What we need

I recently watched a four-part documentary series entitled “The Century of the Self” by a fellow named Adam Curtis. While I initially watched it as a requirement for one of my classes, I was rather enthralled with the subject. Essentially, the series focuses on the development of the “me” generation, and discusses how a man named Edward Bernays, the “Father of Public Relations,” utilized his Uncle Sigmund Freud’s work on psychoanalysis to sell people products by linking them to identity. As a result of this work, there have been grave repercussions, ultimately cumulating in a society where complete selfishness is not only acceptable, it’s considered to be the proper way of life. I find this to be rather disturbing.
Our patience, as a society, has grown short and we are slowly growing less and less capable of empathy, and delayed gratification. Every brand markets its products with slogans like “Because you’re worth it” or “Exceptional because you are.” We seek ease, pleasure, convenience, and we seek to gratify our most basic desires, even as they consistently fluctuate and contradict themselves. While there is nothing inherently wrong with desiring an easier life, I think it’s become all too easy to discount the cost. We’ve been told so many times that we deserve everything good and luxurious, to the point where we believe it. But all this desire for luxury comes at a price: we assume we deserve every good thing we get, and conversely, we assume that the people who are not getting these things don’t deserve it. Our compassion has withered, and it has become easier to simply continue to strive for the status quo.
If you’ve been reading my column for any length of time, it’s probably clear that I have a strong interest in social responsibility, as well as positive contribution to the rest of society. If not, then let that be reiterated now. Therefore, this whole idea of a society structured entirely around meeting individual whims, to the detriment of the disenfranchised and the destitute, is something that alarms me. We seek governments that will promise tax cuts, even if they come at the cost of our social programs or ultimately result in greater debt in the long-term. We seek cheap clothing, even if it comes at the cost of poor working conditions and reinforcing corporate relationships based upon continual exploitation of third world countries. We have become so unaccustomed to voluntary sacrifices for the greater good, as a general rule, and as a result, it has become easy for us to lose track of what truly matters. Of course, wanting the best for one’s family or desiring a high quality of life is something everyone desires; but I think quite often that which we truly NEED and that which we think we require are very different. We are accustomed to getting everything we want, and luckily for us, we live in a consumer-based society where the production escalates and demand is created for the most unnecessary of objects that have somehow become symbols of our identities or place within society.
Uxbridge, as a community, is a wonderful place. Like any community, there are issues we need to resolve and there are problems that need to be faced, but as a whole… I’m proud to call Uxbridge my hometown. There’s a sense of community that I’ve grown to appreciate, even though I can’t truly say I was born and raised here. However, as citizens of Uxbridge, we are also citizens of a larger, global community. We have responsibilities to our neighbours in our town as well as to the people we share the planet with. We can get messages around the world in seconds; we have mobility unlike anything else we’ve ever had… and yet, we also have a society of people functioning primarily as individuals out for our own self-gratification.
We have the ability to have all of our needs - REAL needs - met, and to move beyond that to help people in situations far more dire than our own. We’ve been bombarded with advertisements and political campaigns that are designed specifically to target our most basic instincts and our strongest temptations. The goal, in my view, would be to move beyond what we may be inclined to do, to see what we need to or should be doing. We don’t need to create a deeper chasm between who ‘has’ and who ‘has not’. We don’t need to prove our worth by having more things than our neighbours.
I honestly believe that seeking the greater good, and the betterment of our world will give us a deeper satisfaction than we could ever have otherwise. For me, this was a Matrix-esque blue pill/red pill moment. If nothing else, it’s something to think about.