Consumercide: Inequality, Inequity, Insanity

For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treated them all as a single State. But if you deal with them as many, and give the wealth or power or persons of the one to the others, you will always have a great many friends and not many enemies. And your State, while the wise order which has now been prescribed continues to prevail in her, will be the greatest of States, I do not mean to say in reputation or appearance, but in deed and truth ... 1

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Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. 2

The combined wealth of the world's three richest people is greater than the total gross domestic product of the 48 poorest countries. 3

Today an estimated 20 per cent of the population in the ‘developed' world consume 86 per cent of the world's wealth. This means that 80 per cent of the world population have distributed amongst them a paltry 14 per cent of the world's wealth.[7] To understand this kind of sheer over-consumption attributable to the ‘developed' world which thereby contributes substantially to this state of affairs, one should consider the fact that a mere $13 billion would be enough to meet all the world's sanitation and food requirements - this is hardly as much as what people in the United States and the European Union spend each year on perfume. 4

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The United Nations estimates that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all, and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. That is a lot of money. But it is just 4 percent of the combined wealth of the world's richest 225 individuals. 5

The figures above represent only a fraction of humanity's losses due to inequalities. "Towering above it are the lost innovations and potential never realised by the vast bulk of the human race because virtually all of us are denied a say in the running of society or the purposes of production. And so we all, 'rich' and poor alike, live in a world of dreadful poverty dominated by waste and haunted by lost opportunities." 6

1 Plato, The Republic, 370 BC
2 Standage, Tom, "Bad to the Last Drop" New York Times August 1, 2005
3 Vanaik, Achin "Unequal Gains: For the Elites, the Super-Rich Are the True Heroes of the Times" Telegraph December 22, 2005
4 Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq "The Impact of Globalisation: The Institutionalisation of Social Crisis"
    The Institute for Policy Research and Development, 2001 globalresearch.org
5  ElseTalk, Anne "The End of the Fairytale: Beyond The Capitalist Romance" for Beyond Capitalism Seminar, Wellington, 2 October 1998
6  Peacock, Adrian, Two Hundred Pharoahs, Five Billion Slaves, Ellipsis London 2002

The quotes above reinforce a truism repeatedly noted on consumercide. This is that the rich of the 'north' (and particularly its richest elites) are directly destroying the world through their actions of greed for power and oppression; but the tyranny does not end with those who suffer most in an economic sense. Rather, it is suffered by every living being on the planet, and this very much includes the elites that are responsible for the lion's share of world inequalities. If the elites could really see into the pervasive sickness that propels them to engage in such addictive behaviour and take steps towards curbing that disease, then they would be far better off psychologically and somatically, and they would live in a far better and more humane world. If the world's 691 billionaires (2005 figures) would give up just 1% of their net worth to truly humanitarian causes, that would be a $22 billion dollar start towards making the world a better place.

And all of us in the rich north--that 20% that consume most of the world's resources--have to consider our part in the oppression and genocide that has become the norm of developing countries. We allow through our complacency, passivity and our consumption, the corruption that ensures that the sociopathic destruction of the elites is maintained. Some of us even revere as role models (or even gods) those who amass such wealth for themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.

These are the distinct markers of the most sick of societies.

Consider this excerpt (quoted below) from The BEAST "50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005" :

Charges: Silently enabling and contributing to the irreversible destruction of your planet. Absolving yourself of your responsibility to do anything about it that your immediate neighbors don't. Assuming that it's normal behavior to spend several hours each day totally inert and staring into a cathode ray tube. Substituting antidepressants for physical motion. Caring more about the personal relationships of people you will never meet than your own. Shrugging your shoulders at the knowledge that your government is populated by criminal liars intent on fooling you into impoverished, helpless submission. Cheering this process on.

Sentence: Deathbed realization that your entire life was an unending series of stupid mistakes and wasted opportunities, a priceless gift of potential extravagantly squandered, for which you deserve nothing but scorn or, at best, indifference, and a cold, meaningless demise.

And with that, this site has now found yet another definition for consumercide.

...in 2003 there were 1.2 billion out of the developing world's 4.8 billion people living on $1 per day, while another 2.8 billion were living on less than $2 per day. In 2003, the richest fifth of the world's population received 85% of the total world income, while the poorest fifth received just 1.4% of the global income. -source