Global de-marketing

We live in an over­pop­u­lated and over-consumed world, fac­ing an inevitable result of all our actions. But as with every other equa­tion that involves life and its mul­ti­ple, inter­de­pen­dent vari­ables, the solu­tion to our prob­lem is already inside it.

Desire and abil­ity in humans helps us achieve many amaz­ing things, but it also ruins every­thing. We do things because we can, but we don’t make an extra step inside our heads and hearts and ask “is this what I do really nec­es­sary”? Adver­tis­ing goes in hand with this atti­tude of mod­ern times, and explains ordi­nary humans (in an enter­tain­ing way) the ulti­mate ease of acquir­ing things through feel­ing good.

But what unleashes that atti­tude at such a mag­nan­i­mous scale, so that all of the world goes crazy after things? We can ask a ques­tion in the fol­low­ing form too: how come, after so many cen­turies of reli­gious pre­dom­i­nance in the world — states ruled together by kings and priests, mahara­jas and brah­mins, the pre­pon­der­ance of strict, God-fearing pos­tu­lates of life — we’ve ended up in a world that seems to be an oppo­site pic­ture of aus­ter­ity and penance?

The sad truth is that there’s no big dif­fer­ence between the indus­trial mar­ket­ing and mod­ern adver­tis­ing on one side, and the mar­ket­ing of reli­gious doc­trine on other side: they’re both very poorly con­structed forms of mar­ket­ing. The for­mer is adver­tis­ing a life of pos­si­bil­i­ties here and now and achiev­ing it is easy — and at all expense. The lat­ter is adver­tis­ing a bet­ter after­life (i.e. Chris­tian­ity, Islam, Hin­duism), or no impor­tance of exis­tence at all (i.e. Bud­dhism in its var­i­ous forms).

To a con­fused human, sick of see­ing his or her chil­dren, father, mother, grand­par­ents and the gen­er­a­tions before suf­fer­ing from dis­eases, poverty and lack of basic human rights, the choice is obvi­ous — reli­gious mar­ket­ing offers noth­ing tan­gi­ble and does absolutely noth­ing to help heal sit­u­a­tion here, now. It only repeats silly doc­tri­nal state­ments that are dis­proved by advances in sci­ence day after day.

The exis­tence can­not be denied — the poor human surely expe­ri­ences every bite of a mos­quito and urge to have a break­fast in the morn­ing — and the only mar­ket­ing option there that sup­ports exis­tence here and now is mate­r­ial con­sumerism in var­i­ous forms. It uses accu­mu­lated his­tor­i­cal achieve­ments and sci­en­tific insights to pen­e­trate into every pore of human soci­ety and its needs.

Advance of con­sumerism can­not go for­ever fol­low­ing the cur­rent route. The fall is inevitable because nature has lim­its, and with every pass­ing day our chances for bet­ter and eas­ier tomor­row fade. Almost every edu­cated man today believes our civil­i­sa­tion heads madly to a global dis­as­ter that will put an end to it.

How­ever, as said above, the solu­tion to the prob­lem is usu­ally within the prob­lem. Both mate­r­ial con­sumerism and reli­gions need a good dose of de-marketing, or get­ting down to Earth. In the world of reli­gions it would mean that there should be an empha­sis on deeper mean­ing of life here, now, and not only on life after. A reli­gion should become more spir­i­tual and imma­nent, not only dog­matic and con­cerned with the tran­scen­dent. In the world of mate­ri­al­is­tic con­sumerism de-marketing would mean the oppo­site, or think­ing about the future. Every­one (ide­ally) should stop and rea­son: “If I only think about now, I’m gonna ruin the future of my chil­dren and the future of life. So I bet­ter don’t.”

When reli­gion and mate­r­ial con­sumerism both turn their heads in oppo­site direc­tion to where they were going so far, they’ll finally look at each other and see each other face to face. And that’s where some­thing new, pos­i­tive, and above all — life-affirming — can happen.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 04:53 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with consumerism, global crisis, materialism, Religion, spiritualism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.