First of all, we've got to stop with the instantaneous dismissal of every writer and commentator that doesn't take your side by slamming their skills or claiming the place they were published is inherently "irrational" or "irresponsible." (How many people here automatically eat up everything FAIR writes as Gospel Truth while automatically laughing at and dismissing anything out of the MRC?) All it does is show that you're willing to demonize anyone that doesn't side with you out of hand, and makes it hard for others to believe you're really interested in any sort of informed debate.
Whatever Lynch and Pollack wrote is completely legitimate unless there's some reason they made up their interviews out of whole cloth, Stephen Glass-style. You may not like it, but the people they interviewed exist, and their lack of ability to coherently explain what they're fighting for highlights important points about the protest culture. Like it or not, some of the protesters are "crybabies" who don't have any particularly well-developed reasons why they're there. (Would you really have been as quick to similarly dismiss an article that contained an interview with one of the more wacked-out, ultra-right-wingers to be found hanging around the Philly convention?)
On to consumerism. And I have to admit you've kind of lost me there, johnb. Are you really claiming that one can physically measure an ideology's validity through medical tests? Besides, the way you've described it, it seems one can just as easily claim from the results you've given that it's not the belief in consumerism that is false, but rather the idea of consumerism itself. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone I know that actually goes around thinking "I must buy lots of things or my existence will be incomplete." Most people simply don't think that way. They want things like family and friends more than a Lexus. So obviously it wouldn't be hard to "prove" that people are not phsyically affected by how well their lives correlate with an ideology they've never even thought of. I mean, how do we know what was in those shopping bags of the sheep seen by dcehr's quoted protester? Most of them probably contained standard day-to-day items: clothes, laundry detergent, food. The sorts of things people would be carrying around in shopping bags no matter what sort of a political system we lived under. Their stares of confusion cannot be automatically taken as proof of blind consumerism unless you're looking at them from an already set-in-stone viewpoint that they are sheep that Just Don't Get It. The likely explanation for their looks is that they honestly didn't have any idea what the protesters were doing.
And the further down you go, the less I can buy into the basic concepts you're putting forth. There's certainly a "System" out there, but I certainly don't believe they do what they do for the reasons you describe. Governments try to expand GNP because: a) Increased GNP leads to a better standard-of-living for its citizens across-the-board. If I'm making more money, I can live better all the way around. That means things like better housing and better health care (in that better economic situations lead to more R&D and then to better medicines, disease treatments, etc), not merely the ability to buy an HDTV set. And, more importantly for this debate, b) Because doing so benefits all and hurts none. Economics is not a zero-sum game; it literally is possible to create wealth out of nothing. (As PJ O'Rourke likes to say, "There is no fixed amount of wealth. That is, if you have too many slices of pizza, I don't have to eat the box. Your money does not cause my poverty ... True, at any given moment, there is only so much wealth to go around. But wealth is based on productivity [emphasis mine] ... Productivity is expandable.") This doesn't have anything to do with "consumerism." No productivity, and nobody gets anything. At all. And that people can shop is but a side effect of high productivity, and a side effect that itself adds to productivity. I'm not sure what a "set-point" has to do with this being bad. Do you really think it's bad for people to have a better standard of living? Do you think it would be better for all people to live on a subsistence level forever than to aim for a point where all people can live well?
WRT production, our resources are inexhaustible. Specific ones do have limits, but: 1) Those limits are nowhere near what we used to believe they were. In the '70s, many many people, even academics, really believed we would run out of oil before now. Then new sources were discovered, enough to carry us through the next couple of hundred years at least given our current usage levels and their expected levels of increased usage. 2) Levels of uses change. Human creativity is in high gear, and we've got more potential alternative fuel sources than ever. Look at, for example, how hybrid-fuel-source cars are actually about to be made in meaningful numbers. Look at all the potentials of solar, nuclear, hydrogen gas, etc. We're adapting, slowly but surely. And the only reason it's slowly now is because there's no immediate threat to us if we don't do it more quickly.
Health care. It is central to economic policy, even if you only care to look at it from the supposedly-selfish reasons that without adequate health care, productivity goes to hell, and because health care itself is a huge part of productivity and GNP. (The health care industry in the US is something like 15% of GNP.) There's also the extremely important reality that in order for any meaningful level of medical research to go on, or any decent level of health care at all, you need all that money and productivity stuff. Look at old Soviet health care, for example. It's just a simple fact that without all the selfishness of health care as it is (doctors able to get rich, drug companies able to get rich, etc), there won't be nearly enough of them to go around. And things like AIDS drugs would take far far longer to develop, if they were ever developed at all.
In short, I don't see where any of your points can even be made unless you really do go into it from the get-go assuming that consumerism exists, that all people subscribe to it in their hearts and that governments do as well, thinking that nothing matters but letting people shop. And even if you do start from that assumption, the rest of what you talk about doesn't really work the way you say it does, or for the reasons you say they do. IMHO.
posted by aaron at 12:02 AM on August 17, 2000
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posted by skallas at 9:55 AM on August 16, 2000