There can’t be any doubt that this consumer binge that has gone on almost unchecked for nearly 30 years has been a total disaster. Solutions for controlling consumerism and greed are simple yet I would argue would be politically difficult to implement. Our culture of entitlement has made putting the brakes on spending with impunity nearly impossible. Whatever talk there is of a “credit crunch” Britain is still flush with easy money; we have to control the amount of credit people are using to fund lifestyles which are completely beyond their means. People want so many consumer goods *right now* and they are very willing to resort to debt to fund it. Compared to their incomes, most Britain’s can’t really afford huge LCD TVs, iPods, fancy mobile phones exotic holidays and the like. To make it possible they keep adding to their ever growing debt-mountain to pay for it all.

As we keep pressing our foot on credit accelerator people keep getting stuck in a negative feedback loop. The more they spend, the more goods they obtain and the more quickly they become dissatisfied with them. They become dissatisfied so quickly because of two primary reasons; the don’t feel the pain of having to save the money to purchase the goods and the producers of such goods make them rapidly obsolete to keep people buying them – they create trivial improvements that whilst not substantially improving the product they know consumers will start to become quickly dissatisfied and want to replace them.

So, the first plank of my argument to start to strangle unchecked consumerism and greed is to start making credit more difficult to obtain; slow the down the slew of credit cards available, stop the insane 120% mortgages and debt consolidation companies which are little better than loan sharks that allow people to load up with unimaginable debt they will *never* repay. Lifetime debt is already with us.

A second issue to tackle is the way our culture has become over commodified. We have allowed our environment to become almost entirely colonised by greedy companies and profiteers from rip-off phone-in quizzes on TV, to relentless advertising and branding to the takeover of public spaces like renaming stadiums after junk-food and beer companies. This has saturised our culture with wall-to-wall profiteers and has taken over our lives and has been profoundly anti-democratic; we have no sense of control of anything as they’ve all been handed over to private firms. Giving control of country to the hands of the greedy has been a cultural, political and economic time-bomb.

My third and final suggestion is to tackle the poison of private property; everything from the water in our tap to the genes in our own bodies are being copyrighted, owned, taken from us – our great commonwealth is effectively being stolen from under us. The crusade for private property has become the greatest example of criminality of our age; we are being enslaved by a giant protection racket and this extortion racket is utterly pervasive; like a virus it’s spread to the extent you have to pay to do almost anything even though you’ve probably already paid already – this endless double-dipping for our basic needs has to and absolutely must stop.

Unless there is some kind of democratic revolution any of this is highly unlikely to occur – regardless of which is the major three parties you vote for, none of them are at all interested in tacking the status quo.

Joseph Rowntree called upon us all to seek out the fundamental causes of weakness and evil in society.
Eric Berne gave us a succinct view of self-and-others; the tool required to achieve the above aim.

I would assert that (whether evil comes from social incompetence or – if such is your view – from letting the Devil in) its root cause IS weakness; the weakness of the individual.

In Berne’s terms, weakness amounts to an under-developed Adult ego state* in the psyche; a condition I see as pertaining all over the planet. The two terrible truths of society, are: (1) individual weakness is increasing, and (2) the overcompensating-weak, rise to positions of power. Consequently, any corrective effort must reach out directly to the very young as the Powers That Be are, instinctively, fearful of general empowerment.

I have synthesised an approach. It can be found http://www.barriesingleton.co.uk as outlined in 1995 to Rowntree. Click on “Visionary Stuff”.

Only wisdom empowers; cleverness is inclined to enslave. Development of a strong Adult ego state engenders wisdom and is vital to individual, family, group, state and world stability. Adult strength is the ultimate answer to every weakness and evil.

* Transactional Analysis http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/ta.htm

On another point:
Having only read the summary of findings and not yet looked at the full report from the consultation, I think more should be made of the fact that respondents were self-selected, not representative of the public at large. Do you have the respondents’ profile (e.g. socio-economic, gender, age, geographical spread)? It’d be good to know who responded and how views varied across different sub-groups.