Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Consumerism & Homologation, The 2030 Agenda for…

- - - - But what if the cage broke?
        
        In the psychological The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R.L.Stevenson displays the radical division of personality resulting from the strict moralism of the middle and upper society, giving voice to the hidden reckless pulsions of human conscience. Still, conventions cannot be broken, and the "murder" (metaphorically talking... most of the times) has to be concieved in a secret, parallel, identity, eternally struggling to emerge
      - Positivism
      - Property
      - Propriety
      - Prosperity
      - Progress
      - Prudery
- - - - All these features were synthetised in the figure of Charles Dickens, at the same time journalist, writer and editor of his own novels, making profit out of a precedently aristocratic activity as one of the first modern writers, intending book as a commerceable good but also as a mean for didacticism, attempting to teach the reader something (not yet, or not anymore, as a real denounce of the reality and society)
- - - - In his work Hard Times, Dickens refers to the subject and says: "against them (the exploitation of the workers and the pollution of Coketown) were to be set off, comforts [...] and elegancies which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady [...]".
        He moreover ridiculises those new self-made-men through the figure of the pompous Mr Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, the owner of Coketown's factories who constantly praised himself for his humble birth.
- - - - Charles Dickens himself worked in a blacking factory when he was 12, and used his experience to portray workers' conditions in his novels.
        
        In Hard Times we have an astonishing description of this system: "It (Coketown) contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours with the same sound upon the same pavements to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next".
- - - - Many criticism were raised againsted the workhouses, one of all that of Charles Dickens, who personally experienced life in that places.
        
        In his autobiographically-inspired novel Oliver Twist, Dickens presents his view of the workhouses system. It is the story of an exploited orphan who, through many adventures and eventual crimes, experiences his "revearsal of fortune" and finally enters the upper classes in society. According to the author, the real problem is not the workhouse itself, but the wrong management of it by greedy and unmerciful exponents of the lower-middle class.
- - - - The most important were:
        
        Oscar Wilde, son of a respectable family and graduated in Classics. In London he appeared in the most trendy magazines for his wit, dressing style and oratory abilities, gaining the title of dandy. His fortune failed after the works The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé, presumed to be immoral and obscene, and mostly after his trial being charged for homosexual tendencies, then illegal in Britain.
        
        Robert Louis Stevenson, whose poor health and family's strong Calvinism were the first inputs to "rebellion". He travelled much, left Engineering at univeristy to graduate in law, married an American woman and moved to Australia, Tahiti, and finally Samoa.
        He openly rejected common religion and respectability, by behaving eccentrically and leaving his hair grow long, as one of the first English bohemian.
- - - - The continuous production of goods implies the continuous use of primary and secondary resources, such as water, raw materials and energy.
        
        Undoubtely, capitalism allowed the extremely fast development of human societies and States, on which an entirely new topic could be drawn, but also the horrible drawbacks of it, with unexistimable social and ecological costs.
        
        An alternative is possible neverthless, which intends both development and social and ecological sustainability, with responsible use of human and natural resources, without exploitation and overconsumption. It is called Sustainable Development
- - - - After all, money is intended to be spent, so what else could we do with our wage? Things are not a valuable good anymore, indeed we do not care much about them as long as we can buy others.
        
        Why buy a single, well-made dress when we can buy 10 of it at the same price? Why "waste" time making dinner when we can use pre-made meals? Our society is so obsessed with social appeareances, efficiency and speed that we, as consumers, do not question much about what we buy. Is it really worthy? How is it produced? What's its impact on economy, society and environment?
        
        The educated consumer is a myth, but also a possible solution. As long as people buy a certain product, a company can maximise its income by lessening the expences: that's easy with resource exploitation. An educated consumer, however, can decide not to buy products of unethical or doubtful origin, directing the market towards sustainability with their choices.