Give me neither poverty nor riches,
grant me only my share of bread to eat,
for fear that surrounded by plenty, I should fall away
and say, "Yahweh - who is Yahweh?"
or else in destitution, take to stealing
and profane the name of my God.
-from Proverbs 30:8-9, the sayings of Agur, in the Jerusalem Bible
There
are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The
other is to desire less.
-G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Well,
I see something and I want it
Bam! Right now!
No questions asked
Don't worry how much it costs me now or later
I want it and I want it fast
I'll go to any length
Sacrifice all that I already have
And all that I might get
Just to get
Something more that I don't need
And Lord, please don't ask me what for
The lust, the flesh
The eyes
And the pride of life
Drain the life
Right out of me
-Mike Roe of the Seventy Sevens, "The Lust, the Flesh, the Pride of Life"
All
human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied.
-Ecclesiastes 6:7 from the New Revised Standard Bible
Man
has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
-Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Contentment
is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty.
-Socrates (B.C. 469-399)
Not
what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
What
will you do if your product still further increases next year? You should then destroy
again the warehouses which you are now preparing to build, and build bigger. For the
reason why God has given you fruitful harvests is that He might either overcome your
avarice or condemn it; wherefore you can have no excuse. But you keep for yourself what He
wished to be produced through you for the benefit of many -- nay, rather, you rob even
yourself of it, since you would better preserve it for yourself if you distributed it to
others.
-Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (339-397)
Do not
let your "eye" be drawn by the false "beacon lamps" - of wealth, or
position, or fame, or possessions. Be vigilant over your will and desires, for these are
the corrupt forces that dwell within, and keep you from living free.
-John of the Cross (1542-1591), Ascent of Mount Carmel: Book 1, Chapter 3
We
would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
-Aesop (c. B.C. 555)
Every
increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
-John Ruskin (1819–1900)
If
thou art rich, thou art poor,
for like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
thou bearest thy heavy riches but a journey,
and death unloads thee.
-William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure, Act III
Prosperity
knits a man to the world. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it' while really it is
finding his place in him.
-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Screwtape Letters, 1946
In
a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the
prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
-Ivan Illich (1926-2002)
A wise
man does not accumulate for himself. The more he uses for others, the more he has himself.
The more he gives to others, the more he possesses of his own. The way of heaven is to
benefit others and not to injure.
-Lao-Tzu (c. B.C. 550)
Man
has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for
consumption, still less for profligate waste.
-George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882)
Our
grasping arms are being crammed with the produce of an age of abundance, our eagerness to
grasp being more than matched by the zeal of the people who shower such produce upon us.
Abundance in the West has become a menace threatening to inundate us under mountains of
television sets, houses, clothes, flowery toilet paper, cars, snowmobiles, books,
furniture. In order that we may avoid being deluged, goods must be "kept
moving." Advertising has been carried to lengths never before known. Our mailboxes,
telephones, radios and televisions are channels for would-be sellers of merchandise who
are hard put to get rid of what the manufacturers produce. There is nothing wrong, of
course, with a proper distribution of goods and services. I am not talking about that but
about the promotion of superabundance. We need food, clothing and shelter. Even abundance
and comfort are gifts of God. But we are no longer his creatures accepting and
distributing the goodness he pours upon us but the feverish and slavish worshipers of
abundance itself.
-John White, The Golden Cow, 1979
One of the weaknesses of our age is inability to
distinguish needs from greeds.
-Don Robinson
Advertising
tries to stimulate our sensuous desires, converting luxuries into necessities, but it only
intensifies man's inner misery. The business world is bent on creating hungers which its
wares never satisfy, and thus it adds to the frustrations and broken minds of our times.
-Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979), Lift Up Your Heart, 1942
Today
we dare not wait until men in their own good time get around to wanting the things; do we
permit this, the machine flies to pieces. The wind blew and so the windmill went around.
Under the new order, the windmill goes around and so the wind must blow. It is becoming a
matter of general remark that the economic emphasis is changing; it is shifting from how
to make things to how to dispose of things that are made so that the machine can be kept
in constant operation. The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but
how to produce the customers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to use more
and more things. Consumptionism is bringing it about that the American citizen's first
importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.
