Your ideas about the detrimental effects of material consumerism
are spot on, but I would like to supplement and possibly add to your argument.
While there are some capitalists who would argue that
freedom, personal agency and happiness come out of the availability of choice,
the quality of goods and the option of purchasing such goods provided by the
capitalist system. In reality this is not entirely true.
First of all, the testimony from the doctor in the example
you gave is proof enough of the emptiness of material goods, but what I'm excited
about in this argument is not only the meaningless junk we buy day to day at
any moment thereby depreciating its value, but also that the meaningless junk
provided to us by the capitalist system comes in so much variation that,
coupled with the pressures of making the right choice and the constant prodding
of modernity for us to adhere to a capitalist system we are rendered not only
paralyzed, but also miserable.
The capitalist idea is that with more choice, the consumer
should feel freer to do whatever they please within a capitalist system. This
is not true. As Barry Schwartz discusses in his TED talk "The Paradox of
Choice" the sheer volume of choice available to us makes us unhappier by
virtue of the theoretical option that we could possibly have made the wrong
choice. We may pick and choose the best product of its type, but at the end of
the day we are haunted with the idea that we could have made a different,
possibly better one.
In an L.A. Times article about the importance of gratitude,
the author mentions that her mother was of the school that when she received
gifts, she wrote notes. (Her mother was born in the early 1900's) With the
ever-present ability to buy any item at any time in a store, at a restaurant,
in a mall, online, from a friend, on craigslist and so on-the individual
importance and the very prospect of gift giving and craftsmanship is dissolved;
idea that is commonly tied to Fordism. When material production is mechanized
and labor is deskilled to fit such a production model (the one capitalism
thrives upon) the artisan fades into yesterday out of unimportance and
irrelevance to a growing industrial system.
I believe Marx was correct twofold in his ideas of
capitalism.
One: that capitalism as an institution keeps the working
class just happy enough to not revolt, quit, or commit suicide and feeds them
along the way with meaningless material goods.
And two: that the very nature of modern capitalism, the competition
of various corporations providing the public with type after type of the same
product contributes further to the breaking down of the spirit of the consumer
relinquishing the idea of corporate accountability to personal accountability
of being incapable of making informed choices.
