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flow of energy and materials, due to the limitations of nature. And
terming the unscrupulous wasting of the resources of the planet as
development is by no means self-evident. The green economists arguing
for a stable economy prove exactly its opposite. Yet I quote not them,
but instead the words of their great forebear, the classic of utilitarian
liberalism John Stuart Mill: “It is scarcely necessary to remark that a
stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state
of human improvement. ‘There would be as much scope as ever for all
kinds of mental culture and moral and social progress; as much room
to improve the art of living and much more likelihood of being
improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.
Even the industrial arts might be as earnestly and as successfully
cultivated, with this sole difference, that instead of serving no purpose
but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their
legitimate effect, that of abridging labour.””
The fact that economic growth not only does not serve cultural
development but in fact stands in irreconcilable contradiction to it, can
remain hidden only so long as the availability of material goods and
services remain, explicitly or implicitly, at the centre of concepts of the
good life. In consumer society, wellbeing is nothing other than being
solvent: the ability to satisfy ones needs — as defined by the system —
through using up more goods and services than ones jealous neighbours.
Consumer society — a society in which consumer is a synonym for
person — revolves around the satisfaction of needs: it devotes a historically
unparalleled amount of energy to the discovery, awareness and
satisfaction of needs — and their creation. Before the age of industrial
societies, the word “need” did not exist in its current usage, as some
objective connection between man and certain goods that exists
independently of us. Only recently has consumer society managed to
detach from man first his labour — in the form of wage labour — and
then even his “needs”, which he can only satisfy through the possession
of goods and services that he can purchase on the market. The Meadows
couple, Ivan Illich, Manfred Max-Neef and others warn society in vain
that man has no need for a vehicle, for instance, or even for
transportation. In reality these are merely tools which he is forced to
use through the transformation of the social space. Vehicles bridge the
gap they themselves create. “They create distances for all and shrink
them only for a few,” Illich explains. “Everywhere in the world after
2 John Stuart Mill: Principles of Political Economy. Book 4, Chapter 6.