Vinay Maruri

Robins p.8
9/29/14
The Cap K
Your trash can at home is hopefully somewhat small. Every time you put
something in it, you think nothing of it. When the time comes to put your trash out
to be collected, you also think nothing of it. When you see the trash truck drive
away, you still think nothing of it. But when you actually go to a garbage dump, you
start thinking something of your trash. Hundreds of acres of trash tower over you,
making you think that maybe the continuous buying and throwing away and blatant
materialism pushed by capitalism may not be the best thing after all.
When we go to the grocery store, the average person does not think about
what the value of the food that they are buying and whether they need the food or
not; rather they pick the item and dump it into their carts. They proceed to the
cashier, and then swipe their credit cards without a second thought. We do this on a
daily basis, yet nobody truly knows why.
This mindless behavior is ingrained in our culture and this can be seen in the
way cities and towns are built. Highways and roads get built and around those roads
are countless strip malls and shopping complexes. In our pockets, we feel the
vibrations of heavily promoted cell phones and we drive newer, more advanced
cars, but these cars and cell phones have not fundamentally changed since their
inventions. A car still runs on gas and has four wheels, and a cell phone still
connects one person with another. In theory, nobody should need to replace their
phones and cars until they fail completely, yet in most cases we buy whenever the
newest thing comes out. We have been trained to think this way and in order to
fulfill this, we must continually buy in order to keep up with the rest of society.
The attitude of buying is ingrained almost immediately after one is born. For
Christmas, we are all told as kids that if you ask Santa nicely, you will get whatever
you desire. On your birthday, kids ask their parents to get them some gift or
another. When one does this, one hardly thinks about the value of the gift. One gets
the gift, uses it for a period of time, and then when the next opportunity arrives, we
want more items. When childhood ends and one becomes an adult, this cycle
continues until one dies.

We never do stop and ask why we need or why we buy items. I never gave a
second thought about Christmas gifts I asked for when I was younger. I asked for
gifts and most of the time my parents bought them for me. I now realize though
that most of what I asked for as a child, I used for maybe a couple of months. After
those few months went by, I would throw the items into a closet, then move onto
the latest and greatest thing. These things piled up in my closet until my closet door
could no longer be closed. Once my door couldn't be closed, I realized that what I
was doing didn't make sense at all.
This cycle of buying and throwing away is perpetuated by an economic
system that places too much value in material goods. Capitalism is what we have
been taught since birth, and with the reforms in former Soviet republics, capitalism
no longer has any competitors left in the global marketplace. Capitalism encourages
us to buy endlessly to drive the economies of the world, but we have become so
reliant on buying that even temporary small decreases in buying by the populace
cannot be tolerated. When spending on items should be going down, we instead
allow our spending habits to be propped up artificially by taking out loans that we
cannot possibly repay. All of this needless action taken just for buying stuff that will
become worthless or not good enough for the average person in a few months and
will end up in our growing piles of trash.
Our dumps are full of spoiled food and old electronics that are thrown out in
favor of newer replacements. Dumps overflowing with old items that people throw
away without a second thought, simply because it looks bad or is old. As a result of
this, society needs to build more and more dumps to cope with rising amounts of
trash and rising amounts of people on Earth. Earth however has only a finite amount
of land to fill with garbage, and because our population will not decrease at any
point in the near future, we must find a solution now, otherwise we risk losing Earth
entirely because of capitalism's disregard for substantial environmental protection.
A fundamental tenant of capitalism is greed; capitalism tells you in essence
that you can make as much money as you want to and there will be no
consequences for doing so. This is why some environmentalists have claimed that
capitalisms promotion of using the environment as a source of profit will lead to
human extinction. However, there is a problem that can be seen with the numerous
people who have been convicted of white collar crime. These convicts take money
that doesn't belong to them, and they continue to do so until they are caught. Even

when they are caught, most receive very light sentences or probation and worse
yet, the majority of them are not forced to forfeit their illegal assets and their illicit
material goods. In essence, capitalism promotes greed, even when that greed is
unjustified or has horrendous results.
Material goods should not hold so much value in our lives that we take greedy
actions for the sole purpose of buying or throwing away material goods. This is the
equivalent of an addict mugging somebody in the street because they need to get
their fix. The only difference is that what society deems as unlawful and psychotic
on the part of the addict, it doesn't give a second thought to material goods. In fact,
society deems you to be abnormal if you don't buy material goods often enough.
People are ridiculed for driving old cars and have their houses heavily devalued for
not renovating sections of the house often enough. In order to stop the cycle of
materialism in our lives, this is where we must begin. We must change the mindset
in order to stop being so friendly to our endless cycle and to promote rationality
when it comes to buying goods. This can be done slowly, yet efficiently. Success can
be attained simply by convincing a family of three that it doesn't need to buy an
SUV every three years or by convincing a construction developer that they are
being influenced by greed if they are demolishing and rebuilding a 10 year old
building. These would be examples of a true individual mindset changes that would
lead society on the path against capitalism.
As we move past individual mindsets, the path becomes more difficult. No
longer working on the individual level, we move into the realm of our society's
mindset. The target would be the capitalist mindset that is rooted in our lives.
Capitalism depends on the endless cycle of buying and throwing away in order to
survive, and will only increase the value of material goods in order to remain
solvent. This is where our true problem lies, because as long as we use capitalism
as the basis for our economies, we will continue to have mounting piles of trash and
ever growing materialism. In order to solve these problems, we must either alter
capitalism or come up with another economic system to replace capitalism.
Coming up with a new economic system would be a daunting task even if we
didn't have capitalism to deal with. However, since we do have capitalism to deal
with, the task becomes even harder because capitalism is what we have been
raised with and it still owns our minds. In order to come up with a new economic
system, we first must achieve our mindset change, as if we attempted to come up

with a new system with capitalist thought, it would still be rooted in capitalist
thought, no matter what we tried to do. This can be seen in the economic systems
of socialism and in the economic systems of communism; they were still rooted in
capitalist thought, the only difference being that the implementation of these
systems was different. A new economic system would require time and expertise
that we may not have.
Even after we attempt all of this change away from capitalism, the chances
are high that society remains in the grips of capitalist thought. All it would take
would be one thing going wrong, and change gets thrown into the trash. We may be
stuck with mounting piles of trash even if a shift away from materialistic and
capitalist thought is achieved, so established is the cycle of buying and throwing
away. However, if change is achieved, then our lives will be vastly improved. No
longer would we have mounting piles of trash and mounting pressure to buy
endlessly. No longer would our lives be ruled over by material items. The world
would be liberated from the endless cycle of buying and throwing away, and in its
place would be a truly anti-capitalist economic system still full of economic activity.
Quality of life would improve dramatically, after being freed of the stress to fuel the
buying cycle, and a period of human flourishing would ensue. Life would be brilliant.