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Conditioning the Next Generations for Poverty
The idea that future generations would have less than the generations that came before them used to be a bad thing. Politicians railed against economic decline as a tragedy to be avoided. But lately, there has been a distinct trend in the news and entertainment media to convince people, especially people under thirty, that having less than the generations who came before them is pretty awesome.
Millennials don’t want to own cars, the media tells them. Cars use too many resources, and consume funds that could be used for public transportation. Speaking of resources, for the sake of the planet, you should only be allowed to eat meat once a week as people did in the Middle Ages, according to an advisor to the World Health Organization. You’ll be happier with less protein, and the planet will thank you. (And you’ll be closer to the Government’s idea of the ideal weight for you [the BMI] which was calculated in 1830 and labels normal healthy weight as obese.) There is also the spectacle of a front-running Democrat presidential candidate lamenting that there are too many brands of deodorants and that waiting in breadlines for food is the way it ought to be.
The news and entertainment media are the vanguard propagandists of the privileged elite and they seem to be following a coordinated script; telling Millennials and the generation following (the Tidepod-Eaters) that the good life is a life of scarcity. Remember the tiny house fad they were pushing a few years ago? The idea that the ideal home was a 300 square foot box? The hype over tiny homes has faded just in time to be replaced by the new hype over the “Minimalist Lifestyle.” “Throw away anything that you don’t love,” is the mantra of this movement; living a spare box (or a cast-off shipping container) is the ideal. All of this adds up to an active and sustained effort to convince the younger generations that living in a teeny urban apartment with no car and few possessions is not only economical but virtuous.
“Millennials don’t value possessions, they value experiences,” says the media. Of course, there have always been those who touted the benefits of travel and having fun. (Usually, these sentiments were from very well-off types who had never experienced the slightest deprivation. It’s easier to discount the value of things when you can take them for granted. Being “anti-materialistic” is a privilege that can only be afforded to those whose material wants have been fully satiated.
But now, even the value of “experiences” is being devalued. Swedish media is hyping the alleged “phenomenon” of “Flight Shame;” reportedly, people have been conditioned to feel bad about traveling because it harms the environment. Also, traveling to experience foreign cultures is now attacked as “white supremacy.”
So, stay home and don’t own anything seems to be the idealized 21st Century life. And you must begin to ask, why is the idea of material and experiential deprivation being propagandized, particularly to the up and coming generation?
It isn’t hard to understand. Among the political and economic elite, it is a foregone conclusion that the future will be defined by the scarcity of energy and resources. Better to condition Americans and Western Europeans to accept a standard of living on par with Mexico and Russia. Another benefit, from the elite perspective, is that ski slopes and beaches will be much less crowded if the deplorables can’t afford to go there.
The elite, by the way, have no intention of participating in the culture of scarcity. One actress, who signaled her virtue by announcing that she would eat on $1.50 a day in solidarity with the poors also purchased a $5 million New York apartment. In Silicon Valley, they are bringing back the concept of indentured serfdom, stacking employees in dormitory-style housing where every action is monitored and controlled. Meanwhile, oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg buy lavish estates for themselves.
The elites will be fine if the airlines, per the desires of the Green New Deal, cease to exist as long as there are still private jets to take them to the beaches and ski slopes the deplorables can no longer afford. (They will be a lot less crowded with the wrong sorts of people.) They don’t mind the proletariat being consigned to crowded, unreliable public transportation as there will be less traffic to impede their limousines.
Published in Culture
We’d all be better off living with less.
I don’t get this post. What is this? Promotion of materialism?
I know gluttony has long since been done away with as a vice, but I didn’t think we were at the point of promoting it as virtue.
If you can’t afford it, you can do without it.
I think this is mostly a urban/rural divide issue. I grew up in a city of about 30,000 people. Maybe they have some people doing Uber type things now but are no buses and there are no taxi cabs. Want to get some place then get a car. Kids still want cars. Kids still like eating meat.
The media can say what ever they want, people who have to get to the store or work and don’t live in a major city are gonna want a car.
