imagined-community

Brand Baby. Photo from Adbusters

On Thursday, the New York Times ran an article about dumpster diving Freegans and NYU’s annual year-end trash dump. The article generated buzz about Freeganism in the blogosphere, most of it negative buzz. Commenters at PunkAssBlog often cast Freegans as “holier-than-thou pseudo-revolutionaries.” Others discussed the value, or lack of value, of voluntary poverty. (Hard to believe THAT issue is still circulating. Have the Catholic Workers & the Jesuits teamed up in yet another zealous but hopeless attempt to infuse a little humility into mainstream society by working with the Freegans? Nah.) At Reason Magazine discussion circled around the merits of scavenging and whether people bought the philosophy Freegans are wrapping around their trashy behavior. Thoreau wrote: “It sounds more like a hobby dressed up in ideological clothes. And while the ideological clothes sound rather Marxist, it somehow seems appropriate that aficionados of discarded stuff would appreciate a discredited ideology. Hey, somebody’s gotta recycle it!” While all these posts about recycling waste and whether or not Marxism will make a comeback are interesting, what is significant to me about the Freegans is that they are highlighting a problem that a small host of voices has been putting on our discursive table since the 1990s. Consumerism IS driving us. In fact, we are so far from the drivers’s seat that most of us can’t even see that reality head on. We can’t control our appetites because we are embedded in a social and cultural system that repetitively encourages us to indulge our desires as well as aspire for luxury. With upscaling as the dominant social principle, and social spending pressure everywhere, all of us are finding it increasingly difficult to define our selves without reference to what we buy.

Enter the Freegans. These trash collectors would like to believe that they’ve broken away from the problem of consumerism by defining themselves by what they don’t buy. Unfortunately, the way to stop being defined by competitive spending is not, as the Freegans suggest, by surviving on discarded food or by limiting time spent working (although we might enjoy doing those things). Nor will we be able to resist the social pressures of consumerism with a Freeganist philosophy that grounds human freedom in alternative ways of getting, in this case, instead of using money to get stuff we just take the stuff people don’t want. Aside from all the practical arguments that can be leveled against Freegan ideas, the major problem with Freeganism is that it can’t stand up on its own. No consumerism, no Freeganism. That’s the problem with philosophies of opposition.

Consumerism is an economic system based on the manipulation of desire. Without desire we would be one dull bunch of worms. Desire is our lifeblood, the fire that shapes and defines us as human beings. The problem with consumerism lies in the way in which desire is configured. The heart of desire, where the energy is focused, is on the act of receiving or taking. The object is what matters to us as consumers. We enjoy our money only in so far as it gets us what we want, that iphone, for example. Whereas desire between two people is fueled by give and take, in consumerism the act of giving has been replaced with money. Let me repeat that. For the consumer, money always stands in for giving. Most of us don’t sit around deriving pleasure from interacting with our greenbacks (Unless we are waitresses. Then those bills were the result of A LOT of giving and unfortunately probable a fair amount of taking it, a disempowered form of giving in my book, or at least till we say enough, hence our unusual sensual appreciation of our bank notes. But I digress.)

Consumerism connects us with desire by keeping our gaze on things we want to take. When we participate in consumerism as consumers we can never give, which would create a circular self-replenishing system. Once we are consumers, the only way we can reexperience desire is to take again and again and again. But as anyone who has desired that which is not an object knows, desire is just as powerful when our energy is focused on giving. When we center our desire in the moment of giving we unhitch our selves from objects and on to the meaningfulness of our activities, whatever those activities may be. All of the Freegans responses to valid complaints against our consumerist society would be more effective and sustainable if Freegans fought consumerism on its home turf — the manipulation of desire.

Now, some of you may be thinking, “who cares if stuff is only valuable because it can generate a profit. I like stuff; it makes me happy.” But does more stuff really make you happy? A report in Science by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahnman, entitled “Would You Be Happier if You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion,” has demonstrated how material goods actually don’t bring a lot of happiness because we adapt so quickly to their presence. When researchers compared the moment-by-moment happiness of people in a variety of economic circumstances they concluded “the belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory.” If companies did not primarily base their decisions for new product development on profit, isn’t it possible that more goods might be developed by people who enjoyed the actual process of creating (or, giving) and that these products, while less profitable, might in fact be better products?

