We Are Not Consumers! December 2022
This article was published in the December 2022 issue of the Youngstown Buckeye Review, a locally owned black publication.
Words are created for a purpose and are powerful. The word consumer is perhaps the most powerful word in the dictionary. By definition its purpose is to motivate the consumption of goods, services, and entertainment. Little do we realize how the word consumer dominants our lives. When not actually buying stuff, we’re thinking about buying stuff, thinking about the stuff we’re not able to buy, talking to others about the stuff we’ve bought or not able to buy, watching media filled with stuff to buy, or using the stuff we’ve bought. We literally live 24/7 under the word consumer.
Furthermore, you’re not a patriotic American if you’re not buying stuff. Freedom and equality are connected implicitly with the consumer’s ability to buy stuff. The pursuit of happiness reduces to the pleasures of buying stuff. In short, the word consumer has become a mindset that dominates our feelings, actions, reactions, and thoughts. Consumer mindset is so dominant that the country would collapse financially if people didn’t buy stuff.
Consuming Ourselves
The less used definition of consumer is one who takes, destroys, squanders, or wastes. This more appropriately describes the consumer mindset. We buy things with gadgets that we don’t need or use. We discard things that are still useful. Because consumers are conditioned to fret over facial features, hair, chest, butt, thighs, nails, legs, feet, and skin color, we commodify our body with fashionable clothing, cosmetics, and other body image products. The downside of commodifying our body is that we overlook the harmful effects of cosmetics, cigarettes, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, household cleaning agents, and social media. Food is a major example of the wrongheaded commodification of the body. We get pleasure from eating food we shouldn’t eat and ignore our digestive system’s warning signals. We ignore the heart burn, indigestion, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and allergies that tell us to stop eating. Instead, we continue eating what we shouldn’t and further commodify the body by buying products to relieve the suffering.
Other Consumer Suffering
Consumer mindset is linked to psychological situations of illusion of happiness, self-esteem issues, greed, jealousy, stress, boredom, depression, anger, hatred, and being in debt. An example is how relationships become commodified and transactional to the point of basing the relationship solely on whether we “buy-not buy” what one another does or does not do. Also, consumer mindset is linked to social situations of corruption, ethical misconduct, worker alienation, student alienation, and social-political conflicts. An example is how students view teachers, textbooks, physical facilities, and studying as commodities to “buy-not buy”. Along with bringing psychological situations to school, students simply “don’t buy” education. Administrators contribute to the problem by calling students customers and consumers. Teachers contribute by trying to entertain instead of educate.
Problem/Solution
Human beings are not consumers. Consumer mindset is a false consciousness. Living 24/7 as consumers and suffering the psychological and social problems associated with the false consumer consciousness are based on a lie. We have been gaslighted.
The truth is we are natural Producers! We are autonomous agents who 24/7 “produce” a wealth of feelings, actions, reactions, and thoughts. Every aspect of human biology, physiology, and neurology is a production operation. Examples are how our optical system produces our vision of the external world and how our anger towards things or people is produced in our limbic system. Also, we don’t consume food. Eating is a production process. Eating is the first operation in the body’s production of energy that is used to “produce” all of our feelings, actions, reactions, and thoughts.
Furthermore, physics, chemistry, and the laws of energy are about universal production processes. Earth’s life supporting environments are production processes. There’s even nonsecular support that humans are Producers “made” by and/or “made” in the image and likeness of a powerful creative force in the universe.
Because we are Producers we need a producer mindset with words and ideas. The books Producer Consciousness and Producer Consciousness: A New Mindset for Education by H. Warren and L. Stratford propose such a mindset. The books also show how a producer mindset has strategy implications for social justice movements, personal development, public education, community economics, criminal justice, and other issues impacting our community. Taking information from the books, future articles will discuss why and how we are Producers, what we produce, how we produce what we produce, and how Producer Consciousness can be utilized to deal with community problems directly shaped by the lie that we are consumers.