Ian Sykes ‘28
Opinions Editor
Will our own nature be our undoing?
After witnessing the most recent explosions of hyperconsumerism in our capitalistic society, something tells me that it will be indeed. Underneath the Stanley cups, Labubus, Shein clothes, McDonalds ads, gambling apps, Meta glasses, AI home products, Apple items, Klarna buy-as-you-go payments, and overall plethora of dumb crap that our society spends their precious money on nowadays lies a candid human reality: us humans are having trouble finding their fulfillment in life, so we supplant it with objects. Even worse, we supplant it with objects with no other purpose than fulfilling our most hedonistic and primordial tendencies.
As it stands, humanity is at a point of consumerism that reveals our truest human condition, which is one of infinite and insatiable desire. This desire is no new addition to human nature, as you could guess; men like Aristotle thought of this facet of human nature at length. After being enlightened by reading his Nicomachean Ethics, I realized that Aristotle envisioned our current day in his own. He described the nature of appetite as the “desire of an irrational being for what is pleasant, is insatiable and indiscriminate, and the activity of desire will strengthen the tendency he is born with. And if appetites are strong and excessive, they actually expel calculation.” Even though these words were written thousands of years ago, all of this is to say that attractions to what is “pleasant, insatiable, and indiscriminate” have been a staple of our species for centuries. We struggled with it before, and we struggle with it today — but one thing that I doubt the men of Aristotle’s time accounted for was the arrival of capitalism, let alone late-stage capitalism.
Though its definition remains debated, late-stage capitalism remains the descriptor for our current stage of capitalistic society, particularly in America. But for our sake, it is a way to describe our nation whose capitalistic model has devolved into an infinite lust for expansion, corporatization, globalization, and commodification that comes at the cost of the working class and results in extreme wealth inequality.
And it isn’t some random, high-minded academic idea either. We’re living in it. For a nation purportedly defined by its wealth and prosperity, America is also the home to a people whose wallets continue to run dry in the face of rising prices, and whose difference in wealth from the rich explodes in measures beyond our comprehension every day. Despite typical metrics seeming to show the economy as doing well (including the DOW being over 50,000 as our goddess Pam Bondi brilliantly articulated,) the economy graphed is different from the economy felt. People are still living paycheck to paycheck, skipping meals, and lining the pockets of their bosses while the “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” corporatists who love nothing more than to make a quick buck off of your lust and appetites enrich themselves from them.
Shareholder value does not equate to families being fed, and infinite consumerism juxtaposes extreme scarcity to an enigmatic degree in our world. Ultimately, it has amounted not to infinite prosperity, but to a degradation of human integrity that has made the human soul a consumer item. Nothing defines human life more nowadays than an insatiable appetite for more: a trendier brand, a flashier social media profile, a better dating profile — a new way to sell yourself. I mean, just think about that last one for a second. Dating apps. You’re evaluating your literal value as a human being based on a swipe. You’re selling your soul. Hell, you can pay money to sell it better by buying a subscription to one of these apps. This is what we have been brought to.
We are nothing more to a corporation than a possible profit or a vessel of sellable data. This era of capitalism and consumerism has ravaged the best parts of our nature and has made the unsellable into a profit margin. It has perverted human emotion and affliction into a product; human life into a maze with no prize. Life is a consumable and nothing more. We are consuming so much to the point that we consume ourselves, leaving nothing left but picked over bones and a wilted hope for the future.
Welcome to American consumerism and late-stage capitalism, humanity at its worst.
Featured image courtesy of Intellectual Takeout
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