-Samuel Strauss (1870-1953), "Things
Are in the Saddle,"
Atlantic Monthly, Nov 1924
In
the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy:
equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom
through consumption. The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally
destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race.
-Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967
To the ideal of high consumption and the
downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice
that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption; and equality in
consumption cannot be achieved except by violence.
-Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), Violence, 1969
It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into
the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or
downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth—this was
the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting. And the rich were hypocrites when they
accused the poor (who were no longer interested in “spiritual values”) of materialism. For the rich had given the
example and set society on the acquisitive path. The great business of the whole society and therefore of all its members, was to increase consumption of goods. But obviously, the moment this is the first
objective, the ideal, lack of goods, is the principal drama.
-Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), Violence, 1969
There
is a burden of care in getting riches;
fear of keeping them; temptation in using them;
guilt in abusing them, sorrow in losing them;
and a burden of account at last to be given concerning them.
-Matthew Henry (1662-1714)
The
greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and
consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is
ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them,
molding them into money.
-Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)
The
hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving
wealth.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) 32nd President of the United States
I saw
that a humble man, with the blessing of the Lord, might live on a little; and that where
the heart is set on greatness, success in business did not satisfy the craving, but that
commonly with an increase of wealth, the desire of wealth increased.
-John Woolman (1720-1772)
The
man who dies rich dies disgraced.
-Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), The Gospel of Wealth, 1900
You
can't have everything... where would you put it?
-Stephen Wright
Thinking
to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to
find—nothing.
-Aesop (c. B.C. 555)
Money
never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce
happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it
makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That
was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; "Better is little with the fear of
the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith."
-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
This
drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having
more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all
three ideas are untrue. Possessions
only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with
them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.
-Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life, 2002
We
used to say I don't care if I never have any money
As long as I have my sweet honey and a shack in the woodland
Now we say I don't care if I don't have money, but it's not true
We can't live without money, no, because we don't want to
We want one of those and two of those, and oh that one looks neat,
wrap it up
Put it on my MasterCard. Put
it on my Visa
And I sing it now, hey hey, hey hey, who woulda thunk it
Hey hey, hey hey, who woulda thunk it
-Greg
Brown, “Who Woulda Thunk It” from In the Dark With You,
© Red House Records 1989
Cause
the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right, 'cause we are
Living in a material world
And I am a material girl
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl
- Peter Brown and Robert Rans, “Material Girl”
popularized by
Madonna on Like a Virgin, 1984
But
the meaning of life is not . . . explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire
of the human heart answered by a bank account.
-Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Man and His Symbols, 1964
Every
man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and
his enjoyments.
-Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Whoever
has the power to project a vision of the good life and make it prevail has the most
decisive power of all. In its sheer quest to produce and sell goods cheaply in constantly
growing volume and at higher profit levels, American business, after 1890, acquired such
power and has kept it ever since.
-William Leach, Land of Desire, 1993
I
like to go to Marshall Field’s in Chicago just to see how many things
there are in the world that I do not want.
-Mother
Mary Madeleva CSC, My First Seventy Years, 1959
What
can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying
the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and
what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in
accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has
grown less.
Feodor Dostoyevsky
(1821–1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 41
Joy is not in things; it is in us.
-Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Consumer
wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can
still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is
the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.
-John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), The Affluent Society, 1958
A
vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making
to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the
businessman it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is
something beyond it and that is quality.
-Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
He who
is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
-Socrates (B.C. 469 – 399)
Nobody
who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any
business to talk about 'misery.'
-C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Letters to Arthur Greeves, 13 January 1917
O
America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
-Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968),
"Paul's Letter to American Christians" 1956
Whither
thou goest, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
-Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), On the Road, 1957
This
is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the
destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the
feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate, who was taken
into Abraham's bosom.
-Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Catholic Worker, Jul-Aug 1953
From
the 1890s on, American corporate business, in league with key institutions, began the
transformation of American society into a society preoccupied with consumption, with
comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more goods
this year than last, more next year than this. American consumer capitalism produced a
culture almost violently hostile to the past and tradition, a future-oriented culture of
desire that confused the good life with goods. It was a culture that first appeared as an
alternative culture—or as one moving largely against the grain of earlier traditions
of republicanism and Christian virtue—and then unfolded to become the reigning
culture of the United States.
-William Leach, Land of Desire, 1993
The
surplus of society overrides all our traditions and shapes all our philosophies.
-Walter Weyl (1874-1917), The New Democracy, 1912
Surplus
wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for
the good of the community.
-Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
We
have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to
consume wealth without producing it.
-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We are
developing new types of destitutes—the automobileless, the yachtless, the
Newportcottageless. The subtlest luxuries of today reaches very high in the social
scale… The end of it all is vexation of spirit.
-Walter Weyl (1874-1917), The New Democracy, 1912
The
poor tread lightest on the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and
the more havoc we wreak.
-Paul Harrison quoted in the London Guardian, May 1, 1992
No one
who had once learned to identify happiness with wealth ever felt that he had wealth
enough.
-Joy Davidman (1915-1960), Smoke on the Mountain, 1953
Our
inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower
class.
-Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
We
are a material-mad race of people. Build, increase, expand, pile up, hoard! More and more
and more. “If we can just make enough money to—to— !” Jesus said: “Sell what ye have, and
give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that
faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.”
-Eugenia
Price (1916-1996), Discoveries, 1953
Do not
accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of you life fame,
profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material
resources with those who are in need.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Modern
man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He
has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an
investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under
existing market conditions.
-
Erich Fromm (1900–1980), The Art of Loving, 1957
…the
tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking
the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys
them. One has without truly
having. The consumer is
right—there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost
unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds
this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing
them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this
tragedy.
-Brian
D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 2004
Water
and petrol both come from the earth, and though they seem to be alike
and even the same, they are in nature and purpose exact opposites, for
the one extinguishes fire and the other adds fuel to it. So also the
world and its treasures, the heart and its thirst for God are alike His
creation. Now the result of the attempt to satisfy the heart with the
wealth and pride and honours of this world is the same as if one tried
to put out a fire with petrol, for the heart can only find ease and
satisfaction in Him who created both it and the longing desire of which
it is conscious.
-Sadhu
Sundar Singh (1889-1929), At the Master’s Feet, 1922
If
we do not bear the cross of the Master, we will have to bear the cross
of the world, with all its earthly goods. Which cross have you taken up?
Pause and consider.
-Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1929)
But
prosperity without a soul is like a corpse whose heart has stopped beating. There is no
life, only consumption.
-Cal Thomas, Who Lost America speech in Oklahoma City, 11 March 1999
Theirs
is an endless road, a hopeless maze, who seeks for goods before they seek God.
-Bernard of Clairvaux, (1091-1153) On the Love of God
The
whole attempt to advance the kind of consumer society that depends for its growth on the
ceaseless stimulation of unlimited covetousness among the rich, while the poor majority
rot in their poverty—this is surely something against which a Christian should be a
nonconformist.
-Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), Journey Into Joy, 1972
They
want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the
production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
-Karl
Marx (1818-1883), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844
Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to
be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced
us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to
the image, and further from reality.
Madeline L'Engle (1918-2007), A Circle of Quiet, 1972
McWorld
is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American,
its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a
product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are
Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they
once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like
Harley-Davidson's and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle. You don't drive
them, you feel their vibes and rock to the images they conjure up from old movies and new
celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to the wildly popular international
café chain Planet Hollywood. Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks—the new
churches of a commercial civilization in which malls are the public squares and suburbs
the neighborless neighborhoods—are all constructed as image exports creating a common
world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles,
and trademarks. Hard power yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into a kind of
videology that works through sound bites and film clips.
-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995
These
temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for
Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the
Almighty dollar.
