John McMahon
1 min readApr 6, 2023

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"In the current dominant culture, success is intrinsically linked to consumption."

Consumption is just not an element of the current dominant culture, but a major element of human nature. If the hunter-gatherer doesn't consume food, they die, so they are always looking for something to consume. When Europeans came to North America, the natives there went nuts over firearms, other iron implements and weapons, cloth blankets, mirrors, rum, and a variety of other trade products they couldn't make themselves. They trapped almost every beaver to trade for them. Of course it was all a devil's bargain.

Alternative lifestyle models are considered eccentric or fringe, because they are. In the early 1970s thousands of intentional collectives were formed by hippies, and virtually all of them failed because living without plumbing and electricity and by the whims of a bunch of other people who are high all the time sucks. The people in those communities, living in huts as they did, tended to smell bad, so the word "dirty" frequently proceeds "hippy".

So again, you're not dealing with a particular culture but a basic element of human nature since people will all consume way beyond what they need to survive given the opportunity. But since we can generally only control our own personal behavior, making personal choices about changing it is all that we can really do. Any system that requires people to be fundamentally different than they are is doomed to failure.

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