A few days ago, I wrote about the disturbing way that contempt is seeping into every banal aspect of our lives (you can read the post here). This is so important, and so toxic. The more I think about the burgeoning of contempt in our culture, the more I know that this is not an accident. We live in a society that is manufacturing contempt, both deliberately and as a by-product of the way we live today.
Our stuff is built to be discarded. Look at what you’re wearing right now. How much of it was purchased in the last year? The last 2 years? How about the last 10? How old is your computer? Your TV? Your furniture? Your toaster, for God’s sake? We buy something and expect it to rapidly break or become obsolete. We even want it to break, so we can buy a new one as soon as possible. The rush of buying something new is addictive, and the fact that our stuff wears out so quickly compounds the addiction.
Our things are literally built to be treated with contempt. Our design (with a few notable exceptions) is not focused on beauty or purpose but on building commodities that can be produced cheaply, break quickly, and are, unfortunately, worthy of the contempt with which we treat them.
Our news encourages us to fear and distrust one another. I watched a few minutes of CNN at the gym one day and tried to count the number of times I saw the words “death”, “kill”, and “terrorist” appear in the ticker. I lost track after 20 seconds. So I tried to count the number of non-negative headlines I saw instead. In 2 minutes, I saw one headline that was not overtly negative. One. It was about oil reserves in Iraq.
Our news, like our stuff, is designed not to nourish but to be cheap, consumable and addictive. It flatters our ignorance, validates our fear, shuts down our curiosity and titillates our basest emotions. In so doing, it keeps us hooked on toxic (mis)information, convinced that everyone is out to get us. By shutting down our sense of inquiry and commoditizing information into easily consumable sound bytes, our news is literally and deliberately manufacturing contempt.
Our communities are self-centered and isolating. In the United States, we mistakenly equate freedom with privately owning things, and our communities reflect this in a very toxic way. We have too many big houses and cars, too few parks and walkable neighborhoods. We spend our money on things, not experiences. We allow, indeed welcome, big box stores and chain restaurants to invade our neighborhoods, destroying local businesses.
In short, we’ve commoditized not only our consumption and our news, but our very communities! A suburb in Kansas looks the same as one in New Jersey. Small towns in Oregon have the exact same stores and restaurants as small towns in Florida. These kinds of communities breed economic decline, undermine local diversity, stifle creativity and alienate us from one another. The alienation of modern life doesn’t, in itself, breed contempt, but it certainly facilitates it by breaking down our sense of community and the greater good.
I hope it’s obvious that commoditization is the common thread throughout this post. We have commoditized practically everything in this society, thus creating a culture in which contempt is easily manufactured, amplified and manipulated. This contempt keeps us materialistic, fearful and alienated. Contempt fills us so that we have no room for anything else. Most importantly, it blinds us to the idea that we can do better.
We can do better. We can work toward a future where we create things that are valuable and meaningful, where we embrace the world and build vibrant, healthy places to live and work.
Consumerism, commodities and contempt won’t get us there. Compassion, creativity and community will.
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Include virtual communities. They are prime examples of commoditization – in this case of cheap, poorly designed and discardable ideas.
Hi Bill, thanks for stopping by! I agree that we also often treat virtual communities as commodities, especially in the business world. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I’ll be writing a lot more about this soon.
Thank you! Wow. Extremely well-said.
Hi Stacy, thanks for the comment! I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
lovely post – ‘In the United States, we mistakenly equate freedom with privately owning things’
now to make the case for a new set of opiates
Thank you, Jimmy! Glad you stopped by.
