I'm eighteen years old and another young person recently recommended a band
to me. He suggested that I check out the music of RadioHead. I visited
their website and found out that their music was all about feeling
spiritually dissatisfied with consumer culture. It's very popular music
too, especially among the young people.
Recently I saw a couple of movies that made me think about my friend, Fight
Club and American Beauty. Both movies were released recently and both
seemed to do pretty well in the box office. One thing that the two very
different movie have in common is that both movies contain the theme of
people feeling spiritually dissatisfied with consumer culture.
There is a lot of evidence that people are spiritually dissatisfied with
consumer culture. When Allen Ginsburg wrote about the creepy surrealism of
a supermarket, people knew exactly what he was talking about. And it seemed
almost taboo to talk about these feelings.
Capitalism is an excellent system for distributing goods and services fairly
and efficiently. However, it also reaches into other parts of our lives.
Capitalism (in America) produces a shiny, smiley, stupid, obnoxious,
isolating, soulless, obsessive culture. It seems like an unintended
side-affect of this great system for distributing goods and services. Not
just advertising, not just greed, but bundle of poor aditudes that don't
just aim to distribute goods and services but seem to deny our humanity.
Pirsig calls it the "hyped up screw you daze that everyone seems to be in"
or even the "deathforce."
Some people are so fed up with this waste-product of capitalism that they're
ready to destroy capitalism just to destroy the consumer culture that goes
along with. If you talk to contemporary radicals, as I like to do, they're
going to talk about that feeling you get inside a Starbucks, McDonalds, or
Wal-Mart. Pirsig discusses the value of looking at the misfits, the
marginalized, and seeing what they're all about. Some radicals might still
be saying how capitalism exploits the poor. But the American poor are doing
pretty well, comparatively. Their real complaint is that Capitalism makes
the poor feel bad about being poor. Hell, consumer culture tries to make
everybody feel bad about not being richer.
Is there anyway of getting a free-market without having to live in a
consumer culture? Is this spiritual hollowness just the price we have to pay
for being adequately fed, clothed, and housed?
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