-John Muir (1838-1914) commenting on the proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy, 1908
quoted in Wild Earth, Summer 2000
The
horseman serves the horse,
The neat-herd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
from "Ode, Inscribed to W.H. Channing," Poems, 1847
When
I lost my faith in people
I put my trust in things
To avoid the disappointment
Trusting people brings…
I tried to do it all myself then
Surrounded by my stuff
All I found were limitations
I could not rise above
There are gadgets and contraptions
Immaculate machines
There’s a program you can download now
That will even dream your dreams
It’ll even dream you dreams
For a monthly fee
Clear up your complexion
You get a hundred hours free
Possessions cannot save you
The way some body can
When I learned to care for others
Then the boy became a man
-John
Gorka, When I Lost My Faith ©2001
Men
have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have
come to esteem what they call the soul’s progress, namely, the
religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and
they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults
on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,
and not by what each is.
-Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self Reliance," Essays 1841
When
humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other
humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals:
Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have
mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans
squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.
-Wendell Berry, "Getting Along With Nature," Home Economics,
1982
Too
much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy
another. To increase my
standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower
his. The worldwide crisis
of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing
happiness. Industrialized
nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and
higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made
poor and hungry. It
doesn’t have to be that way… But we have a greed problem: if I
don’t grab mine while I can, I might not be happy.
The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or
by industry, but in church, among Christians who learn a different way
to pursue happiness.
-Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction,
1980
It would
appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the
industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that
are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies. But this
static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen
from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and these complex foci of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the
omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture and all that flood of information; all of it , so often
analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as humanity’s rediscovery of itself.
-Václav Havel (b. 1936), The Power of the Powerless:
Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane, 1985
All
left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because
they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to
destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a
standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic
coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be
set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the
robbery shall continue.
-George Orwell (1903-1950), essay on Rudyard Kipling, 1942
quoted in Berry's What Are People For?
Until recent years, British and American resource corporations,
with the full backing of their home governments, roamed the
world…plundering the raw materials of the people of Africa, Asia,
and America. Raw
materials were extracted with little or no compensation to the people
or governments in those areas. To
secure control of these raw materials, a series of institutions were
imposed on the people to foster dependency on the transnational
corporations and their home governments. The raw materials became particularly important to the
exploiting corporations and governments because of the high profits
earned due to cheap labor and minimal royalties and taxes. In a sense, these resources fueled the industrial growth of the
United States and Western Europe.
-Richard Nafziger,
“Transnational Energy Corporations and
American Indian Development,”
American Indian Energy Resources
and Development,
University of New Mexico, 1980
The
religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a
sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not
really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands
that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to
live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and for
each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we
are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that
we cannot change because we are dependant on what is wrong. But that is the addict's
excuse, and we know that it will not do.
-Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,"
What Are People For?, 1989
I
want a change, and a radical change.
I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional
society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.
-Peter
Maurin (1877-1949), “A Radical Change,” Easy Essays
You
shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his
manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
-Exodus 20:17 from the New International Version of the Bible
Who is
the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough.
-Basil the Great (329-380)
Yes,
we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will
they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material
abundance without character is the path of destruction.
-Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 3rd U.S. President
The
world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what
do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and
self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so
satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and
powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your
desires." That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they
see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of
desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy
and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the
means of satisfying their wants.
Feodor
Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 41
We
are stripped bare by the curse of plenty
-Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Lecture, Cleveland, Ohio, 3 Feb 1932
from Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963,
ed.
Robert Rhodes James
A
strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only
plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on
its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.
-John Steinbeck (1902-1968), Letter in The Washington Post,
28 Jan 60
He who
knows that enough is enough will have enough.
-Lao-tzu (fl. B.C. 600)
We are
the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
-T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Hollow Men, 1925
Can we
reasonably expect happiness from an insatiable appetite which, no matter how it stuffs its
belly, is still psychologically like Oliver Twist in the poorhouse, holding up an empty
bowl and begging, "I want some more"? Isn't it possible that our dream of the
good society contained, from the beginning, a hidden violation of the Tenth
Commandment—"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods"?
