And with every bite, every press of the accelerator, every swipe of the credit card in our shopping malls, we have left a larger ecological footprint on the face of the world. We have squeezed our wealth out of the bodies of plantation workers in Thailand, farmers in Ecuador, factory workers in Malaysia. The crisis of consumerism is infecting every culture of the world, most of them emulating our American lifestyle. David Loy, in The Religion of the Market , considers whether consumption has actually become the new world religion. While it recruits new converts through the floods of mass media, it dulls the consumer, making us oblivious to the suffering in which we participate.
Shopping is a core activity in sustaining a culture of denial.
Now that communist countries throughout the world are collapsing, consumerism is all but unchallenged in its growth. As traditional societies become modern, consumerism is the most alluring path. Religious peoples and communities have the power to bring the only remaining challenge to consumerism. And Buddhism has unique insights which can stem the tide of consumptive intoxication. It is easy to join the delusion, forgetting our Buddhist training.