-boundaried amount of care for my decrepit mother while residing in a room that would otherwise be a well-heated receptacle for nothing but knick-knacks. I am getting most of my groceries from a weekly near-expired (otherwise headed for the dumpster) food giveaway. And I am paying for my remaining expenses which are currently well under sustainable level by teaching math to disadvantaged kids (productive activity in alignment with my values) on a very part-time basis. It could, of course, be argued that my public service wages are dependent upon primary producers, but I would suggest that constitutes short-termist thinking since an innumerate labor force of the future is unlikely to be highly productive. It could also be argued that I am "cheating" a bit by keeping my income low enough to qualify for free health insurance covering the treatment I require to survive without literally shitting my guts out on a daily basis, but that micro-system-within-a-system is currently way too fucked up for me to even begin more accurate tally of resource-usage.

IOW, some of what seems like unavoidable expenditure to an extreme individualist is really more towards discretionary spending in alignment with values of privacy, solitude, freedom, authority, status, and minimization of intrusion of bothersome others and hassle. For example, your head might explode if you had to spend even just 5 minutes each day helping my mother with her technology problems, so not an option for you to save resources while effectively avoiding property tax expense. We all have some of these sort of limitations depending upon our innate tendencies. For example, my tendency to be bottom-heavy strictly limits my ability to efficiently dumpster dive, and my tendency towards physical cowardice limits my ability to engage in near urban solo rough camping.