From the Editor...
Christmas. Don’t get me started.
Actually, no. I don’t really have anything against Christmas itself. It’s a symptom, not a cause, and the fish rots from the head, so to speak.
The rot that I speak of is Consumerism, and it is an affliction upon the entire human race.
I skimmed over this topic in my last editorial, but when else is there a better time to talk about the culture of consumerism than during a holiday which has become soley dedicated to it?
Christmas is a holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who most definitely was not born on Christmas Day. First a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, the holiday was hijacked by Christians and turned into the holiday called Christmas.
But even then, Christmas was not about giving gifts. It was feasting and caroling and getting together with the community and church. Only in 1822, when Clement Clarke Moore published ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas did Christmas become a holiday for gift-giving, supplanting the tokens of goodwill that were once given freely but now saved for holidays and celebrations. And now look what it has become.
The celebration can barely be called Christmas anymore. Gone are the family gatherings, the gratitude, the thankfulness. Nowhere in society extols those values any more, except perhaps those donation boxes which open every year.
No. The holiday spirit can now be summarized in these two lines, written by Tom Lehrer back in the 1950s.
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and buy!
Indeed.
What other message do we hear blasted at us over the entire holiday season? Holiday sales! Price cuts! Gifts for Mom! Gifts for Dad! The kids will love it! Perfect present! Buy this! Buy that! And this other thing! No matter where you look, the entire holiday has been commandeered by consumerism,
presenting the obligation of giving gifts, not anything handmade or secondhand, but something brand new, tightly fit in its plastic packaging, wrapped in disposable wrapping paper. This year’s holiday season is expected to reach $465.6 billion dollars, making up 20% of all the retail sales of the year.
But why? Why do the corporations continuously tell us to buy things, not only during the Christmas, but during the rest of the year, too?
Yes, we can blame it on corporate greed, but the blame lies mostly on the economic system itself.
Let us look at the current economic system. People in the system trade money. Where does the money come from? Money is created when banks give out loans which are backed by capital. But banks charge interest for loans, thus creating more money owed than exists, making it literally impossible to
pay back all loans.
However, if the banks can lend out more money than the amount of money coming in, then nobody defaults on loans, and everyone is happy. Except those loans also collect interest, resulting in the same feedback loop
But at the same time, the new loans require new capital in order to be taken out. Thus, an ever-increasing amount of capital is required to ensure that the system runs smoothly.
But capital can only be increased through production, and demand must exist in order for the increased production to be profitable. Hence, the corporations want you to buy more so they can make more money so they can take out more loans to create more money to allow loans to be paid off to allow the economic system to continue to run smoothly, all the while forcing consumption to climb higher and higher.
But this growth isn’t linear at all. As interest rates are exponential growths, so must the production, and by extension consumption. Conclusion: Consumption must continue go up exponentially, in order to keep the system running.
Must continue. For an infinite amount of time. Infinite exponential growth of consumption. And unless we can shift our consumption habits from material goods to services (imagine: 90% of the world employed as butlers. Yeah, not going to happen), we’re going to end up in a society eerily similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where everyone is told to consume as much as possible and inventions are only approved if they are less efficient than their predecessors. Not only that, but the natural resources of this planet would be completely stripped, attempting to provide for our insatiable appetite. Unless we can expand to other planets at exponential speeds, this infinite exponential consumption will ruin both society and the Earth.
And we call this economic growth. Whose growth? The only growth that I see are the coffers of the rich, the debt of the poor, and the endless tonnes of garbage being sent to the landfills each year as a result of our consumerist lifestyles.
So when you’re out Christmas shopping (if you haven’t done so already, I know I haven’t), take a moment to think about what you’re getting someone. Do they actually need whatever it is you’re buying? Can you make something yourself?
Or maybe, instead of subscribing to the impulsive, compulsive buying, you could instead settle down with your family around the tree and celebrate what the holiday is really about.
Pagan tree worship.