-Joy Davidman (1915-1960), Smoke on the Mountain, 1953
Consume more than you need
This
is the dream
Make you pauper
Or make you queen
I won’t die lonely
I’ll
have it all prearranged
A
grave that’s deep and wide enough
For
me and all my mountains o’ things
-Tracy
Chapman, Mountains of Things
©1987 SBK April Music/Purple Rabbit Music
He who
seeks more than he needs hinders himself from enjoying what he has.
-Hebrew Proverb
What
we're talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and
status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It's going to take us
a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put
ourselves.
- Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God
and the Environmental Crisis,
sermon at Carlisle, Massachusetts 18 March 2001
When I
walk into a grocery store and look at all the products you can choose, I say, “My
God!” No king ever had anything like I have in my grocery store today.
-Bill Gates quoted in Parade Magazine, 14 Jul 02
they
showed it to you and
you laid your money down
well it looked like what you
wanted but it laid you in the ground
-Peter Himmelmann, You Bought It from Gematria 1987
Materialism,
among all nations, is a dangerous disease of the human mind; but it is more especially to
be dreaded among a democratic people because it readily amalgamates with that vice which
is the most familiar to the heart under such circumstances. Democracy encourages a taste
for physical gratification; this taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to
believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in its turn, hurries them on with mad
impatience to these same delights; such is the fatal circle within which democratic
nations are driven round. It were well that they should see the danger and hold back.
-Alex de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America, tr. Henry Reeve
1945
I
think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new
slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are
free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its
principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades
its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car,"
it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of
bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 2000
Day by day night after night
Blinded by the neon lights
Hurry here hustlin' there
No one's got the time to spare
Money's tight, nothin' free
Won't somebody come and rescue me?
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire
Stranded, caught in the crossfire!
Tooth for tooth, eye for an eye
Sell your soul just to buy, buy, buy
Beggin' a dollar stealin' a dime
Come on can't you see that I
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire…
-Stevie Ray Vaughn (1954-1990), Crossfire
with Tommy Shannon, Chris Layton, Reese Wynans, B. Carter, Ruth Ellsworth
We are
slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire
agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend
and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an
exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees.
-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
In the
last twenty-five years alone, new inventions and improvements have utterly transformed the
way we live. Personal computers and fax machines, cordless phones and wireless speakers,
e-mail and other hi-tech labor-saving conveniences have revolutionized our work and home
life. Yet have they brought us the peace and freedom they seemed to promise? Without
realizing it, we have become dulled, if not brainwashed, in our eagerness to embrace
technology. We have become slaves to a system that presses us to spend money on new
gadgets, and we have accepted without question the argument that, by working harder, we
will have more time to do more important things. It is a perverse logic.
-Johann Christoph Arnold, Seeking Peace, 1998
What
does a person need – really need? A few pounds of food each day,
heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working
activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all – in
the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our
economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time
payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our
attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by.
The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves
of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Where, then, lies
the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or
bankruptcy of life?
-Sterling Hayden, Wanderer, 1963
We
did not choose to believe that personal choice is the highest human
virtue. Rather, we were
taught, formed, forced to believe nothing is important in life other
than that which we have personally chosen. The irony is that the belief that nothing is important in life
other than that which we have personally chosen is a belief that we have
not personally chosen! The
supermarket and shopping mall have been our school.
-William H. Willimon & Stanley Hauerwas, Lord Teach Us, 1996
[The]
illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement . . .
alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely
because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a
better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn
and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources.
Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch
with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry
of production and consumption for their own sakes. We have renounced the
act of being and plunged ourself into process
for its own sake.
-Thomas
Merton (1915-1968) Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967
The
bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that
bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned
out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.
-Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Frederick Engels (1820-1895),
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Under
private property ...Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby
to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is
therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is
subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and
mutual plundering.
-Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Human Requirements and Division of Labour, 1844
There
are two ways to be rich - one in the abundance of your possessions and the other in the
fewness of your wants.
-E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973) In Christ, 1961
Everything
in excess is opposed to nature.
