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I would like to share a story with you. Just a year ago about this time I was sitting in Starbucks, just up the street, as I often did during graduate school, reading a scholarly article for my class in New South History. This particular article looked specifically at the social changes that occurred in the early twentieth century in southern cotton mill towns.

The main thread of the story dealt with how the mill workers adapted from their rural, land-based culture and lifestyle to the new urban industrial culture and lifestyle from 1890-1940. It was quite fascinating. It was a story of whole families leaving the farm seeking employment in the new cities and towns. Men, women and children as young as six years old worked the mills 14 hours per day six days per week.

Gradually villages of these former farmers developed around the mills. "Company towns" they were called, with housing and the general store owned by the company that owned the mill. Life was hard adjusting to work on a machine's schedule, but since these new industrial workers came from the same background, they quickly formed a close-knit community.

Values based on subsistence, sharing and simplicity carried over from the farm to these new communities. Like life based on the land, village life remained based on kinship ties which also controlled migration. Households remained linked by obligation, responsibility and concern. Villagers helped one another, not for immediate return, but with the understanding that community support would help meet their individual needs in the future. Despite the attempts by the company to control every aspect of their worker's lives, mill villagers were able to create the life they desired: simple and community-based.

It seems that unlike the emerging urban middle class of the period, these farm people had no desire to acquire goods. And therein was the problem for the mill owners.

By the 1920s, there was a labor shortage. Several tactics were tried including stealing each other's workers by offering higher wages as well as in-house wage increases to spur production. The laborers reaped the benefits of increased wages: they could work only four days and earn what they had been earning in six. Given their simple, community-based, subsistence lifestyle, they chose to work the four days and spend the remaining three with family and friends.

This was not the response the urban, middle-class acquisition-oriented mill owners had anticipated. But the mill owners were not to be thwarted.

In the spirit of social uplift prevalent at the time, the mill owners instituted social welfare programs for the company towns and their residents. Sidewalks were paved; streetlights installed and social workers were hired. New items were offered in the company store priced within reach of the workers, provided they worked 5 or 6 days per week instead of four. Social workers offered cooking and home-tending classes to teen girls, skills once learned from older women in the family and community. Company-sponsored programs replaced informal childcare networks developed by the community women. Doctors replaced midwives and the members of the community who practiced home remedies. Women were taught how to keep a "proper" house which included upholstered furnishings, how to cook gourmet meals and sew the latest fashions from Paris. But these programs were not as altruistic as they might appear.

In fact, these programs served double duty. First they obliterated communal ties by replacing informal networks of obligation, concern and responsibility with corporate-controlled services and standards. Secondly, they stimulated desires for consumer goods so that mill workers would work increased hours to earn sufficient pay to purchase those goods. I can't say how well I was beginning to get the picture when I got to the bottom of the page and read this quote in which one mill owner of the day explained the rational behind the plan,

"Their needs must be increased to equal the rise in wages to get them to work steadily. The people are not sufficiently ambitious enough to care to work all the time, but as we are throwing about them elevating influences their needs are growing greater and the next generation will be all right."

I had to pause and read that quote several times. Let me paraphrase it for you:

Don't worry about this generation; we'll get the next. We can simultaneously rob them of their community ties and then convince them they will be better people and have a better life if they just buy the right stuff and live according to the standards of "experts" whom we have invented.

It hit me like a fully loaded semi tractor-trailer rig doing 85 without lights in the dark.

I thought of my grandparents who were the generation who would be all right. I thought of my parents, the generation after that. I thought about their need "to give me something better that what they had", that something better being material goods. And, suddenly it all became crystal clear. I understood about the loss of community I read about in the papers so much. I knew why people felt their lives were beyond their control. I knew why there was a certain sense of hopelessness that pervades our society. I knew how we'd been had. I thought of the jokes about "retail therapy". Our whole self worth is wrapped up in material goods. Everything is a product we can buy if we just work that extra day: happiness, self-worth, and community. A friend once called it "delusions of grandeur".

By focusing on the product rather than the process of living, we have lost touch with both our humanity and with the divine. We have also lost touch with each other; we have little real community. We think if all wear the same brand of clothes or can talk about the same TV sitcom, we have community. But it is all illusion.

And then I did something radical. I stopped shopping. In fact, I stopped wanting. It was like getting sick after eating and not being able to even think of that item again without getting squeamish.

Every time I had to buy something, it became a question of how many hours must my husband or I work? How many hours away from family and friends or spent in an activity that failed to build community? Who really benefited from that purchase? How did that purchase affect others - even people I didn't know or would never meet? Buying truly became a spiritual experience. I began to question how consumption was preventing me from creating the life I wanted. How was it robbing me of my creativity and humanity?

I also got mad and more than a little. No one likes being "had" and that is exactly how I felt. It wasn't pleasant and I wanted to know how I, reasonably intelligent, decently spiritual person that I am, get sold such a load of goods, literally. I began with the book The Artist's Way and began reclaiming the creativity and sense of identity I had lost. I began to find my true self, not the one sold to me daily by corporate America.

Cameron teaches that creativity is our divine right. Further creativity is a process and the natural order of life. Creativity is what links us all together as spiritual beings. It is what feeds the universe, the life force, God or whatever you call it. When we repress our creativity, we repress our humanity. But creativity only flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self worth.

We need true community in order to create the life we want. I was back to community again. So what was it about consumption that destroys community? It was clear, at least to me, that community, creativity and simplicity were the keys and further, were inextricably linked.

Shortly after, I joined a simplicity circle and it was in the readings for that group that I discovered why we consume and how it affects society. There were seven clearly identifiable reasons or causes and their effects that exactly explained the phenomena I could now see so clearly via historical study. Seven. The same number as our UU principles. Seven.

