>The bigger lesson: Humans don't desire consumerist society.

How exactly is this the case? By all metrics, humans love consumerism and it, or rather capitalism, allow us to enjoy an exceedingly high quality of life.

I would say: Consumerism helped grow the economy from the end of the agrarian era/start of the industrial era to a poorly delimited point in our recent history when we transitioned from industry to services. After that point, consumerism has been as bad for our mental health as high fructose corn syrup has been for our waistlines.

Manufacturing and agriculture combine to less than a fifth of American GDP today; I say it would be better quality of life if Americans worked one day a week for the same material possessions, but the drive to consume ever more is the primary impediment to that. Similar arguments apply in the other G20 economies, but I’m not going to quantify them.

Of course, I’m not an economist, so perhaps I’m doing a gross disservice to the real value of the service sector…

Profit seeking corporations love consumerism, most humans are fine with a safe warm place to live and enough food to raise a family.

Convincing them to voluntarily transfer their wealth to someone else is the goal of consumerism, hence the ridiculous money spend on propaganda convincing people they need more things than they want.

The revolutions of 1989 would tend to argue against that. Leaders in East Germany and the like thought that giving people subsidized food, housing (and alcohol) would be enough to make them content. Some of it was, yes, about not having democracy, but a lot of it was being upset that they didn't have the consumer goods they knew people in the West had access to.

Hmm. I live and work in the bit of Berlin that used to be DDR (aber ich bin Ausländer).

The museums around here insist the two big problems were the secret police and the fact that production wasn’t very well matched to demand. Even if you ignore the literal Stasi, I think you may be understating the impact of the shops running out of various foods from time to time.

Totally agree. The number of people who naturally always want more is pretty low. Most people just want some level of security and comfort.

If humans weren't naturally susceptible to consumerism, that money wouldn't yield a ROI...

Humans are susceptible to seduction.

I don't think the point of consumerism is to separate humans from their wealth. You could do that easily and more effectively with many other organizational structures. Look at "communist" dictatorships, or feudalism, or isolated tribes that have no means of trade; their general population is very poor and shut out from what wealth the land generates or has the potential to generate.

The point of consumerism is to act as a motivator for the working class to keep working. Once you have that plentiful food and safe & warm hut, assuming that's all there is to aspire to, it would be very tempting to stay home from work on Fridays.

But... if you resist the temptation of shiny bullshit, we're so productive now that you could stay home from work on Fridays and the gears that provide that food and hut would keep turning. Why do people have to be motivated then? it just so happens that the excess of that extra work goes into someone's pocket.