Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen wrote about the imperial mode of living to refer to lifestyles in the high income countries that were based on massive exploitation of cheap labor and cheap resources from poor countries. By framing the problem in this way, it seemed they were putting a lot of responsibility on people in high income countries about how they choose to live their lives, by engaging in consumption way beyond their needs.
What choices do we have in choosing our lifestyle?
We can argue that nobody actually chooses a lifestyle. Our presumed choosing is a result of all the education, parenthood, social connections, life experiences that we have been exposed to. If we grew up in a poor family with no experience of private clubs, golf courses, private yachts, having servants, travelling a lot, buying expensive things, we would never know this lifestyle was available to us.
An Nguni Ubuntu aphorism reads that “a person is a person through other persons” which means that our personality is created only through interaction with other people, in a social context. We are who we are by adopting thoughts, feelings, behaviours, beliefs from other people. We can think, feel, and want to live in a certain way, after we had a presence in society. We cannot want things that we do not know about. We cannot live a lifestyle of which we have never heard about. We cannot imagine a life outside of our experience, or outside of what we learned from others.
People in high income countries live a more comfortable life because it is available to them, not because they chose it. Sure, it seems that we choose to buy in supermarkets, but if they weren’t available, would we still do it? If big houses, SUVs, or cruise ships were not available, would anyone still want them? No, of course not. When the advertising industry throws at us some new, unnecessary thing we often find ourselves thinking I never knew I needed this. That’s exactly how fake needs are created!
It is capitalism that makes high consumption available to people. What is being produced causes the problem. Consumption is an after effect. Things are not being produced because people want them, they are being produced so capitalism can make a profit, then people are manipulated into wanting them, through billions of dollars spent on advertising.
If the system is the problem, how can we change the system?
If we appear to have little choice in what we consume, and if we know we gotta change the system, the real problem is changing the system. Here is when the notion of social agency becomes important.
Social agency refers to how much movement we have available in society to explore our natural potential. Social agency is not about choice, it’s about flow of experience, it’s people being exposed to a wide variety of other people, a wide variety of knowledge, many cultures and ideas, all these contributing to the personal growth of the individual. We may be capable of some hidden talents, but we will never know unless we explore that possibility. Social agency allows that.
Social agency is something that is created by the economic and political system. If the system has a lot of restrictions on our ability to upgrade our social status, restrictions on access to quality healthcare and education for everyone, restrictions on moving around and so on, then we will not be able to explore our potential. We may not be able to find happiness, to learn skills, to uncover talents, to be helpful to others.
The system can be changed when more people align their behaviors towards wanting an expansion of their social agency. I deliberately avoid the word “choice”. Behavior cannot be chosen more than a lion cannot choose to hunt an antelope, or a chess grand master cannot choose to think about chess. The system changes when a collective is seeking to increase their social agency.
Who is doing the “choosing” for me?
Some people don’t like to be told what to do. But you are telling yourself what to do all the time! There is no single occasion when you think you made a choice without your Past You telling the Present You what to do. All your thinking, all your emotions, are the Past You manifesting itself in the Present You. And, as we have seen, the Past You is a creation of all those lived experiences, all the people you have met, all the things you learned, which you did not choose at all.
Even when you thought you chose to learn something new, that thought came from a previous experience. Not to mention the vast amount of information we do not put under the illusion of choice that we want to know about.
Our choosing is done by our Past Self. Our Past Self is a creation of lived experience and is limited by social agency. Lived experience is what is offered by the economic and political system. Some people are born with the privilege to be exposed to rich experiences. Many other people are born without access to rich experiences. We simply cannot create on our own those lived experiences. That is a myth created by capitalism that if we work hard enough, if we are smart enough, we can overcome our condition.
How to keep people accountable?
If people are not responsible for living certain lifestyles because the system created them, then it seems difficult to hold people and the system accountable. However, nothing stops us from imagining a desirable moral code, or an ideal society. Even this act of imagination may come from the fact that we have seen suffering in the past, we have experienced moral and material progress, and we evolved to feel all those are good things. This does not stop us from wanting more progress.
We hold people and capitalism accountable by comparing them against a desirable moral code. We can decide, as a society, that for example having too much wealth is not something desirable. We can decide that destroying the environment for the purpose of wasteful production and consumption is not something we want to pass down to future generations. We can decide that the continuation of life in all its diversity and forms on Earth is something we want to protect. These ideals can be translated into a desirable moral code, and into government policy. Then we can see that if the system does not respect these ideals, we will hold the system accountable.
The good news is that a lot of people support these ideals. Just in the recent Peoples’ Climate Vote 80% of people globally want their country to do more on climate change, 69% said climate change is impacting their big life decisions from where they choose to work and live, or what they buy. The takeaway is, we can change the system. We should not blame people for their lifestyles, but we should hold the system and the people accountable for interfering with the social agency of others. That is the bottomline.
Photo by Jon Tyson
Interesting piece. I generally agree, especially with the contention that "People in high income countries live a more comfortable life because it is available to them, not because they chose it. Sure, it seems that we choose to buy in supermarkets, but if they weren’t available, would we still do it? If big houses, SUVs, or cruise ships were not available, would anyone still want them? No, of course not."
This analysis lends itself to two things: a critique of lifestyle politics, and an understanding that systemic change is usually the precursor to individual change (at least, on a mass scale).
I saw an example of the power of systems when I adopted my kids from Haiti. In Haiti, they played with whatever was available. I remember them being intrigued playing with rocks and a bottle cap. In the US, almost immediately their rooms got cluttered with toys (even though that's not what I, as a parent, wanted). Same kids, same desire to play. But, yes, we can advocate for changing systems and also model different life ways (to some extent) individually. Ex. We give to and buy from thrift shops.