So why do we consume? What does it do to society to be consumer oriented? How is community linked to consumption? And creativity? And how, as UU's can we respond? Lets look at the seven reasons, their affects, and the corresponding UU principle.

1. Hierarchy. We think in terms of hierarchy, that is, placing ourselves above or below others and behaving accordingly. Climbing the ladder causes us to spend less time with activities that are caring in nature and thus we begin to feel uncared for ourselves. We look for ways to prove our worth, to justify being cared for by others

   But what if we simply followed the UU principle of Justice, equity and compassion in human relations. Equity means impartiality. What would be the point of consuming of didn't prove our worth, if it didn't justify the treatment we received by others? What if instead of spending extra hours at the office to get that bonus to be able to buy that bigger house, to gain respect in the community, everyone was just treated with respect? What if every member of society was treated justly, with compassion, and equity not because of what they owned, but simply because?

2. Competition. We have an obsession with winning and achieving because we learn early that self-esteem is based on others' approval and that this approval only comes when we win at some competition. Competition encourages insecurity. Insecurity leads to an uncaring society. In an uncaring society, self-worth becomes based on material possessions and status.

   Mass insecurity. It is sold to us daily. You are nothing with product z. Yet we have the antidote: the UU principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. What if nobody needed anything to prove his or her worth? I'd like to read a recent quote from the street artist Eric Drooker in UTNE Reader (reprinted from Punk Plantet):

   "I've long maintained that, actually, we are surrounded by political art everywhere we look. Don't forget: Advertising billboards, signs and commercials, which bombard us at every turn, were all designed by artists who went to art school. But what is the political message of all this? Consume…Be Cool…Be Aloof…Be Sexy…Be Self-Obsessed…Get Drunk…"

   Insecurity fuels profits.

3. Loneliness. When we no longer engage in caring activities, when we no longer gather together just to be together, we become lonely and seek false methods of creating community and a sense of belonging: We shop out of boredom; we are addicted to TV, alcohol and drugs. We are number one in murders and capital punishment. But, there is a lack of true community. Loneliness and its cousins, depression and boredom, are expressed in violence and addiction a society where there is no true community.

   Let me take this one step further. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, a guidebook for reclaiming one's creativity states that boredom is fear in disguise. Further, fear is despair in disguise. Along with that, avoidance is a fear of intimacy. We are a society in complete despair and, what's worse, we are avoiding intimacy. Remember the advertising, "Be aloof"?

   Conversely, the UU goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all says get intimate. Community comes from the junction of common and unity. It is hard to be lonely, depressed and bored if you intimate with yourself and others. By extension, peace, liberty and justice are easy to extend to those with whom you are intimate.

4. Egocentric Ideas. The modern view of the world is materialistic and mechanistic. We see the world as lifeless matter to do with as we may. Daniel C Maguire, Ethics professor at Marquette University and author of the book Ethics for a Small Planet puts it another way. He references traditional religion's emphasis on the creator but not on the creation. We are to worship a creator God, but how we treat his or her creation, the earth and its inhabitants, is of little importance.

   However, he and many other theologians and thinkers are posing an eccocentric worldview as the antidote. In this worldview, there is a holistic, metaphysical approach with respect for the interdependency of all life. Sound familiar? How about the UU principle of respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part?

5. Unconsciousness. We are taught to follow the rules and not ask questions, "Go with the flow". We do what we are taught to do, what is expected of us, what everyone else is doing. Unconscious living results in "keeping up with the Joneses."

   We have to learn to pay attention to our inner source of knowledge. We have to discover whom we are and how we want to live. We also have to learn from our own life experiences and not just from books.

   Living consciously means asking if we really like our partner or did we marry to please our parents? Do we really like where we live or where we go to college or are we there for the status? We have to question everything we do. Living consciously means a free and responsible search for meaning and truth.

6. Repressed Humanity. It is human nature to grow and to seek growth, to be fully human. When we are prevented from growing in authentic ways, from expressing our humanity, then we seek growth and expression by other means such as consumption.

   We substitute true growth with superficial growth based on image. Image has become everything in our culture. We become obsessed with consumption as a way to grow and express our humanity because we have no true sense of identity as a result of never being encouraged to discover who we really are.

   We must follow the UU principle of acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. It is the key to our humanity, authentic growth and a less-consumption oriented lifestyle.

7. Process over Product. As I stated earlier, in our society we focus on the product and ignore the process.

   The creative process - creativity - is our divine right. It is what connects us to the divine creative force of the universe, the sacred life force. It is through this active process by which we develop our conscience. By focusing on the product rather than the process, we create passive conformity and deny the development of conscience.

   However, as UU's we believe in the right of conscience and the use of democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. Thomas Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that

   "Democracy cannot exist when [people] prefer ideas and opinions that are fabricated for them. The actions and statements of the citizen must not be mere automatic "reactions" - mere mechanical salutes, gesticulations signifying passive conformity with the dictates of those in power."

   We must be active participants in the process, not just consumers of the product.

The end of the story that began that fateful morning in Starbuck's a year ago is that I am no longer fooled by the slick ads and the social constructions. I see the mill owner's social welfare program for what it is.

I am practicing a life of voluntary simplicity. Charan Sing defines simplicity thus:

"Simplicity doesn't mean to live in misery and poverty. You have what you need, and you don't want what you don't need."

Voluntary simplicity means living a life that is "outwardly simple and inwardly rich". It is about giving up the obsession with consumption and with image, living authentically, and resisting external pressures. It is to reclaim my creativity, my freedom, my democracy, my purpose, my identity and my community.

I hope you will join me.

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