The Soap Box

The May/June issue of Orion Magazine includes an article by Jeffrey Kaplan titled The Gospel of Consumption that is an interesting read. Kaplan’s article discusses the history of how we have created a world where production and consumption of more and more goods has become the priority over living a meaningful life.

The author quotes Arthur Dahlberg’s 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism in relation to the impacts that increasing the length of the workday would have on consumers.

“By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in" he suggested, the profit motive becomes "both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs." For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, "it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”

I came across a prime example of “wrapping our soap in pretty boxes” the other day when I had the opportunity to tour a box factory. The facility designs packaging for a number of consumer products, then prints graphic patterns on paperboard, cuts out the boxes, and then runs them through a folding/gluing machine creating thousands of boxes in a single run. The packaging is designed to entice us to buy the soaps and other products they contain. In the end, we consumers unwrap our new soaps, and toss the boxes in the trash, or if we are “environmentally conscious” the “recycle” bin. After my tour, I have not been able to look at the boxes that hold the “cleansers of my soul” in the same light.

Kaplan concludes his article with the following reminder.

We can break the cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities (…) in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet. If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around.