One Story

I talk a lot with people about their stories. Personal narratives are crucial to the work I do in helping people find healing and redemption in their lives.

But we also have bigger, societal stories that we connect to, that we use to think about our lives, our world, our choices, our actions.

F.S. Michaels, in her brilliant book "Monoculture", describes how societies often have a story that dominates, and that this story changes over broad historical periods. She makes an awfully good case for the idea that the dominant story of our time and place is the economic story. It's a story about the world that filters how we think and relate to everything, through the role of consumers.

We relate to everything and everyone, primarily through a relationship of consumption.

Whereas education used to be about broadening minds, developing knowledge, creating beauty and ideas, it has now been reduced to an economic good or product to be consumed. We actively promote it as an investment for people to use on their path of career building (which of course, is also now purposed as accumulating things of value to be consumed, whether it be wealth or personal fulfillment)

Michaels compellingly points out how this is also true in areas of our life such as religious life - we treat church as an experience to be consumed, and even God as a product to be used and manipulated to our own ends.

Clothing, time, food, families, friendships, leisure, sport, volunteering, art... all of it... is being subtly transformed into products and services that we relate to as consumers, as part of this dominant economic story. Listen to the pundits who advise about "building your personal brand", and you'll see the most obvious expression of this. Look at Facebook and see how people are defining themselves in terms of a set of consumptive practices - assets, experiences, brand preferences, etc. and establishing status by associating with certain consumptive lifestyles.

Of great concern to me is that way we (I) have begun to treat each other from a consumption point of view. None of us would want to admit that we are shaped by this mindset in our friendships and relationships, but I'm afraid that few of us are likely exempt. It takes unusual honesty to admit that at times we view our spouses in terms of what they can do for us: make us happy, take care of us, compensate for other relationship disappointments in life, build our egos, meet our physical needs, meet our wants, upgrade our status, take away certain negative feelings, etc.  All of these, subtly become characteristics of a product we want to consume rather than a living, breathing, broken person who is with us in life.

And while it is probably fine for us to wish and hope that our partners will do some of these things at times, it is deeply flawed when we construe our partners primarily in terms of their success or failure to perform as products, and perform in the way we expect.

So even our personal stories become shaped by this economic story. It's as if the larger dominant societal story of consumerism, becomes the template in which all other stories are told. When it comes to each other as people, we're rarely so crass as to admit our commodification of other humans. We dress it up with words like "love"...which seems like a sacred term, but often what we mean by "love" is a personal experience of gratification, rather than persistent dedication to caring for the other. (Watch an episode of The Voice and notice how people use the word "love" - it almost always refers to the individuals own sense of enjoyment or how they are made to feel by the other)

But as Michaels points out, the issue is not about relinquishing consumption entirely, but becoming aware of how our minds are immersed in this story, and engaging in practices that reflect other stories, non-economic ones. She doesn't say it, but I think the logical extension is that the story of love, of sacrifice for another, is a story we must practice on a daily basis to escape the economic story becoming dominant in our lives.