In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.
Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.
And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.
So like… I’m agreeing with the things you’re saying, but the way it’s phrased makes it seem like you’re saying “It’s actually the poor people who are the problem”
In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?
English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.
American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.
The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.
But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?
In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.
Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.
And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.
So like… I’m agreeing with the things you’re saying, but the way it’s phrased makes it seem like you’re saying “It’s actually the poor people who are the problem”
Just struck me as kind of funny lol
In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?
English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.
American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.
The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.
But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?