Commercialism and Consumerism have given Capitalism a bad name

On December 4th, 2024, I got my first tattoo.  As myself and the artist talked, I asked if she was excited for the Christmas season.  “No”, she said, “I don’t like Christmas.  All the capitalism, I guess.”  I’ve heard that very same sentiment expressed by at least 10 people I know personally in the US, and gotten the feel of it from many others in our culture. 

What all of these people disdain about the Christmas season is the rampant promotion of superfluous products to overstimulated people who already have enough useless stuff in their stuff-boxes (houses).  They hate to see once-meaningful traditions co-opted by a self-esteem race started with the purpose of mass-marketing and making monetary profits.  They’re discouraged by seeing the people around them scrambling to have a picture-perfect season according to the trends. I happen to see a lot of truth in that sentiment and though I’ve retained my childhood love for Christmas, some of our seasonal shenanigans make me cringe. 

Of course, this behavior extends well beyond Christmas and any other celebrated Holiday.  Living in America means living in the crosshairs of endless advertisements, almost all of which are for things we don’t need.  Many industries bombard us with campaigns encouraging us to spend now and think later, and their efforts to sell the maximum and beat the competition often go to ridiculous lengths.  I’ll give one example – the automotive industry, since I worked in it for nearly 10 years.  The average passenger vehicle can have 20,000 parts in it.  The supply chain to make a car from beginning to end will have over 15,000 different suppliers involved. 

Automotive suppliers are typically geared to “high production volume.”  The most economical condition for them is when they set their factory lines up and make tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of the same or similar parts over and over.  At one point quite recently, the Ford Explorer (including optional upgrades and different color options), had over 25 variations available for sale.  The Toyota Highlander had more than 35.  Many of these variations, which the manufacturers must keep in stock once marketed, will sell less than 1,000 units per year.  For most suppliers, the cost of these low-volume production runs will be at least 20% higher and can be double the standard cost. Worse, these “low-runners” are notoriously difficult to forecast, so more inventory than needed is always produced – not filling orders is not an option. 

What it means at the end of the day is each automaker and their total supply chains pay obscene costs and waste hundreds of millions of dollars in obsolete inventory every year, simply to maintain all of these variations of a car and gain what amounts to a little more market share.  The more you step back and look at the whole picture, and how much good could have been done with all those wasted resources, the more asinine it appears.  Many American industries work in this way as a normal way of operating.  This is what I call an example of commercialism. 

I define commercialism as the tendency to become obsessed with commercial gain, to the point of sacrificing deeper values in pursuit of its attainment.

And we see many people going along with the program.  There is a story living in the back of most American minds telling us that as we acquire more and better things, we ourselves will become more and better. There are enough people who buy into this mindset of continuous and increasing material acquisition to keep the system running.  I personally know two people who buy a brand new truck every two years.  They lose money on every lease and trade, and they’re both relatively deep in debt.  They don’t know when they will be able to stop working at jobs which they don’t happen to find a lot of meaning in. Yet they will not be satisfied without having the latest and the greatest.  This is what I call consumerism.

It is simply the other side of the coin to commercialism.  I define consumerism as the tendency to become obsessed with material acquisition and outward appearances, to the point of sacrificing deeper values in their pursuit.

With our commercialistic and consumeristic tendencies, we do some pretty stupid stuff in our country.  And a great deal of these ugly things are attributed to the oft-demonized word capitalism (as is the case with my wonderful tattoo artist).  What is capitalism?  I myself have seen at least 5 definitions of the word, all with grains of truth in them, though some of them with smaller grains than others.

Capitalism means this – free trade without coercion/violence.  It is a system in which individuals can make whatever choices they like, so long as they do not impose force or fraud on anyone else, and where no coercive intervention (i.e. government action) takes place, except to punish people who initiate violence.  I’m going to say it again, because in order to have meaningful dialogue, we have to come to terms with our terms.  Capitalism is just the name for a system where people live and trade without violence.

Now, in American culture, for most people, commercialism, consumerism, and capitalism are synonymous.  If you walked right up to a random person on the street and asked them, they’d probably tell you those words all basically mean the same thing.  This is a mistake.  Making bad choices is a different thing than being free to make your own choices.  This is why I say that commercialism and consumerism have given capitalism a bad name.  Of course, it's important to remember that our American system is not a capitalist system; the closest that ever came to happening was in the early days of the country.  However, there was always some government intervention in that system, and it quickly grew into the massive parasitical relationship we know in 2025.  That being said, even in a capitalist society devoid of coercion, it’s likely we’d see some of the same scheme around us.  Many folks believe more freedom would make it worse.  So does that make free trade a bad thing to be avoided?

I happen to be disappointed and appalled at a great many choices that people make with the freedoms that they have.  I think it’s ridiculous that a baseball player makes $700,000,000 while human beings starve in the street.  I think it’s ridiculous when people own 7 cars, or 4 houses, 3 of which remain unoccupied for 11 months out of the year.  I shake my head when I see a person let their kid have 2 Krispy Kreme donuts every single morning.  I think it’s crazy when companies care more about quick profits than having fulfilled employees and being a benefit to society.  I believe it’s terrible when people are willing to make decisions they know will end up being bad for the environment.

But if I had the opportunity, would I force those people to abide by what I see as my higher values?  No. Just because people make stupid choices doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to make choices at all.  This insight might sound silly, but it is so pivotal to the unfolding of human societies everywhere that it cannot be overstated.  We have so much violence and coercion (synonyms for government) because we believe that we can’t let individuals make what we perceive to be bad choices. 

The problem with this mindset is that whenever we take away a person’s ability to make a choice by force, whatever the reason, we are sacrificing a deeper value in the process. Every individual human is a rational being who makes choices in the face of alternatives.  We have a nature, and some choices will serve our flourishing according to that nature more than others. As Mark Michael Lewis, The Profitability Coach, likes to say, growth = information x responsibility.  As we make choices, we get information from the world around us, and the more we take responsibility to understand and integrate that information in future considerations, the more flourishing we’re able to create for ourselves and others. This individual learning process is part and parcel of being human.

Force short-circuits this process.  Force says “People are incapable of learning and cannot be trusted to course-correct through time.  We must make them do the right thing.”  In a society like America with a large, intrusive government, people are taught not to take responsibility for their actions. They’ll be forced to do things a certain way anyway. They are disincentivized from working to improve the quality of their choices. Under these conditions, individuals make less direct contact with the infinite depth of reality, which is the ultimate teacher to guide them in creating more flourishing.  Instead, they are deprived of their choice and responsibility by someone who is just as human and who has just as provincial a knowledge as they have. Because of course, the right thing is always being determined by whoever is in control of the political apparatus at the time.  Learning and growth stagnate in a culture like this.  Our vision becomes myopic, and our aims begin to fold in on themselves.  The seats of political power incentivize and embolden the most totalitarian elements of society to step up to a new level.  Our contact with reality progressively diminishes.

If we want to experience the most rapid movement possible toward the maximum flourishing for everyone, we must create an environment of maximum responsibility and freedom.  This environment is capitalism.  Would a capitalist framework prevent commercialism and consumerism?  No way.  We’d still have a bunch of that stuff.  However, people would be held far more accountable for their poor choices by the ultimate teacher that reality is.  Would we learn as fast as most of us would like?  No.  However, we could learn to encourage each other in our journeys of growth and learning without taking an unhelpful stance of superiority, dominance, and violence.

So let’s remove the baggage of commercialism and consumerism from capitalism, and look at it in a different light — a system where people are free to make the maximum contact with reality, and to learn from their mistakes through time.