I didn’t read this as promoting gluttony or materialism or living outside your means. Seriously you can get a hamburger at Burger King for $1, eating meat more than once a week is not about what you can afford and is not gluttony. Everything that the media and the progressives think are great ideas have serious problems. Tax increases that hurt the economy and virtually everything in the Green New Deal will make us poorer.
The media is pushing the idea that poorer is good. Can’t afford things, well that is fine you didn’t want those things anyway they are bad for the world. There are two paths we can make economic choices so that the next generation can afford things or we can make economic choices so that the next generation can’t afford anything but they are OK to happy with the idea.
This poverty mindset is part of a guilt-trip that progressives have been using for years. The good things enjoyed by the wealthy western nations are stolen from the labors of impoverished workers in their narrative. The Judeo-Christian belief is that Mankind was placed in a garden with orders to keep it and tend it- not a wilderness with orders to preserve it in its original state.
Thank you for getting my point.
Less what?
Fewer movable goods? (clothes, gadgets, books, etc)
Smaller homes?
No cars?
Less food?
Freedom. Liberty. Opportunity.
They intellectually embrace what they’ve said about living with less, but in real life, it won’t happen. Not a chance.
I wonder if the unstated assumption is to prepare the masses for the deprivations that are inevitable under a coming socialist rule. The elites under the new socialism will have their private jets, their large cars, their large houses, their ample and luxurious foods, etc., just as the Soviet elites had their cars, food, luxury dachas, etc.
An alternative theory is that convincing the masses to live on less is part of the effort to convince the masses to vote for the new socialist rule. “You don’t really need all that stuff your earnings could buy, so it would be better for you to hand your earnings to the government.” Of course they won’t mention that the government would then use your earnings to buy stuff for select friends, and not to do the things the politicians claimed in their campaign videos that they were going to do.
I think both those points are possible, if not likely, @fullsizetabby.
When the Iron Curtain came down, the first ones out the door were the rich bureaucrats. :-)
Duh. Have you ever seen foreign cultures?
I wouldn’t. Except for calories.
Embrace it for the proles and peasants. Not for themselves.
And can I say that I really, really hate Ricochet version 4. Not only does it look ugly, it still doesn’t properly do comment threads. If I reply to Susan Quinn, my reply should be indented under hers for easy thread reading, not at the end with “Reply” in the box.
There’s another way to look at gluttony, per C S Lewis. This passage appears in a letter from the devil to his protege:
The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscience troubled by it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your patient’s mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example. She would be astonished—one day, I hope, will be—to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness and self-concern? Glubose has this old woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile ‘Oh please, please … all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast’. You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance. In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, ‘Oh, that’s far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it’. If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.”
This “gluttony of delicacy” is very common among the Progs.
Essentially you got out-voted. Nested comment threads were discussed here years ago, and most people decided they didn’t like them.
And we’ve learned from the anti-Columbus rants that Columbus (and all those Western Civilization ideas) should have stayed in Portugal. You wouldn’t want to interfere with the culture of some child-sacrificing warring tribe barely surviving on hunting/gathering by introducing them to running water or electricity or medical care or motorized transportation. By extension, no one should go anywhere, no matter how much you think you might help others live better.
But since hypocrisy is always on display when watching the Left, I am (morbidly) amused by Africans complaining about the “cultural imperialism” of white “liberals” from the U.S. demanding that conservative African societies adopt policies the white US liberals like, such as encouraging abortion, encouraging homosexual behavior, and forcing income and wealth redistribution through taxation.
Careful there. Picking on the Methodists is my job around here.
Indeed, one has only to compare Whole Foods foods with food-foods, or Starbucks with ‘just a cup of coffee’.
I think some of the austerity can be explained by cell phones which deliver an entire internet on the go. If people live inside their devices they don’t need much space or use much ‘stuff’. As for not owning a car, if you mostly play video games and don’t date, the only thing really left to do is get to work and back. Assuming a job.