Quo vadis, Luxury

This essay is dedicated to my beloved Sarah who has been an unfailing infuence in the creation of it...

I am nauseated. Appalled. Not a day passes that the two Western Civilizations
(Europe & the DisUnited States) do not fre up my ire. The only solace I
embrace is that both WCs (WC I & WC II) are more outraged with themselves
than I am with them. I ask myself: How may I be satisfed knowing this? I
just cannot. Everywhere my eyes see for me, I am reminded of William Blake's
couplet:
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe,
One should think that with all the attention that is allocated to health, diet
and exercise by the proud, greedy and jingoistic, there would be at least some
somebodies basking themselves in the sunshine of their lives. But no.
Everyone is afutter. Strained. Running helter-skelter. I sense I must break
loose...the same sensation that vexed me in Caracas, Venezuela a bit before
the city, senseless, careless and hopeless, broke into a bloodcurdling violence
that wiped out two thousand people over one weekend. I feel I am smothered
by self-serving simpletons who care nothing for the society they pertain to and
expect only to gratify—the faster the better—their personal cravings for
appointments and trappings. They do not consume to possess; rather, they are
possessed to consume and fail to take into account that half the world subsists
on subunits each day. When hundreds of millions of earthlings are addicted
to such a dog-eat-dog modus vivendi, only this clear-cut conclusion might be
drawn: We are living in very dangerous times. (I've got to get out of this
place!) Ante bellum?
It used to be that clothes made the man or the woman, but today it is obvious
that the fashion industry makes the designer and the manufacturer who, in
turn, churn out the rough and tumble wearing apparel business...whether you
like it or not. A sort of pop culturalism gone in reverse, especially pertinent
when one thinks that Design has supplanted Beauty during our mad rushes to
conform and earn. At this point, therefore, we can say that in fashion anything
goes! Anything that sells. As long it is stereotyped. It will never be fashionable
to go around naked, will it? Why?

We would have to sift forever to fnd an enterpriser more dopey than one who
today produces exemplars of opulence—The Trinkets of Vulgarity—such as
bags, luxurious vehicles, private jets, haute couture clothing, accessories,
yachts, designer clothes, luggage, shoes, watches, jewelry, and then some
more. Anything that takes us away from what we are—to a dream world of
what we might want to be but never will be. There is even a glut of “privileged
conspicuous consumption” in view, but targeted to only a few: those who can
render it!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Luxury corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by
possession and the poor by covetousness. It sells the country to softness and
vanity, and takes away from the State all its citizens, to make them slaves one
to another, and one and all to public opinion.” Need more be said? You,
betcha!

It is not the economy. It is the human being. It is unquestionably imprudent

to think otherwise. Ever since 1601 when the English East India Company
dispatched its frst outing to the New World in search of ill-gotten gains—thus
“inventing” capitalism—there has been a knee-jerk reaction to the
accumulation of wealth as if it were some sanctifed system, for the good of all,
at the expense of workers sweating to accrue it for their persons in charge,
and an arrangement, while not perfect, that is the best of all those available.
Time and time again this pact has degenerated systematically into chaos and
has caused immeasurable misery for hundreds of millions hoping to receive
some “small change” from this frequently corrupt, obviously fawed, unsigned
treaty coordinated between employee and employer—but by the employer.
Economic dodos even study these cycles of stupidity pontifcating, with
colored pie charts and factitious, “horoscopic” mathematical theorems, on
how it is just normal that fractures in the technique of administering an
economy and fnancing its stock market are a matter of historically recurring
routine. Creative destruction. (William H Gross, once managing director of
Pacifc Investment Management [www.pimco.com] and Las Vegas blackjack
expert, is reputed to use gaming juju when calculating stock buys; and, my
uncle Lester Wood, Merrill Lynch executive in the old days, told me fat out:
“Gamble the [stock] market to lose.”) Will someone please tell me when this
400-year-old ruse used deceptively to gain another’s confdence, this swindle,
will pass into oblivion for the good of all of us?
Why are we so greedy and corrupt? Do desires to encounter pleasure instead
of pain rule our behavior? Why this preponderance of interest in pleasure
over pain? Of course, there is nothing per se reprehensible about wanting to
enjoy pleasurable experiences. Yet, what if we think that perhaps 50% of the
world lives on a couple of dollars? Are we not swimming into deep ethical
waters, where it could easily be argued that the pain of the rest of the world is
also our own. Do we not have some ethical, common sense responsibility to
alleviate the infictions of others? At least recognize that they exist? And not
just for some religious motive. For one that depends on our own survival.
Alain Minc, in his Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (Gallimard, 1993), hinted at the idea
that Europe (Western Civilization I) was overwrought with hedonism, and he
mentioned the possibility that the Old Continent risked a breaking up into
organized, criminal factions that might take over democratic processes which,
over the years, could deteriorate because of the greed and corruption that has
permeated them. There is defnitely a “Pall of Incertitude” hanging over
Europe, and indeed the DisUnited States of America, that suggests that
Western Civilization is under social, economical and political scrutiny—by
itself, by others. Asia!
In Italy, just recently, it was reported that in Germany the idea has been
bantered about to dress overactive children in jackets flled with sand to keep
them fxed in their seats at school! Italian mothers furiously opposed the
sentiment. But what must strike one as even more absurd, is that European
mothers and fathers—going on three millennia now!—have not learned to
raise their children properly! Not to say that members of Western Civilization
II have! Worst of all, there is no call to fnd out why kids can't keep still!
Authored by Anthony St. John
2 February MMXVIII
Calenzano, Italy
www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior
Twitter: @thewordwarrior