Robin, these are some terrific insights. And, there’s plenty of blame for everyone…consumers and politicians, for sure…but also “creators” and “educators” and “investors.” To be an entrepreneur was once to care passionately about creating a great products: lasting solutions that improved life or work for specific people in meaningful ways. That task is a challenging one; it cannot be achieved quickly or cheaply. It’s an indictment of our collective foolishness that an entrepreneur who works for a decade to create a unique service for a niche market, creates a few dozen high-paying jobs, pays her taxes, sends her kids to great colleges, etc. is regarded as a so-so entrepreneur because she didn’t build a hundred-million-dollar-a-year sales juggernaut. Seriously? Her venture generates a couple million dollars in annual profits on total equity investment of about a million. That’s so/so? But what the politicians want is 1000 jobs — ANY jobs, no matter how stupid and dead-end they are. What the venture investors want is massive reach for the brand, so they can convince retail investors of the unbounded promise for zany future potential profits — and the associated stupid valuation multiples. And, the educators (MBA, anyone?) fuel the nonsense fire with teaching centered on agent/manager cases, rather than principal cases — brainwashing entire generations of business people into thinking that generating 5% growth in EBITDA year/year via reducing R&D and raising leverage is BY DEFINITION good business. Newsflash: creating value is noble because it is rare, requiring original creativity and energy to be applied diligently beyond the point that most people would give up or sell-out or compromise. In other words, it is WORK. As opposed to PLAY. We’ve become a society that thinks everything should be PLAY. We are playing at the idea of work. We are playing at the idea of creating. We are playing at the idea of living. We are playing at the idea of teaching. I sincerely hope that the 15 minutes of fame for a generation of little-leaguers is about to be over, so we can get back to the serious business of being. Human.
Well said, Scott. Glad you enjoyed the post! I would actually substitute the word “easy” for the word “play”, because I think that’s what you’re getting at. We often think of working hard in this culture as working long hours (even if we don’t do anything worthwhile), and we think of playing as trivial and easy, like going out drinking or spending all day playing a video game. The concept of emotional labor, of really investing ourselves in something we believe in, is treated with idealism and distain… unless it can generate a profit, of course!
Real, creative, meaningful play (the kind that creates authentic value) requires emotional labor. For that matter, so does creative, meaning work! And so the lines begin to blur.
This kind of work and play will be absolutely essential to transforming the way we do business in the 21st century.
We are also confronted with an abundance of abundances which we can choose use for virtually any purpose. While our grade schools teach us mostly to sit down and shut up, the web affords us unbounded opportunity to learn everything we care to learn and to express ourselves on every topic we care to write or speak or act or dance about.
Complain all you like, but also teach us how to exploit the abundant resources at hand to explore our vast opportunities to grow ourselves and help others. Attend to the teachings of the Dalai Lama fostering compassion when you care to. That’s very humanizing, at least to me.
Thanks for stopping by, Richard! You’re right, there’s a lot of information out there to help us live more meaningfully, and I’m very grateful for it. Cultivating a compassionate heart is also essential, as you say.
We can’t put all the onus on the individual to try and break out of the system, though. We’ve seen how well our over-reliance on individualism has solved our other problems.
Until we as a society learn to value compassion and meaningful creativity the way we now value profit and personal gain, it will be very hard to break free from this cycle of commodization and contempt.
Dear Robin, I stumbled upon your blog and really love it!
I am providing a german language website dedicated to viable ways into a sustainable future – one article per week. The way you do act and think are very in line what I do present there. Would it be acceptable for you if I made a thorough translation of this article and present it on 52wege.de (of course mentioning your site, the origin of the article and you)?
I wish you all the best you and the amazing work you are doing.
Absolutely, Dirk! Will you kindly link to the original post? Thank you for stopping by, and I’m glad you enjoy the blog. Ich finde auch 52 Wege ein tolles Blog.
Enjoyed the read. I believe one of the causes of this contempt is that so much of what we have in the western world has been achieved so easily. It’s easier to disregard the value of something that comes easy, whether it be material, spiritual or virtual. Compare this to our parents (well, my parents) who were born in the 30′s and ’40s, for whom things like higher education were much harder to achieve.
I’d encourage you to continue thinking and writing more on this subject; I believe, based on this and the earlier post, that you have much to offer.
Thank you, Martin. Glad you enjoyed the post!
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Hi Robin, I enjoyed your thoughts. I am not sure, though, if our relationship to our stuff rises to the level of contempt. I think it is more disappointment or apathy.
Outstanding points; very important and timely. American culture seems to be increasingly devoid of meaning and community.
At first, this may sound off-topic, but there’s a great book out there – “Last Child In The Woods,” by Richard Louv. This book has heralded a whole movement that some call “No Child Left Inside.” I think it touches on some profound truths – that today’s children are growing up increasingly inside, glued to TV and/or computer screens, and without the essential grounding of the outdoors, with the result of ill health mentally and physically – the author referes to it as “Nature – Deficit Disorder.” Addresses the lack of community and identity.
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