Principle 8, The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992 

I

—  Human Development Report 1998 Overview, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) — Emphasis Added

In May 1997 the 'Think Sangha' Buddhist group met in the Hongen-ji Temple Hakone, Japan, to discuss consumption and consumerism.  It defined consumerism as the dominant culture of a modernising invasive industrialism which stimulates - yet can never satisfy - the urge for a strong positive sense of self to overlay the angst and negative sense of lack in the human condition. As a result, goods, services, and experiences are consumed beyond any reasonable need. This undermines ecosystems, the quality of life and is particularly destructive to traditional cultures and communities and thwarts the possibility of spiritual liberation.  The meeting also considered the second key area of consumerism which concerns its essential dynamic or the system by which it works. This is commodification which understood more deeply is a process of alienation and disconnection from the traditional process of making and selling goods. The idea behind commodification is to intervene between humans and any aspect of our reality (like our work, products, needs, words, image, environment, etc.) in order to create a commercial product of that reality to be sold for profit. This is the way capitalism makes money. It does not so much create new services or products. Rather it seeks to enter all the possible connection points in an economic transaction in order to distort value into price for the sake of turning a speculative (non- productive) profit.

As a powerful social force, consumerism has transformed citizens into shoppers. Where Western shopping habits have been adopted by rapidly developing countries like Malaysia, they have spawned the concept of 'cultural imperialism’, a state of beingness in which the culture of economically dominant Western countries has advanced to a stage of colonisation of the less powerful cultures.  The basic 'weapon' is investment power that mimics the invasive style of colonisation. Cultural imperialism is by nature a more powerful consequence of colonisation than say, forced occupation, because it utilises a clever and systematic form of subjugation. Cultural imperialism works more effectively, subtly, and silently when it creates a sense of euphoria, elation, and excitement in the mind, body, and consciousness of those imprisoned by the desire to shop till they drop. These are the soothing effects of malls wherever they are. The mall provides the haven for this form of sophisticated imperialism, never more so than in the hot tropics where the air-conditioned shopping experience comes with inbuilt respite from a harsh climate.

Fundamentally, shopping for mass produced goods works through giving people “what they want,” as an integrated follow up to mass-advertising, which has told them what it is that they want. It treats choice as fundamentally a private matter, but by teasing out all the idiosyncratic “wants” that we all harbour as private consumers and creatures of personal desire, the outcomes are often irrational and unintended. More importantly the results rapidly produce a society we might not choose through careful deliberation. Such spur of the moment private choices, though technically “free,” are quite literally dysfunctional with respect to our rational values and norms.  This applies forcibly to the impact of Western lifestyles on relatively small isolated communities, known as the Ladakh effect.

Development pressures on this formerly self-sufficient culture in the region of eastern Kashmir have been systematically breaking down traditional social and economic structures, while visions of a seemingly superior Western lifestyle are stripping away the self- esteem of young Ladakhis, who now routinely compare themselves with a glamorised media version of the Western, urban consumer. As a result, people who were once proud to be Ladakhi now think of themselves as impoverished, primitive and inferior.

By far the largest reason that consumerism re-structures society in a random ways is that it supports unplanned consumption that undermines the environmental resource base. It exacerbates social inequalities, and fuels the dynamics of the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment system by introducing positive feedback. The more we want, the more the market provides. If the unplanned trends continue without change — not redistributing from high-income to low-income consumers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods and ecologically sound production technologies, not promoting goods that empower poor producers, not shifting priority from consumption for conspicuous display to meeting basic needs — the world will drift further away from the adoption of Principle 8 of the Rio Environment Summit.

As the 1998 UN survey on human development made clear, the real issue is not consumption itself but its the way it restructures the global social pattern based on wealth.