Material Mind

You need stuff. And you need more of it because what you have isn't enough or not good enough. You also need to protect what's yours. With walls, bars, security systems and, if need be, with a gun. And you do not share! Sharing, like any other activity that diminishes the amount of stuff in your possession is taboo. This is the central message ingrained in every aspect of the consumer society where markets, driven by "enlightened self-interest," shape our culture and minds.

Have you ever seen the 1987 film "Tin Men"? It's a lovely dark comedy in which Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfuss play door-to-door salesmen who use every scam and trick they can think of to sell aluminum siding. This film depicts a perfect microcosm of our materialistic and greed-driven society. From the willingness of the salesmen to do almost anything - legal or illegal - to close a sale, to the need for material possessions in order to keep up the appearance of social status, it's all very much the essence of our collective modern consumerist mindset. Even the way the two salesmen meet for the first time is a perfect representation of the toxic mindset that shapes our daily reality; their Cadillacs collide, they both blame each other for ruining their prized possession and from there on a feud erupts between them escalating into a frenzy of damaging each other's car and ruining personal relationships.

And that's what we've done as a society: we've prioritized material possessions over personal relationships. Even if the use of the term materialistic to describe a person's personality or a society tends to have a negative or critical connotation. It has become a central value system which regards social status as being determined by affluence, as well as the belief that possessions can provide happiness. The tin men need a Cadillac to communicate their status as successful salesmen, and their unwitting customers are made to believe their houses need aluminum siding to communicate their own social status, to show how smart they are, to make their house the envy of the neighborhood.

This toxic mindset has taken society by storm, especially after the baby boomer generation. When you asked kids why they attend school, they used to answer that they wanted to prepare for a meaningful life, nowadays the answer is to become wealthy, to make money. Take a look at this survey conducted by the University of California and the American Council on Education; it finds that from the 1970s to the late 1990s, the percentage of students who stated that their main reason for going to college was to develop a meaningful life philosophy dropped from 73% to 44%, while the purpose of obtaining financial gain rose from about 44% to 75%. That's an almost perfect reversal from a meaningful life philosophy to financial gain. And that's because we've been made to believe that happiness is found in material possessions.

This mindset has only negative consequences. Study after study shows that an increase in material wealth and goods has had little to no effect on the well-being and happiness of citizens. In fact, if we were to overlay graphs of GDP growth and levels of happiness, they'd go in opposite direction; GDP up, and happiness down. The youngest generations, who believe most fervently that possessions are the key to happiness and that success can be judged by a person's material wealth, are the ones who struggle most with the modern mental afflictions caused by the highly individualist and materialist market-oriented economy based on "enlightened self-interest."

We've become disconnected, not only from each other, but from nature as well. We've confused "stewardship" with "utter control," taking from nature what we need to satisfy our selfish needs and wants. This philosophy of materialism is destroying us, physically, spiritually, psychologically and environmentally. We've all become tin men, all competing with each other and destroying each other's lifes as well as our own. Which is why I recommend you all watch the below linked speech on this very topic...

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