The Rise of Consumerism Is Killing Relationships — Here’s The Real Reason Why
As consumerism rises, the family increasingly fades into the aeons of history — here is why
There has been a women’s movement over the last century which has seen a rise in the rights of women.
It’s popular to say that this is what is killing relationships, that women have choice. This is a load of rubbish.
Here is why, what is often forgotten is that for every right a woman got, a man got an equivalent right. For example, a woman in education is a woman who can join the workforce, and a woman who can join the workforce can survive without a man.
This frees men from needing to take a wife i.e. in a world where women need men to survive, men have to meet that need, but in a world where they don’t, they don’t.
Even the ability to divorce, it’s often sold that this liberated women from men, but it equally liberated men from women. In fact, it’s often forgotten that one of the main reasons it is believed that divorce became outlawed by the Roman Catholic Church back in the mid-first millennia, was to stop men from abandoning their wives and children — who could seldom survive in the old world without a man.
As such, there has not been just a woman’s movement, there’s been a men’s movement as well, meaning there has been a social revolution where the individual has become empowered, and where men and women alike for better or worse have been liberated from each other — at least at the individual level.
But there has been a price for this liberation, and that price is that we have taken all power from families and given them to the state. So, in the past our families were the state, now the state is the state.
That means families no longer protect us or define our futures per se, the state does. That means the state is far more powerful than the family, and it can even take children from families should the parents not comply with the wishes of the state.
The question is, what empowers the state? The simple answer is, the economy, and it is the insatiable hunger of the economy that is killing our relationships.
It is doing this because the only thing that stands in its way of gaining more power, are families.
Yep, families.
The power of the economy rises as the power of families fall
In the past, we used to put the vast majority of our wealth into our families, now we put all of our wealth into the state. That means the state is now our family. That means our families have been replaced by something new, something bigger, something more powerful.
It has been replaced by something so big, there is no escaping from it.
That something is *drumroll* GDP.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo a.k.a. the DRC, the family is still the almighty. This is because people don’t work for the economy, they work for their families, which can be seen by how low their GDP is.
Yep, GDP does not per se measure how well off a nation is, it measures more whether the people within a nation work for their families or for the state, the higher the GDP the more people work for the state, the lower the GDP the less they do.
However, there is an inflection point, so, once a nation’s GDP gets to a certain amount per capita, it becomes impossible for any person in that state to work for anyone other than the state.
The entire Western world is far beyond this point, which is why everyone works for the state.
However, the DRC is not, they are far from it, their GDP figures (approximately $600 per person) show that the people are self-sufficient and as such need very little money.
That means people in the DRC don’t work for the state or need it, hence, why they don’t need much money, instead, they work for their families, each of which will be a de facto state in its own right.
Because of this, the state of the DRC can have little influence over its populace other than at the point of a gun, but even then, it’s a struggle.
The DRC is of course a poverty-stricken disaster zone, but the family is nuclear, which is why the DRC is a failed state — so it is not a state, it is a place full of nuclear families who are each state’s in their own right.
That’s why the family rule over their children, and why people need their families more than the state. Because people work for the family, not the state. It’s also why men and women still get married young and immediately embark upon building a family. In this world, you have to create your own state i.e. family, to survive.
And you don’t have the option of not creating your own family to survive. This is because there is no nation-state for which you can work. There is no interconnected national or even local economy, there are no big businesses, there are no public-sector jobs, there is just your nuclear family.
Except that’s not strictly true, there are still taxes that need to be paid, but very small taxes and these taxes are basically the equivalent of paying a Mafia to protect you.
Which is how the world used to be.
Before the rise of the state which was fuelled by the Industrial Revolution, a country’s leaders were not governments, monarchies were not governments, they were nothing more than protection rings, people paid taxes to them so that they would protect them from external invaders.
Even the church was basically a big protectorate ring, with the purpose of it being to keep families together i.e. thou shall not divorce.
This is why the DRC is such a disaster zone, it is filled with protection rings and families who are paying those protection rings to protect them from other protection rings that want to expand their protection rings.
You could even say the country is filled with lots of little empires in which the families in each empire pay the local Emperor to try to keep the other emperors out.
Sound familiar?
