If we believe that:
- as consciousness beings we make consciousness choices;
- we should take responsibility for the choices we make;
- our choices impact other people, environment, society, etc;
- although impact resulting from each individualistic behavior is relatively microscopic, the combined effect of these behaviors is significant;
Why then those who think before they buy are still a minority? How many people, base their choices mainly on financial or brand criteria or consume only because are influenced by an intrusive advertisement?
Why is not “ethical” or “critical” consumption a natural choice?
Reasons are many…..
- Are we indeed consciousness beings? How many things we do, are done because we follow a certain pattern, automatically, subconsiously learnt? If we study ourselves we might find that the reasons why we drive our car to go to the shop or the fact we take the plastic bag graciously given by the shop-attendant do not include at all consideration about the impact on nature. Not necessarily does this mean that we do not care about nature…sometimes we simply have not thought about the side effect of our activities.
Another common reason for rejection is people do not believe that "critical" or "ethical" consumption could lead to meaningful result due to the negligibly small impact of each of us over the “entire” world. Many people would think critical consumption is nice, but they claim is inefficient and useless due the difficulty to involve a critical mass in it.
However a simple way to defend the contra thesis is if we draw a parallel to political elections and voting. During election campaigns, there is significant investment from the elite, advertising to citizens the importance of each individual vote. The results of an election are a visual example of the impact of combined effect of individual behaviors…then why is so difficult to accept the fact that if 60% of dog owners start to clean the shit after their dogs there will be at least 50% less shit on the street. (accounting for street dogs)
There others who entirely reject critical consumption. It is their understanding that the state and municipalities have to regulate environmental and ethical issues. They do not want to invest time, money and efforts in critical consumption. They are convinced that their social responsibilities end when they pay their taxes if they do. It will be a long way to get these folks involved, but lets try to change ourselfes first....
This blog is trying to aggregate reasons why individual choice matters and to help critical consumers in their behaviour through providing useful information. Comments on how we do it are more than welcome!
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