A friend of mine took rather strong exception to an advertisement run by national car company Proton portraying their new Saga driven by Astronaut Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor.
The astronaut talked about the car’s power and acceleration and finally compared it with the rocket that shot him into space.
I thought the advertisement cheeky and silly but he actually felt insulted by the short clip.
He felt that we all have a social responsibility to push the human race further up the rungs of evolution instead of offering mindless entertainment for everyone.
An advertisement for the new Saga is a rather peculiar platform to launch such a serious and heavy thought but he was clearly angered enough by the 30-second storyline to examine how we can all contribute towards the evolution of society and mankind.
The capitalist system is one that requires a high rate of money circulation because it needs to satisfy investors’ desire for ever higher returns.
It is made possible by the industrial revolution that speeded up production in highly capitalized factories that must be keep working as hard as possible to pay for itself and the return a healthy profit to its owners.
Two centuries after the revolution we are now closer than ever to the zenith of the capitalist system and the consumer society that supports it.
Consumer credit now fuels ever faster growth rates in many economies and what this means is that we are simply forcing others to buy things that they neither need nor want using money they do not have just so that the bank account of companies would show a bigger balance.
If you just stop for a moment to think about the situation, it is quite obvious that consumer credit will be the cause for the unraveling of society into chaos.
Once the debt mounts to unmanageable size then the monetary system as we know it will collapse under the weight of public loss of confidence. I may be exaggerating slightly but it is true that we cannot live beyond our means.
In order to support the ravenous capitalist system, the private sector needs to produce more and more products in countless varieties to tap all available seams of spending power.
This is supported by heavy advertising and promotions budget designed to entice buyers and convince them that a particular brand of an essentially highly similar, if not identical product is superior to the others.
Faced with so many choices consumers need to be dumbed down and this is achieved by the unrelenting bombardment of advertising and the intentionally confusing copies crafted by the agencies.
How many of us can really tell at a glance, which financing package is better, which phone is more suitable for our use and which car offers better value for money?
Everything that can be fragmented and compartmentalized has been so divided and with very passing day, companies are thinking of new ways to differentiate their product from the next.
The result of capitalism is a materialistic society, without a materialistic society capitalism cannot survive and thrive.
Capitalism necessarily means that we worship money above all else and the way to show that we are the most diligent disciple is by buying and flaunting the wealth that the Gods have bestowed on us.
The world is busy hunting personal satisfaction armed with the dollar sign and end up being an increasingly unhappy place. Wealth allows the select few to worry less about the bare necessities while the majority of the population find themselves in the yoke of debt for all their lives. They have no choice but to continue working to pay for the life they are told they should want.
Instant gratification is the mantra today and with it many people become more shallow and hollow.
The case of the Malaysian Airlines co-pilot Ahmad Said, a strapping 25-year old who has his whole life ahead of him indulging in child pornography is just one example of how we look for more and more excitement in our life just to fulfill our base desires.
We do not long for spiritual fulfillment and the moment someone says spiritual fulfillment, many heads would be pointed towards religion and the negative connotation that they are used to attaching to them.
I believe that we need to build spiritual heroes in our society and less of those who can pull trains with their hair, have the most money or have anything to do with the material satisfaction.
Malays are a spiritual people, the Chinese people are a spiritual people and so are the Indians and yet somehow we have become to engrossed with dividing the material pie and forgetting about the essence of our faiths; LOVE.
Capitalism breeds lust, spirituality grows love. We have to choose what we want.
I suppose this is just a rant but it does express why I think we have more but are less happy today
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