That’s because it’s the story of history. People paid local “emperors” to keep the other emperors out, but that was it.
The emperors may have wanted more, but they couldn’t get it. They had little sway over families, mainly because, again, families are largely self-sufficient.
To understand why this matters, imagine a big nation trying to influence a small nation that is self-sufficient. They can do it to an extent, but only if they offer the small self-sufficient nation something, or they go to war with them.
The trouble is, even after going to war, because the families can be self-sufficient, after the war has been won, the big nation will have to stay to keep control, and even then it will be a struggle because they will have to keep control of each individual family.
But how do they do that when all the people need their family more than they do them?
The simple answer is, you can’t. It would be like a teacher trying to keep control of an entire school by themselves, as soon as the teacher turned their back, the kids would go back to doing their own thing.
This matters because in the past, just like in the DRC, a child was born into a family, not a state. There was no state. However, now people in developed countries are not born into a family per se, they are born into a state.
By all accounts, that means we are now more a dependent and thus a possession of the state than we are a family, mainly because our state has more power over us than our families.
How this translates to consumerism killing families
The reality is this, men and women don’t need each other to survive, they don’t need a family to survive, if they contribute to the state, the state will keep them alive.
That means everyone who lives in a developed state has more loyalty to the state than anything else. The state is our mother and father, and mothers and fathers are always the most powerful influence on children — even if we dislike them.
In the past, the state, which was our family, told us we needed to make a family ASAP, and that was our most important task, it told us that if we were unhappy with our relationship, we should fix it ASAP and not even think about giving up on it.
That’s why that was what we would do.
Now the state tells us our most important task is working for the state. And here’s the thing, how do you work for the state?
You get an education so you can join the workforce, you join the workforce so you can earn money, you then use that money to consume. To consume, to consume, and to consume some more because that is what fuels the state. Consumerism, so the circulation of money.
This is what is killing families.
The state has turned families and relationships and people into the prime consumer items which fuel the circulation of money, which is why we treat each other more often these days like consumer items.
Yep, there’s a reason sex sells, it’s fuelling the economy, which is why the state has put the cycle of relationships at the heart of our economies, and because the state is all-powerful, we comply with its wishes — just as we used to our mother’s and father’s.
For example, now if the state says don’t aim to have a family, focus on your education and career first a.k.a. gain the ability to consume first, people will do as they are told — because the state is all-powerful. Now if the state says if you’re unhappy in a marriage you should get a divorce — a very profitable business that fuels the circulation of money — people will do as they are told.
If it says, don’t fix your relationship problems between yourselves, turn to the Internet for advice a.k.a. consume, people will do as they are told. If it says try therapy a.k.a. consume, people will do as they are told. On and on it goes.
For example, after the divorce, if the state says try the dating scene a.k.a. consume, people will do as they are told. If it says being single is awesome, try all these things a.k.a. consume, people will do as they are told. If the state says affairs are cool, try one a.k.a. consume, people will do as they are told. If it says be promiscuous a.k.a. consume, people will do as they’re told.
No doubt you get the point, and no doubt you get the point that the state tells us to do all of these things and a lot more.
That means it is not the rise of the individual rights of men and women that is destroying the idea of family, it is the rise of the state because the state can only rise by destroying families, and how does the state rise?
By telling us to consume, consume, and consume.
Final words
The fact is the dating and breakup scene has been made so profitable that if we started having successful relationships, GDP would take such a big hit, it would literally cause the economy to collapse and push us all into a depression.
No jokes, it is that profitable. This is why all the systems out there don’t want us to have successful relationships, even if it seems like they do. They just want us to consume as much as humanely possible.
What this means is one of the keys to succeeding when it comes to love, is remembering that the system is against you having a successful relationship because successful relationships hinder consumerism, and hindering consumerism, hinders the rise of the power of the state.
That means if you want to have a successful relationship, don’t look to the state, look to your partner, because only then will they stop being a consumer item.
The power is in your hands.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy the following:
15 Fascinating Facts about Relationships That You Probably Didn’t Know
Men and Women Fixing Relationship Problems Is What Drove Us to Build Cities — Here is How
The Top 10 Reasons Why the Modern World Is Ruining Everyone’s Mental Health
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