All too often, I see bite-sized wisdoms like ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ mutilated into pathetic consumer incentives along the lines of ‘change the world; buy the right stuff’.
A perfect example can be found on the package of LoveChock. Their slogan? ‘Eat the world happier’. Fantastic! Because it can be read both as ‘make the world happier by eating [this]’ and ‘consume the world but feel happier about it’.
Leo Tolstoy, in pamphlets from 1900, wrote such a catchy one-liner: ‘Everyone thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing himself’. I believe we have the opposite problem now. Everybody thinks of changing themselves, but nobody thinks of changing the world. We believe the world is too big to change, that meaningful political change is unrealistic. So what do we do with all the anxiety generated by climate change, our working conditions and rampant inequality? We change the world by changing ourselves, which, within the limit of the imagination of the good capitalist consumers we are, means: we try to buy the right stuff.
No consumer will save the Great Barrier Reef from bleaching
But no consumer will save the Great Barrier Reef from bleaching; no consumer will stop the displacement of Colombian smallholder farmers. And I am sure that Tolstoy did not mean this by ‘changing oneself’. After all, Tolstoy was a good Christian anarchist. And he was writing about something more complicated than changing your consumer behaviour: he was preaching for a moral revolution. He was preaching for the right – political – actions, and more importantly, for wisdom.
And, of course, he is right there. But you do not wake up wise one morning. I guess we need more years for that.
Thankfully, though, it doesn’t require a lot of wisdom to realize that a growing economy is by definition unsustainable, nor does it require enlightenment to see that free trade has nothing to do with freedom, and instead, it goes hand in hand with booming inequality.
Are we not stressed and scared enough to be angry?
What if we would stop wasting our time, money and awareness weighing the organic-fair-trade- equal-employer certificates of two almost identical bags of coffee in the Albert Heijn and instead start organizing ourselves? What if we, instead of worried ‘ethical consumers’, become assertive revolutionaries? I know too many citizens who lower themselves to being mere employees and consumers. Stressed and depressed students who think that the company they intern for is part of the problem but see single-handedly overthrowing this new aristocracy as unrealistic. And it is unrealistic, as long as we are trying to do so alone, but we are not. Are we not stressed and scared enough to be angry? And angry enough to revolt?
I say: out of the Odin and into the streets.
Luuk Slegers is masterstudent Internationale Ontwikkeling, richting Sociologie, en woont in Wageningen op Droevendaal met zijn vijf huisgenoten. Hij gaat graag ’s morgens een stuk wandelen in het Bennekomse bos.