By Bhabani Shankar Nayak
The worldwide horrors of war, conflict, injustice, exploitation, marginalisation, inequality, everyday violence and brutality on a mass scale are designed to numb people and erode their civilised, humane self-confidence and their trust on each other. The aim of these manufactured crises and shocks is to shape a society in which individuals become ever lonelier and more vulnerable in the name of personal space and individual freedom. Scientific reason and secular consciousness are being undermined by reactionary and right-wing social, cultural, religious, and political projects that seek to dismantle collective conscience in every sphere of life beyond national, cultural, social, regional and religious boundaries. The naked imperial assault on world peace and capitalism’s assault on everything humane and social are defining features of the desolation of our times in the twenty-first century. Unbridled individualism is offered as an alternative to the collective foundations of a happy life. It is argued that collective life undermines individual freedom and liberties. It is partly true that conservative societies based on reactionary traditions domesticate individuals in the name of socialisation. However, egalitarian, progressive, and collective societies also share sorrow and happiness and empower individuals to live in a society where our freedoms are interconnected. “Realise freedom together, or diminish freedom alone in wild” is the maxim of progressive and egalitarian collective societies (indigenous and remote communities).
The culture of mass consumerism is imposed on individuals, families, and societies. Diverse cultures of consumption are transformed into the mass consumption of goods and services based on desires that exceed consumers’ needs and means. There is absolutely no relationship between the product, its producer, and its price. This separation is central to the creation of a market-driven society in which the market decides price by separating producers from consumers. The availability and accessibility of products and services for consumption depend on one’s ability to access the market according to one’s purchasing power or economic abilities—central features of a market-led society. Indifference is inherent and integral to a society based on the commodification of life, where fundamental survival itself produces alienation. This alienation is crucial to transforming a need-based society into a desire-based society based on mass consumption of unnecessary goods and services by the individuals for the sake of a deceptive self-realisation of self-worth through ownership of a big house, big cars, expensive luxury items, and so on.
The desire to satisfy material self-worth shaped by capitalism produces social, cultural, and spiritual emptiness. This emptiness seeks a solution in more consumption of the next generation of commodities and services, yet alienation and moral emptiness continue to drive people into mental hospitals, counselling centres, or religion in search of escape. In this way, individualism and an individualistic lifestyle lack any foundation on which they can stand. The meaning of life comes from interacting with one another, and interconnected individuals can excel only in society.
Capitalism promotes an individualistic lifestyle and a market culture of individualism, but it survives on the basis of collaboration and cooperation among capitalists who work in solidarity with one another while dismantling the collective foundation of society for working people. In this way, the invisible and visible power of capitalists and their capitalist system promotes authoritarianism in order to control, domesticate, and dismantle human lives and the planet in the name of growth, development, and prosperity.
Crises and disasters are inherent to capitalism. They continue to create conditions of desolation for capitalism’s own survival and weaken the unity of human beings by promoting a reckless culture of consumption based on the ideals of mass consumption, in which the triumphant market decides the nature of individual life, family, society, states, and governments. The millennial tenacity of liberal democracy has a quintessentially capitalist core that is well equipped to assimilate individuals, their cultures, and their societies within its own fold. Rigid compliance is the only rule of the game called capitalism: there is no choice but to be compliant. Such a culture of capitalism kills all forms of diverse democratic practices. It breeds authoritarianism, accelerated by digital platforms and AI-led technologies controlled by a few who want to create a rent-seeking techno-feudal society in which all human beings are mere digital slaves.
Alienation and authoritarianism are twin toxic forces that destabilise life and society. It is time, therefore, to pause, breathe, and imagine an alternative—one that empowers both people and the planet.
