I'm going online right now, telling people how I live, maybe 10 see it and say "he's right, I have to live by what I claim to believe" and make an effort to change what they do. Maybe 10000 do, maybe none. But I did this because I wanted to.
I don't care what companies do, if they don't have what I want they don't get my money. It's really that simple. We talk about marketing and propaganda, how much marketing has gone into muddying the water and poisoning the discussion just to get people to forget this one fact? If everyone just lived by their own stated rules they wouldn't be able to get away with any of this. They get away with it because we let them get away with it, by making excuses for ourselves. They want you to make these excuses you're making, convince yourself why you need their junk, convince yourself that it is insurmountable because you can control only your own behavior. You're demoralized into wanting "the collective" to change your life for you. You focus on your peers instead of yourself, and this is precisely how they can get away with what they do, because of the choices you make, because of your focus on things out of your control.
My goal isn't to save the world, my only goal is to be honest with myself and live the way I want to. And that's all it takes, everything else is excuses.
1. We can “save the planet” (whatever that means to us) by forcing companies to change: ultimately it is we who have to change because the change flows from us
2. None of this matters: it’s just about personal integrity
Because these two can be combined: if everyone just had sufficient integrity/character then we could “save the planet”. We wouldn’t be trying to do that, as individuals, but that would be the emergent result.
What I’ve been complaining about all along is just the apparent idea that we can help the environment by voting with our wallets. But if this is all about (2) then I don’t give a shit at all: I don’t care about the personal finance aspect, the frugality aspect, or the “living your values” aspect; I simply think the idea that we as consumers have more power than companies is wrong. And specifically when it comes to “saving the planet”.
But if “saving the planet” is not a concern then we are just talking past each other.
And all of that crap about “excuses” is just you projecting your living-your-values mission onto others; I don’t care, for even one second, about that stuff. At least the way you present it.
It is, by the way, funny how you think that “companies” want us to think that we are powerless. Well sure, maybe they do. But they have indeed invested money in the idea of the all-powerful consumer. The now famous “carbon footprint” was an invention by British Petroleum: the idea that we should, as individuals—always as individuals—just turn off the bathroom light and maybe not drive on Sundays. The “carbon footprint” is of course the fault of individuals, not of entities like BP. British Petroleum and you would at least agree on that much.
Maybe the perfect consumer (as far as companies are concerned) does feel powerless. But she also has to feel a sort of paradoxical guilt for using about ten planets worth of resources (if extrapolated to the human race).
And yet another trick is to reduce people to consumers (as in only that). Hence your fallacious conclusion that my line of reasoning is that people should feel powerless. But that ignores the fact that people are also citizens, and they have more potential power as citizens (political animals) compared to your don’t-tread-on-me code of conduct.
Each company has their own marketing department. Public Relations is the science of manipulating desire, developed for over one-hundred years now. And they just have to focus on selling their coffee machines or whatever.
Take just one commodity as an example. A soda. They sometimes put just a little bit of salt in it to (1) mask the sweet flavor, and (2) to make you more thirsty. But you of course don’t notice any salty taste or the fact that it is unreasonably sugary because the salt and the sugar (to a point) cancel each other out. But a reasonably conscientious consumer could read the what’s-in-this-shit label, go on a message board and convince a lot of others (hundreds? thousands?s) to do a boycot campaign until all major producers start to issue “no salty business” labels on their products, so that the somewhat less conscientious consumers can pick the no-salt options without reading the what’s-in-this-crap label.
Now you just repeat the above step for all of the hundreds of items that you have to buy.
Who has time to do that on a big enough scale? No, not just on the scale of getting the bragging right of “I consume X times less than the average person”;[1] we’re talking about actually pressuring companies (with our awesome wallet power[1]) to stop producing whole lines of products.
Each company just has to sell their coffee machines or whatever else. And you just have to do wade through and make sense of the the propaganda given out by dozens/hundreds of companies, for hundreds to thousands of product lines.
[1]: Some fringe “anti-consumption” lifestyle groups does not threaten the bottom-line of any company.
[2]: Speaking of which: one can of course vote with one’s wallet. That is a form of power. But here the issue of how relative that power is painfully obvious: some (most) people have wallets (including savings) consisting of hundreds to thousands of dollars, while some people (and entities) have wallets with hundres of millions of dollars. This is not a one-person-one-vote kind of power!