Shopping for a better future?
On revaluing ourselves
This is the Next: the Newsletter, the weekly newsletter that mixes personal essays and social critique, and, where I, inspired by literature, psychology, and all my spiritual practices, attempt to make meaning out of what happens: to me, and to us all.
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What is the key word today? Disposable. The more you can throw it away the more it’s beautiful. The car, the furniture, the wife, the children—everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is—shopping. Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn’t know what to do with himself—he’d go to church, start a revolution—something. Today you’re unhappy? Can’t figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping.
“The Price” by Arthur Miller
In 2017, I co-organized Wisdom Oslo, a conference on Consciousness in Business. It took place at an art installation called Salt, which was meant to be temporary, and to celebrate traditional construction methods and fishing practices. The installation consisted of several pyramidal constructions, including one that could be turned into the world’s largest sauna, and a long “hesje” or drying rack, traditionally set up by fishermen to dry cod in the wind.
The conference consisted of a series of talks and experiential workshops, and was attended by some two hundred guests from all over the world. On the morning of day one, I sat on a comfortable chair covered in a faux-fur rug and smelled the scent of firewood, the stage having been made up to resemble a ceremonial Sami tent.
If anyone could look out of place in such a setting, it was, no doubt, the tall, blue-eyed Norwegian businessman who sat next to me, which I barely noticed at first. I was too enthralled by the speakers, so transported to a world of possibilities and idea(l)s, that I struggled to both perform my role as time-keeper (warning speakers of how much time they had left to deliver their talk) and notice who was around me.
Until Mr. Per Espen Stoknes, from the stage, suggested we turned to our neighbor and shared with them what kind of relationship we had with money. Was it of the kind, “The more the merrier?” Or did we edge towards avoidance, preferring not to deal with it? Or was it a case of, “I want more, but I feel guilty about it”?
I thought this was a rhetorical question. Surely, everyone felt some guilt about it. I thought we would all answer the same. But alas, that’s what the tall, blue-eyed Norwegian man was at the conference for (I mean, apart from hearing the speakers, and network, no doubt): to shutter my convictions, seeping doubts into my firmly held belief that to have more was, somehow, to be immoral.
“For me,” he said, “it’s the more, the merrier,” he said, smiling.
“Really?” I replied, thinking he might be joking.
“Of course, why not?” he replied.
It wasn’t the kind of exchange where he said something specific that turned my life up and down. It was more that his eyes glowed, and that, in catching their glimmer, I realized that there was a way to relate to energy, to life, to oxygen, that didn’t involve always feeling like you weren’t exactly worthy of the next breath. Or that you should repent for it.
The fact is, as Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, that we have learned, through the ages, and especially through the process of the Witch Hunt, that we aren’t worthy because we are, but we are worthy if we do. And we can never do “enough,” and thus, we’re always bound to feel like we cannot give ourselves value for just being.
Federici explains that, until the 13th century, the Church defined poverty as a state of holiness, and that this definition was at once used to defend alms giving and charity, and to contain the feeling of envy the poor might harbor towards the rich. This allowed the Church to grow ever richer, thanks to the donations, of land, harvest and money, that both the rich and the poor were constantly offering the Clergy. Starting from the 13th century, however, the process of primitive accumulation of land led to the rise of heretical movements—many of them led by women. The latter started to oppose the enclosures of land, and to fight against the corruption of the Church as a whole. And it was at this point that the sermons changed: poverty was no longer holy, it was a sign of laziness. Help, the priests shouted from their pulpits, would no longer be given to all the poor, but only to those who were deserving of it.
And the fact is, this specific idea, that some of us deserve, and some others do not, so often ends up determining what we believe about our own value.
One tragedy of our times is that, like machines, we run towards some kind of “imagined fiction,” through AI, games, and virtual worlds, as we increasingly fail to relate to our bodies and worlds as if they were real. Which, obviously, they are.
As Federici goes on to explain in Caliban and the Witch, part of the ideological shifts that underpins our understanding of value today, is that what gets done doesn’t necessarily have value because of the usefulness of the final product. What gets done, sometimes, has value only depending on “who” does it.
This is easy to see through an example: in the Middle Ages, when men sewed, they were running a business, and they got paid handsomely for it. But when women sewed, they were doing “unpaid work” or “house chores,” which were not considered “real work.” Today, the effect of such a belief, on a societal level, is that most of the clothes we buy and wear are made by women (and children!) in conditions of exploitation, and against, practically, no pay. And on a personal level, we have learned to believe that what has value is what people are “willing to pay for,” which leads to devalue ourselves as beings, and to manufacture ourselves into machines.
In order for this to happen, though, we had to learn to discount our humanity as something of value in and of itself, and to disassociate from our bodies.
One tragedy of our times is that, like machines, we run towards some kind of “imagined fiction,” through AI, games, and virtual worlds, as we increasingly fail to relate to our bodies and worlds as if they were real.1 Which, obviously, they are. This also makes it increasingly difficult to take in the real-world effects of our actions, or to give value to things from the past—including such things as drying racks—that have allowed us to survive and thrive for centuries, if not millennia.
The temptation, as Marion Woodman, Clinical Analyst, says, is to escape into our imagination. Something which, as she points out, we can do for as long as we wish—individually—drinking ourselves to death, for instance, in search of our spirit, or finding sweetness in muffins—and collectively, hoping for some robot to find the answer to all of our problems.
However, there will always come a point where we’ll meet ourselves in the mirror, and must confront the actual harm we are doing to ourselves (and the world around us), be it in the form of disease, destruction, pollution, loss of ecosystems, of things that might not have “market worth” but do have value.
And the fact is, maybe it is time we meet ourselves in the mirror, if only to acknowledge that we have gotten lost, and to find ourselves again: individually, sure, but also collectively. Maybe the disease, destruction, pollution, loss of ecosystems, that are so rampant in our society, are the alarm bell that calls us back to the Sami tent, and invites us to sit together, not so that only some of us can believe in the idea of “the more money, the merrier,” but so that we can change the script, and recognize that all of us are deserving of being valued, not as “performers” or “workers,” but simply as (human) beings.
This is also discussed in this article in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/arguing-ourselves-to-death