Benjamin Barber: happiness doesn’t come from a shopping mall
September 8th, 2008
By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
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Benjamin Barber argues in his latest book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, that the market has consumerism has begun to replace citizenship. From an interviewed in the Free Lance Star Ledger:
Capitalism has been an immensely productive and efficient form of social and economic organization, and it was predicated at its birth on the notion that if you produce goods and services that people really needed, you could both provide for the public good and make a profit from doing so–and that was an exciting way of hitching together altruism and self-interest.
The problem is, in part because capitalism was so successful at that in the developed world, a lot of the fundamental needs that people had that drove capitalism have been successfully met. People with the money no longer had great pressing needs, and people who still had needs–there are billions of them–didn’t have the money to be part of the game, and that created this modern crisis for capitalism. Instead of meeting real needs by manufacturing goods, it’s manufacturing needs to sell all the goods it has.
The analogy to religion:
The analogy I use in the book is [that] religion is an important part of our life, but when religion dominates everything, when it’s 24/7, when all the signs are religious, when everything in the public arena is religious, we call that theocracy, and we don’t like it. And when politics dominates everything, when everything is political–you know, religion is political, our love life is political, entertainment is political, culture is political–we call that totalitarianism, and we don’t like it.
But when commerce and consumerism dominate everything, we call that liberty. And I don’t get that. That’s just as unbalanced, just as dangerous as when any one sector of our life dominates every other sector of life.
On restoring the balance between democracy and capitalism:
We live in a world [with] a lot of very great needs, the Third World, “the bottom billion” in Paul Collier’s phrase. People right now are making money by selling us water in bottles that we can have free from the tap when two-thirds of the world’s people don’t have access to clean water. Capitalists can make money by finding ways to cleanse water in the Third World. There’s a little firm in Denmark that makes what’s called a Life Straw that filters out the contaminants in water. That’s helping people in Africa get clean drinking water. At the same time it’s making money for this firm.
Capitalism needs to turn to real needs. American infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. There’s one set of industrial jobs that cannot be exported–fixing our bridges, fixing our tunnels, fixing our highways. That’s a great job creator; it helps us provide the infrastructure that makes private corporate life and public life possible.
So part of what we need to do is restore the balance between democracy and capitalism, but the other part is [to] get the capitalists back to serving real human beings and making profits from serving real needs instead of trying to sell us things we don’t need.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Capitalism, Consumerism, Society, Business. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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