Consumed: Inside the Belly of The Beast

aleks

aleks

Well-Known Member
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOKl04TWVsU[/youtube]

Consumerism has become the cornerstone of the post-industrial age. Yet how much do we know about it and what it is doing to us? Using theories of evolutionary psychology to underpin a bold narrative of our times, this film takes a whirlwind tour through the "weird mental illness of consumerism", showing how our insatiable appetite has driven us into "the jaws of the beast". Both an apocalyptic and redemptive view of the human condition.
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What makes consumerism a mental illness? We are all consumers, nothing mentally ill about it. Issues of sustainability, overpopulation, ecological damage etc are not problems associated with any "mental illness". They are side-effects of demand and the conflicting use of resources as market participants jostle for position.

If I get a chance I'll watch it. :)
 
I enjoyed it, I thought the motive for the movie was flawed though, his message of the destruction of the Earth by consumption was just not backed up any of the experts who were filmed, sure the potential exists and is acknowledged by them, but the message that Tim Cooper and Alastair Macintosh have is that we will evolve, we will avoid catastrophe. And there's a few too many "empty motherhood" statements and vision in the film for my liking, in an attempt to engage the viewer on an emotional level.

That Jonathon Chapman was good as was that Aimee Ploudee I thought, giving good insight into both the psychology of design and the desire for prestige and status. Both argued strongly that runaway consumerism's greatest danger is psychological, not environmental which I think is what the filmmaker was trying to push, but I may be wrong.
Jonathon Chapman: You know this consumption of material items as a means to acquire status is as much of a trap as it is a set of freedoms.
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He's arguing that if the consumption of goods and services is compensation behaviour then it is a disorder.

The agenda for this movie can be summed up by this quote though:

The human race is acting like a cancer on the planet
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Thomas Malthus is still alive and kicking in the minds of many modern documentary makers.

Maybe this is our future, one from science fiction author Ken Macleod in his "The Fall Revolution" series:
"So we wander the Earth, Meg and I, and we talk to people. When we tell them about Ship City, the more they understand the less they like. It seems to them not an anarchy, like they have here in the Solar System, but a divided and hence multiplied authority. So we don't talk much about Ship City. We talk about the desert, and we wait for these strange but somehow familiar folk to ask us, yet again, if we remember the way through the wormhole to New Mars. It is the only subject that brings envy to their eyes. I can see why. The thirty billion have refuted Malthus: everybody's rich. They've refuted Mises: nobody's paid. They've refuted Freud: nobody's sad. But it's kind of crowded."
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Consumption is natural enough, but making it an "ism" makes it an ideology. The problem is that there are enough weak minds to take this philosophy to fundamentalist extremes. As with any ideology, those at the top profit, while those at the bottom ignorantly contribute to their own future suffering in exchange for blissful ignorance in the present.

Consumption should be a verb, not a lifestyle.
 
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