In America, people believe that a house is who you are, while a car is who you want other people to think you are. If you have no house and you have no car, by extension you are nothing, and you want to be nothing.
Many have modeled their lives around this belief. When you visit a place, to most of us it’s just a place, as static as a TV image, but if you’ve internalized a sense of ownership over it, it takes on a new significance. Then things must be just right, processed, controlled furnished and micromanaged. In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk calls it the “IKEA nesting instinct,” the hoarding and management of material goods in an attempt to reach some form of self-actualization.
Marx called this inability to properly value goods as “commodity fetishism.” The social environment of the commodity system serves to obfuscate the real value of those goods. Marx theorizes that “fetishism… is inseparable from the production of commodities.” The mere existence of a product creates its own market.
Consumerism in its minor forms is ruinous, but at the housing level, is is the gestalt of all self worth. We’ve based our entire economy around it, a kind of super-metric of wealth, health, and spiritual satisfaction. If we find ourselves without the means to “buy” a house, we “buy” a car (all of which can be taken away should we refuse to pay our national rent, also known as taxes). A car at least creates the illusion of prosperity. And if you can’t afford that, well then you’re not worth much to America, unless of course you’re generating income as a prisoner in the country’s ever growing private prison system. Read More
