Buddhist teaching is built on the concept of samsara, the perpetual cycle of birth, suffering, and death that we must struggle to overcome by attaining nirvana, or freedom from desire and ignorance.
Buddhist or not, we all are trapped in samsara. Our lives are a figurative cycle of death and rebirth, with endless suffering in between. We suffer and inflict suffering on others, though society has found ways to obscure both of these. We are blinded by veils of ignorance and desire, obscuring our only path to freedom.
We who partake in modern society– whether enthusiastically or reluctantly– have resigned to this cycle; we masses toil away our entire lives in various forms of soulless labor, to produce an ever-increasing array of worthless consumables, which are then sold back to us through manufactured desires, while the damage to our planet increases exponentially and guarantees increased future suffering.
Reflect for a moment on all the “creature comforts” that we aspire to attain, and whether any of them truly enriches our lives, and whether they are worth the countless hours of freedom that we trade for them, the lifetimes of stress that we endure attempting to remain financially secure.
Think about the luxuries that we vow we cannot live without, the standards of living that were unimaginable just a few generations ago, and how resistant we are to the very notion of changing our habits for the betterment of our own lives and our communities, to say nothing of the hope of saving our very planet.
Drive down a street in any population center– be it a metropolitan downtown or a suburban strip-mall hellscape– and evaluate what you see around you. Hundreds of restaurants to satisfy each of our novel cravings, thousands of stores selling every variation of clothing or home furnishing or other inherently-worthless trinket.
Consider how many advertisements you encounter every day, in some form or another. Each one reinforcing a lifetime of indoctrination that consumption and material possessions are meaningful goals. Each thing promising you some fleeting glimmer of happiness or fulfillment, or asserting that the consumption of this particular thing is sustainable and good for the planet, or commiserating with your dissatisfaction as some form of subversive, “woke” marketing. Whether it’s a commercial or a billboard or even just some hip logo and brand marketing, our senses are bombarded every minute with things begging for our consumption.
Walk through a mall and marvel at the opulence on display… marble walls, granite columns, ornate fountains. What was once reserved for temples of spiritual worship or communal spaces is now a grotesque facade to obscure the ugliness of consumption, sweatshops, and planetary destruction.
How many libraries do you see amongst the commerce? Or museums? Community centers, open spaces, or even religious temples? One for every thousand bastions of consumerism? How can we pretend that our lives are built on anything other than consumption?
The ruthlessness of modern society lies not only in the grinding of the bones of the poor, those that must struggle simply to survive; neoliberalism’s more insidious evil is its broader dehumanization of us all. We have rejected the old gods and their silly myths and replaced them instead with lazy nihilism and hedonism, an absence of belief in anything that leaves us alienated and desperate for anything to give us meaning. Our civilization is built on the exploitation of our vanity and myopia, our timeless, universal psychological weaknesses.
Liberalism masquerades this as individualism. Conspicuous consumption is our reward– our counterweight– for the empty, unfulfilling hours of servitude that we sacrifice every day. We are compelled to purchase things that express our unique style and sensibilities, or to or enrich ourselves with or, occasionally, donate to a worthy cause that is nevertheless fundamentally incapable of solving any systemic issue.
This is the Eden of neoliberal capitalism. An interdependent populace whose shared belief in money and things far outweigh their differences, resulting in a stable and docile society that wants everything and values nothing. Endless delights for insatiable appetites.
Perhaps, at best, we could justify that that consumptive capitalism also serves as the foundation for all the complexities that are necessary for advancements in medicine or science. This is a common argument by people that have been indoctrinated their whole lives to believe that such advancements are impossible under any other system (“look at all the failed communist states!”). But why? Why do we presuppose that these things cannot be decoupled? Why are we so willing to believe that greed and selfishness are the only motivating factors for our species?
How can we be satisfied with this life? Whether you believe that humans are endowed with some transcendental spirit that makes us unique and special or you believe that we, like every other living organism, exist solely to replicate our genetic data and then die… how can you find any meaning or purpose in the world we live in?
What, then, is our nirvana? How can we break this cycle and escape the suffering? That, brothers and sisters, is what the Church of the Savior Self intends to discover.
