Prince Charles' Take on Consumerism

In a recent address to a national press group, Prince Charles (yes, the same royal highness so often criticized in the press) spoke words of wisdom. The transcript is worth reading in its entirety, but here is the money section below.

Gandhi realized that Humanity has a natural tendency to consume and that if there are no limits on that tendency we can become obsessed simply with satisfying our desires. The desire grows ever more potent as we consume ever more, even though we achieve very little of the actual satisfaction we desire. Is this not so in the Western world today? Despite such high levels of consumption, we hear so many people admitting to feeling deeply dissatisfied. Studies now show this to be the case too. A report by the Children’s Society in this country concluded earlier this year that the pressure on children, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, to have the latest designer clothes and computer games is resulting in more and more of them falling into depression. Which reminds me of that wise observation about Gross National Product made by Robert Kennedy forty years ago, that it “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”

One of the downsides of consumerism, it seems to me, is that it forces us to compromise on issues that should not be compromised. I’m sure there are many people who know that it is wrong to plunder the Earth’s treasures as recklessly as we do, but the comprehensive world view which we now inhabit persuades us that such destruction is justified because of the freedom it brings us, not to say the profits. In other words, our tendency to consume is legitimized by a view of the world that puts Humanity at the centre of things, operating with an absolute right over Nature. And that makes it a very dangerous world view indeed.

It is an approach which accepts as the norm a one-sided, entirely “linear” form of progress and an extremely literalized view of the world. For some reason we have been persuaded that what we see is all we get. It is a view encouraged, I am afraid, by some of the Media, and it concentrates only on the outward parts of creation. It does not look to the whole - so much so that we happily de-construct the world around us, dismissing as unreal anything that cannot be objectively measured and tested. It is, if you like, a world of only visible quantities.

The question I would ask you to ponder this evening, then, is whether this predominantly rational, technologically driven and secularist approach to life is actually “fit for purpose” in the twenty-first century?

It is an approach which has been adopted in such a wholesale fashion that I feel many do not even realize that we have lost something very precious - what I might best describe as that intuitive sense of our interconnectedness with Nature - which includes the realm beyond the material.