Society

Runaway consumerism, pollution, and the human causes of climate change are problems that we humans seem inadequate to face and deal with.

We have this huge engine that we have made out of multiple pieces, and we don’t know how to apply the brakes.

Here’s a thought though. What if we stop seeing these as problems and instead see them as roads pointing to a solution even if the road is unclear?

The day I read that gross domestic product doesn’t mean how much we have produced, but how much we have spent on what we have produced I realised that the only meaningful engine in the economy is the consumer.

If we want to change society in the face of the climate crisis, we really have to stop consuming. We have to cut it by a huge amount, because if we don’t – well we know where that road leads.

But if we suddenly stop consuming overnight, the centripetal force would fling gobs and swathes of people off into space. It would be catastrophic.

Catastrophic of course for the companies that produce things, but also for everybody who would get caught up in it.

It would hit the people who would no longer have jobs. It would hit people who would no longer have access to all kinds of things. I mean you name it and it would cause problems if production didn’t exist.

Take something simple like water. How would people access it if nobody was making taps or washers or pipes any more.

So we can’t just stop consuming and say that that’s the solution.

But in the long term and even in the shorter term it has to be the solution and that is why we should all thank the climate crisis because it’s pointing exactly towards that.

And it’s pointing as exactly towards that at the same time is that we human beings with our desires and needs are getting slightly sick of this ever expanding drive and push to consume more.

We are growing out of consumerism and you can tell that is the case because people are pushing faster and faster for more and more distractions, and none of them are hitting the spot for very long.

So we are on a path that is narrowing from one direction and another, and we should be pleased because it’s pointing the way.

The Financial Conduct Authority published a report on 16th January looking at mortgages among other things, and saying that the FCA will

Begin simplifying responsible lending and advice rules for mortgages, supporting home ownership and opening a discussion on the balance between access to lending and levels of defaults.

The BBC reported that:

Until now strict rules mean lenders have to be sure that people can repay mortgages, testing them for higher rates of interest. Other rules were also imposed on mortgage providers after the financial crisis almost 20 years ago exposed reckless lending and put major financial institutions at risk. The FCA points to current low numbers of borrowers missing repayments, or having homes repossessed, as evidence of questioning whether the rules are too strict.

The reason for the low number of borrowers missing repayments is the current strict set of rules. If the intention is to keep defaults at a low level that is a reason for keeping the rules. It is not a reason for easing the rules.

It raises that question of what the FCA think is an acceptable number of defaulting borrowers. Is it higher than the current low number? Can that be a desired outcome?

I was in my late teens the first time I went to Amsterdam and walking around the city centre, around the canals and looking at the buildings, I fell in love. Even then I knew that part of the reason was that it was so easy to detect the care that had been put into the buildings, each individual one, when they were built, but also that any craftsman could have built the buildings. And that singled them out from modern buildings where the techniques and the organisation seemed to be, or are, foreign to the common or garden craftsman.

For example, if a hundred men today sat down and put themselves to working out how to build one of those houses in Amsterdam, I’m sure that they could gather the materials, read the references and work out how to build such a house and actually do it. Whereas if a hundred men sat down and looked at some modern buildings, they’d be lost. The techniques are somehow very removed from what an individual can do.

Anyway, that was then and then much later on I heard car mechanics and car owners complaining that the electronics in a modern car were now a black box, meaning that they were unobtainable. The insides of them, the construction of them were unobtainable. If they went wrong you simply sent back to the manufacturer to get another one.

In contrast, in years gone by any man who set his mind to it could learn the techniques of how a car works and they could rebuild a car. And I know the comparison between how to build a house in Amsterdam and how to rebuild a car is an analogy that stretches too thin quickly, but there is something about human size and human methods that unites them.

The fact is, as we all know, that we now live in a world where probably worldwide a few thousand people understand the code that runs basically the whole of our human systems. And outside of them, forget it, nobody knows.

And the point of this is that when we divorce ourselves from a feeling that the construction methods we use are of us, then we lose ownership, authorship and a sense of position relative to those things and we become effectively slaves because we don’t know how to do it.

‘We’ being the great mass of humanity. And I think that’s wrong. I think the great mass of humanity should be able to put together the techniques and the means to build the things with which we occupy our lives.

But that is not the turn we took.

If you could have everything you wanted, where would you stop. You wouldn’t. You would want to taste everything that existence has to offer.

We can’t have everything we want and so we are defined by what we cannot have. We cannot even have independence. At the most obvious observation we are dependent on the air around us.

In The Man Who Could Work Miracles, the Gods gave a middle aged man, a clerk probably, everything he wanted with the exception of the power to force others to love him. If he had settled without that demand he might be here now. But what he could not have caused him to see how hollow it was to have nothing except that which he commanded.