Westerners share a curious fantasy. They imagine that everybody in the world wants to live just like they do. In this fantasy, everybody is dying to work 60 hours a week 52 weeks in a year in order to pay off an enormous mortgage and buy a bunch of things the TV told them they urgently need.
Depending on their political leanings, Westerners either pity the poor losers who have no access to these extraordinary joys or engage in gloomy fantasies of how the hordes of the poor losers, starved for work and debt, are coming to take all of it away.
No evidence suffices to convince Westerners that there are crowds of people in the world who have no interest in this lifestyle. The greatest punishment they can imagine inflicting on their enemies is preventing their existence in the work / debt cycle.
This is precisely the delusion that motivates the Western sanctions against Russia. The sanctions are expected to work because Russians should be devastated if they are not allowed to keep buying and borrowing.
But just like an enormous number of people around the world (the people whom we either pity or fear), Russians don’t see this way of life as hugely attractive. They don’t want all of this stuff we keep buying and they really don’t want to work all the time to buy the stuff. Sanctions are making them happy because they are offering an exit from the onerous work / buy / borrow cycle.
Clarissa's Blog 
From all the bizarre behavior (from my American perspective) you describe in your blog, I believe you when it comes to the majority of Russians. But what about the robber-barons and Putin and his cronies? It seems like they would be the type to like luxurious lifestyles, and sanctions might eventually hurt them in the long term (just because the businesses and people are too dried up to steal from), and they seem to be the ones running the show.
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“But what about the robber-barons and Putin and his cronies? It seems like they would be the type to like luxurious lifestyles, and sanctions might eventually hurt them in the long term”
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By “Western” you seem to actually be describing just a certain U.S. attitude (one much marketed).
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I wouldn’t say that Canadians are that much different in this regard either.
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Apparently the attitude also afflicts many people in Australia who have gone to work on the mineral mines to benefit from the mining boom. They are fly in fly out workers whose bodies are horribly mangled by their punitive routines. Many commit suicide or their families go mad (there was an incident where the wife at home drowned all her children by mistake). The reward for this is to get the latest flat screen TV and an SUV, or maybe a boat. The money is high but the families die.
I’m not saying that people ought not to take up this opportunity, only it was pointed out to me that the people that do may tend to be afflicted with rampant materialism, according to someone who did it.
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“the wife at home drowned all her children by mistake”
who did she think she was drowning?
or what did she think she was doing?
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Heh. She thought she was running a bath for her kids but she fell asleep instead and the water overflowed and they all diedid.
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My first reaction is that that’s tragic, my second (since I’m a horrible person) is suspicion.
Who puts their kids in a tub turns the water on and then lies down?
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Here we go:
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/baby-sons-died-in-shower-perth-inquest-hears/story-fnhocxo3-1226631607995
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Most Germans, for instance, rent and don’t have mortgages, are they part of the western tradition or what …
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The exact nature of consumerism will differ from country to country.
In Germany (and incresingly in Poland) owning your own separate house is not a realistic goal for most people Most people in Poland live in apartments but don’t see that as any barrier to starting a family (even if young couples are still living at the parents of one of them which used to be very common and still happens).
Starting sometime in the 20th century many or most white Americans didn’t want to have children before putting a mortgage down on a house. That’s a culturally specific twist but not a necessary condition of consumerism.
In Germany (and increasingly in Poland) travel is a consumer good in ways that it isn’t in the US. Two or three international package vacations or trips on one’s own (say Spain, Greece and Turkey for the middle class augmented with the Maldives, Caribbean or Thailand for the more well off) are standard consumer goods while international travel vacations just aren’t a thing in the US as far as I can tell.
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OK, so Western means consumerist? NB people in US now think they need not only a mortgage but also a minivan to have a baby … babies do not fit into regular cars.
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“Most Germans, for instance, rent and don’t have mortgages, are they part of the western tradition or what ”
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OK — I am just always curious as to what people mean by Western, it seems such a fuzzy term. I always default first to the (partly invented) cultural tradition that traces European culture to ancient Greece & then out to the Americas; next to the older West and East in terms of Soviet bloc or not, which is different; also to West and East in terms of the so-called Orient. Then there is what Foucault or Bataille or others say about “West.” So when people say “Westerners” are X or are Y I am never immediately sure who they are talking about or what they mean since the word can cover so much and since many people and populations I know, I would consider to be within the Western tradition, yet would not say they have the characteristics being described.
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When I say the west it refers to those countries ….. I want it to.
Now that I think about it, the exact roster changes depending on context.
Possibly leaving someone out, for me:
Always in: Western Europe (as defined by the cold war) the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
Sometimes in, sometimes out : Japan, South Korea, Latin America (except Cuba, maybe Venezuela), former non-western Europe countries now in EU.
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Yes…
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OK, so Western means consumerist here.
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Well, how does what you just said above agree with your earlier statements that Soviet people you knew growing up were overwhelmingly extremely consumerist? Did you change your mind about the past? Or did the average Russians suddenly become very non-consumerist? Maybe even spiritual? Isn’t that what their propaganda was insisting all-along? Holy Russia as a spiritual beacon of the humankind, someone who will lead the humankind out of the hole dug by the evil consumerist decadent West? I wonder what caused this change, if it occurred? I mean either the change in reality or the change in your perception of reality…
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“Well, how does what you just said above agree with your earlier statements that Soviet people you knew growing up were overwhelmingly extremely consumerist”
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“Soviet people you knew growing up were overwhelmingly extremely consumerist?”
Actually think she said they were materialistic which is different from consumerist.
Materialistic people don’t care where their goodies come from (so they do things like paw around in dead bodies looking for trinkets as in the Donbas).
Consumerists have to have some kind of economic standing to consume (which implies some level of good faith bargaining missing in the uber-materialistic).
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The reality is more complicated and multi-sided, I guess. Consumerism or not, there is large percentage of Russians, especially in the large cities, who over the last ten years acquired mortgages, car loans, etc. Although those loans were nominated in roubles, the hike in interest rates (base rate went from 10 to 17 % recently) will hurt a lot of people. But this does not mean those people will turn against Putin. The consolidation in the face of external enemies is equally or even more likely. See, when I was a kid my family did not believe in Communism. We listened to Voice of America, BBC, Liberty, etc every day. My mother was brave enough to refuse joining Communist party when offered… (It cost her being unable to go abroad anywhere.) One day I asked her if, if/when the Americans attack us, she will switch to their side (this was actually a topic of discussions between me and my classmates; some of them claiming that their parents or older siblings would support the US invasion). But of course no – she responded – it is one thing to criticize your country, and another thing entirely to join those who attack it.
And sanctions do not really work in general. Especially if the country being sanctioned is large enough, and not all the world is participating in the sanctions. Iran got it harder, and so what? Still cooking the Bomb…
And I am not so pessimistic about the consumerism of the West or the US in particular. Life is good enough in the West so the West can afford to have consumerism as apparent primary motivation. I am pretty sure that people of most countries would be willing to suffer some moderate inconveniences in the name of ideas. Hypothetically, if all the world ganged up against the US and introduced some sanctions, the US people would likely resist the pressure to change something they hold dear (rightly or wrongly – is a separate story).
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I’m all for consumerism and I love the Western lifestyle that I gently mocked in this post. But I don’t find it hard to accept that there are millions upon millions of people in the world who don’t want to live this way.
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