The word, consumerism, is thrown around a lot. It seems that oftentimes the word is used to mean something along the lines of, “Golly, we buy a lot of crap.” But I think it has a much more specific and higher-level meaning.
At a newsstand today I saw the front page of a USA Today. I made a mental note of the headline, which I believe I recall correctly to be, “Terrorist Attack Pierces Heart Of Indian Tourism.” Yes, the USA Today relates the story of mangled human bodies in the context of how it relates to the purchase of goods and services. Never mind that physical hearts were pierced in the attack, causing the people who were using those hearts to pump blood all around their bodies to die on the spot; the metaphorical heart of tourism gets the headline.
I think that’s consumerism. It’s not just when you buy too many meaningless widgets. That’s just called greed or maybe being unselective. But consumerism is when your worldview is centered around the consuming of goods and services, which may probably have greed as an aspect, but they’re not the same thing. Consumerism is a sort of mild reductionism. It’s not a bold claim such as a a formal materialistic reductionism or something like that (no one would ever make such a claim methinks), but it’s when your opinions and concerns seem like you operate under the assumption that the world of financial trade is the only real world.
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