Perhaps the saddest aspect of this imperative to consume in the West is that we’re asked to accept a piece of certifiable rubbish: more satisfaction is ultimately to be found in a product – a style of trouser, a personally tailored system of electronic communication, an exercise regimen, a career – than in another human being. We will be happier with a young, handsome stranger in Barbados for a week, it is implied, than in the company of someone we love and who loves us and to whom we feel responsible and obligated.

To an outsider, we would appear to be a race of people grown inept at human expression making love, fixing dinner for someone, presenting an idea – without devices or accouterments to focus and enhance our meaning. To an outsider, it might also appear that, psychologically if not actually, many of us live in isolation; and that separated from a continuous stream of stimulation derived from our purchases we become anxious.

What way is there out of this morass? If we read history, we know that on a smaller scale it was ever thus. We know that our measure as a people in the cultural West is, always, not what we have made but what we have imagined. And we know that the failure of technology is as nothing compared with the failure of our imaginations. We know the way out of this. It is love – the Christian’s agape, tolerance of the Other, the compassion of the Bodhisattva, simple charity. It is the wisdom to accept rather than solve the intractable paradoxes of life.

On a practical level, we have to stop making things that sell, and make things that help. We have to rediscover story – and music and the theater and dance and painting and photography – as sources of renewal, not products, as the wellsprings of our dignity, our awareness. We have to discover, again, that our fate does not lie with government, or with capitalism, but with each other.

And we must rediscover a sense of humor….
(Earth Island Journal, Spring 95, 35)