Pig Lipstick points out that a more constructive anti-consumerist approach for the Freegans would be to start businesses that use waste to create new products, in other words, to give back to society. Terracycle, a company that has concocted a liquid plant fertilizer from worm poop (they feed the worms organic waste), which is then packaged in old plastic soda and water bottles, has been so successful that Scotts-Miracle Gro is suing Terracyle (claiming the products look similar and that Terracycle is lying about their product’s effectiveness). Anti-consumerist capitalism is certainly one way to counter waste — one of the most harmful side effects of consumerism — and to create products we want because they appeal to our desire to take care of our planet and ourselves.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, I can control my desire. Brands and objects do not define my identity. I do not impulse buy and I never try to keep up with the Joneses.” But what about your kids? According to Professor Juliet Schor in her most recent book, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, the average 10-year-old has memorized about 400 brands, kindergartners can identify some 300 logos, and at the age of two, kids are “bonded to brands.” Children learn who they are and how to manage themselves from society. What are they learning from their immersion in our consumerist culture? Is consumerism giving kids the tools they need in order to center their lives in the values that the Freegans, and probable most of us, think are important? Values like generosity, concern for others, and cooperation?

Even though I think that psychologically we must reorient ourselves toward giving rather than taking, there is no doubt that if we want a society that reflects our values then we need a society-wide solution, if for no other reason than our kids won’t have to fight so hard to stay sane. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter suggest that political action and legislating change is the only way to rein in a consumerist society driven by competitive shopping:

At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action. If we were really worried about advertising, for example, it would be easy to strike a devastating blow against the “brand bullies” with a simple change in the tax code. The government could stop treating advertising expenditures as a fully tax-deductible business expense (much as it did with entertainment expenses several years ago). Advertising is already a separately itemized expense category, so the change wouldn’t even generate any additional paperwork. But this little tweak to the tax code would have a greater impact than all of the culture jamming in the world.

Of course, tweaking the tax code is not quite as exciting as dropping a “meme bomb” into the world of advertising or heading off to the latest riot in all that cool mec gear. It may, however, prove to be a lot more useful. What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another, and that we will continue to do as long as we have no incentive to stop.

The Freegans, and the rest of us, could deal with the problems created by consumerism by aggressively advocating for more creative consumer protection laws, laws that go beyond restricting false advertising and deceptive pricing scams.

Alternative strategies for coping with society are just that, coping strategies. But if we really want our complaints about society to be answered then we need to actually do something that produces not just takes. Doing something, giving back, can be as simple as being friendly to the Crate & Barrel cashier instead of buying that bowl you think you want (for all the wrong reasons if you REALLY think about it). Walk away from those designer jeans and go write in your blog, someone, somewhere, will appreciate it. Instead of going out to dinner for the third time this month to the newest, hippest restaurant in town, persuade your friends to support you in starting up a small business and sit down and start brainstorming that evening. Stop obsessing about your new house and join a political campaign that will support consumer protection laws. Take all that time that you would have spent shopping for furniture and thinking about wood flooring and organize a reading group. Instead of staying up all night planning what food to serve to your reading group (you are about to engage in competitive spending) just order pizza. Am I trying to suck all the fun out of life? Of course not! I LOVE new stuff. I love planning dinner parties. And I am well aware that since we are always immersed in a cultural and social context our desires are always shaped to some extent by what we are exposed to. But we don’t have to acquiesce to the shape of desire that consumerism offers us. Ask yourself, if your desire is only a well-trained Pavlovian response to what society presents you, are you really free? Don’t you want to know that when you buy that new dress / car / shampoo it is not because you are responding unconsciously or consciously to social pressure but because you either really need it or there is something about it that appeals to something intrinsic to you and your desire? Or has mass consumption finally led us to forsake the idea that each one of us is irreplaceably unique with desires particular to our selves? The Freegans are leveling some valid complaints against our society. Maybe they just need a little help from the rest of us to come up with more effective ways of addressing those complaints.