Paucity

In my first junior school, we had a succession of Swedish cooks. Each day they would come to our little village school (usually by motorbike) and prepare all of our meals from scratch, fresh each day. Naturally we all hated our school dinners. When, at the age of nine, I moved to North Tyneside, where the school meals were largely mass 'cooked' on an almost industrial scale across the whole county I quickly came to appreciate the culinary delights that I had left behind. It's an old cliché that you don't know what you've got till it's gone, but it might be helpful if we could find a way. A lack of appreciation of our current situation leads to a desire for another. As we are constantly sold the idea that the accumulation of wealth and possessions is the key to our happiness, we continue to accumulate and consume. It is like some sort of compulsion and no one is going persuade us to stop, as our whole economic model is built on the assumption that we will continue to accumulate and consume more and more. No alternative is offered or even considered; it is a one-way process that cannot be reversed or re-routed. We stick so religiously to this orthodoxy that even when the super rich run out of things to spend their obscene wealth on, they search relentlessly for more, still convinced that what they have is not enough or good enough. I recently heard that to fill up the Octopus - Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen's super yacht - with a month's worth of fuel costs $600,000.  And that is just fuel. A 'yacht' like that has no practical use, it's just a way of disposising with excess wealth. If you have enough money to spend $600,000 a month on boat fuel, you have too much money. That is not the politics of envy, it is the politics of basic rationality. 

That kind of example Is probably unhelpful in that it simply presents an extreme so ridiculous that we fail completely to associate with it. We can't see that we are locked into the same cycle of endless dissatisfaction as Paul Allen; we cannot equate our desire to buy the latest iPhone with his desire to posess a ridiculously large boat. Indeed that is part of the problem: we see that Paul Allen has so much more than us and subsequently feel justified in our dissatisfaction that we don't have a little (or a lot) more. So we push ourselves to greater consumption, because if they can have more, so can we. This is the only way that the wealth of the super-rich trickles down - the effect that the right wing is always so keen to accredit to their mates; this is the real politics of envy, it drives our economy on to greater and greater consumption, with the excuse against the consequences that we are not consuming as much as the next person. Constantly comforted that we are not the biggest contributors to the problems of relentless consumption and constantly dissatisfied that we are nowhere near the biggest contributors to the problem, we are happy to drive the the accumulation further and further, not by much, by just enough that we make it to the other side. Where the grass is greener surely.