-Hippocrates (B.C. 460-370)
True
happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of
external goods.
-Aristotle (B.C. 384-322), Politics
No man
can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a
man rich. He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
-Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
He who
multiplies riches multiplies cares.
-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Often
people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money,
in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works
is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in
order to have what you want.
-Margaret Young from The OmniRead Treasuries
compiled and edited by Peter Stafford Sumner
With
respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less,
the more perfect one is.
-Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 1990
Lives
based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.
-William James (1842-1910)
More,
more, is the cry of a mistaken soul.
Less than all will not satisfy man.
-William Blake (1757–1827)
It is
preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living
freely and nobly.
-Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
When
I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can't get no, oh no, no, no
Hey, hey, hey, that's what I say
I
can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can't get no, I can't get no
When
I'm watchin' my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I
can't get no, oh no, no, no
Hey, hey, hey, that's what I say
-Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Satisfaction, Rolling Stones, 1965
Before our eyes we have the results of ideologies such as
Marxism, Nazism and fascism, and also of myths like racial superiority, nationalism and
ethnic exclusivism. No less pernicious, though not always as obvious, are the effects of
materialistic consumerism, in which the exaltation of the individual and the selfish
satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life. In this outlook,
the negative effects on others are considered completely irrelevant. Instead it must be
said again that no affront to human dignity can be ignored, whatever its source, whatever
actual form it takes and wherever it occurs.
-Pope John Paul II, "Respect for Human
Rights," 1 Jan 1999
There
is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living
within your means.
-Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) 30th U.S. President
American
culture is no longer created by the people… A free, authentic life is
no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being
manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from
media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very
fabric of our existence. Most
North Americans now live designer lives—sleep, eat, sit in car, work,
shop, watch TV, sleep again. I
doubt there’s more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes
anywhere in that cycle. We
ourselves have been branded.
-Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of AmericaTM,
1999
What worries some people about consumption (and I confess at
the outset to be one of these ambivalent creatures, fat but troubled in
paradise) is that the affluent, technologically advanced West seems more
and more focused not on consuming to live but living to consume.
The problem with consumption, and the consumer capitalism that
has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is that it has become so
all-consuming.
-Rodney Clapp, “The Theology of Consumption & the
Consumption of Theology,”
The Consuming Passion, ed. Rodney
Clapp, 1998
Consumer
sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer
markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the
multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for
Coke sales. Long-lunch traditions obstruct the development of fast-food franchises and
successful fast-food franchises inevitably undermine Mediterranean home-at-noon-for-dinner
rituals—whether intentionally or not hardly matters. Highly developed public
transportation systems lessen the opportunity for automobile sales and depress steel,
rubber, and petroleum production. Agricultural lifestyles (rise at daylight, work all day,
to bed at dusk) are inhospitable to television watching. People uninterested in sports buy
fewer athletic shoes. Health campaigns hurt tobacco sales. The moral logic of austerity
contradicts the economic logic of consumption. Can responsible corporate managers then
afford to be anything other than immoral advocates of sybaritism?
-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995
The
goals of development are always and everywhere stated in terms of
consumer value packages standardized around the North Atlantic--and
therefore always and everywhere imply more privileges for a few... Underdevelopment is the result of a state of mind common to both
socialist and capitalist countries. Present development goals are
neither desirable nor reasonable. Unfortunately antiimperialism is no
antidote. Although exploitation of poor countries is an undeniable
reality, current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of
colonial elites to repeat history and follow the road traveled by the
rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed
packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution
and universal frustration.
-Ivan
Illich (1926-2002), Celebrations of Awareness, 1971
Thanksgiving
is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant
consumption is the result and reward of production.
-Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Civilization
has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give
thanks.
-G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Daily News, 2/21/02
However
destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the
corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must
learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight
to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the
greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.
-Wendell Berry, "Conservation Is Good Work,"
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1991
It is
not necessity but abundance which produces greed.
-Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592)
First,
…our culture invites us to locate the sum total of human happiness here and now and
in the consumption of the fruits of the technological economy; and second, …we have
not been tricked into this, but that we actually chose this path several hundred years ago
and continue to choose it on a more-or-less daily basis.
-Craig M. Gay, "Sensualists without Heart,"
The Consuming Passion, ed. Rodney Clapp 1998
The
environmental problems of the 21st century involve us, not them—individuals, not
corporations. This time there aren't any bad guys to hold responsible. This time, we
ourselves have to be responsible.
-Karen Studders, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Commissioner,
quoted in "Ventura: Pollution control starts with individuals,"
St. Paul Pioneer Press 24 April 2001
The
test of our progress is not whether we add more abundance to those who have much; it is
whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd U.S. President
We eat
when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty. We buy what we don't need and throw
away everything that's useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn't
need! Pretend he's got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn. It's wrong! Wrong.
Wrong. Wrong.
-Allie Fox, father in the movie The Mosquito Coast
from screenplay based on Paul Theroux's 1982 novel by the same name
There
is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste
for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and
their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and
lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their
intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection
that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.
-Alex de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America, tr. Henry Reeve
1945
Our
present culture, however, specializes in inflaming endless lust for possessions with
advertisements that constantly convince us that we need more (particularly to create the
ease we have never found). The marketers don't tell us much about their products, but they
spend a great deal of energy (and enormous amounts of money) appealing to our fears and
dreams. Thus, the idolatry of possessions plays to the deeper idolatry of our
selves—and in an endlessly consuming society, persons are always remaking themselves
with new belongings.
-Marva J. Dawn, A Royal "Waste" of Time, 1999
Advertisers
regularly con us into believing that we genuinely need one luxury after another. We are
convinced that we must keep up with or even go one better than our neighbors. So we buy
another dress, sports jacket or sports car and thereby force up the standard of living.
The ever more affluent standard of living is the god of twentieth century North America
and the adman is its prophet.
-Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, 1977
It is
really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for
more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), The New Jerusalem 1920
So
many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to
deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so
compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are
all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of
advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the
satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.
-Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Catholic Worker, Apr 1953
The
answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to
the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is
to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.
-Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,"
What Are People For?, 1989
The
illusion that consumption -- and its correlative, income -- is desirable probably stems
from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as
food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound
together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables
us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us
better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself. ... Consumption is the
death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in
favor of death itself.
-Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993), "Income or Welfare,"
Review of Economic Studies, 1949-50
Materialism
sees national well-being hitched to the rising star of the Gross National Product. You may
say, "At least we are concerned with human well-being." But we are talking about
human dignity, not human well-being. How, for instance, do we go about "improving the
well-being of people?" We do so at the expense of their dignity. We subject them to
media manipulation so they will buy what we want them to buy, wear what we want them to
wear, eat what we want them to eat. Whatever we may profess about believing in human
dignity, our actions betray us. We base our commercials on theories that assume people are
either laboratory rats or computers. We then proceed to strip them of dignity in order to
load them with things.
-John White, The Golden Cow, 1979
What
is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
-Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1949
We
must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that
organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces,
and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns
required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in
terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.
-Barbara
Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002
The
writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation
illiterate in the language of the wall.
The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually
bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows
us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness
that bring us whatever we want.
-Barbara
Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002
Advertising
signs: they con you into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on all around you
-Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma, 1965
The
gospel preached during every television show is 'You only go around once in life, so get
all the gusto you can.' It is a statement about theology; it is a statement about beer.
It's lousy beer and even worse theology.
-John Silber, president of Boston University quoted in Time, 25 May 1987
The
need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the
entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market,
given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national
ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or
are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction
becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the
globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
-Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Frederick Engels (1820-1895),
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Work.
Consume. Be silent. And die.
-graffito
It is
important to recognize that behind the razzmatazz of consumerism, we all remain dependent
on basic natural resources - land, air, water and biodiversity - for every product and
service. There can be no free lunch on the environment.
-Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program,
"Asia's Dry Lands
Crisis too Critical to Ignore,"
Environment News Service 10 Nov 2000
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