Standing Room

9 May 2009

Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘Bring it on’, was the nation’s great battle cry as we loaded the guns of avarice with alacrity; conveniently forgetting that the bullets of greed have a nasty habit of ricocheting back into society.

We self-harmed with abandon; fast finding ourselves addicted to life’s little luxuries. Nouveau Labour’s manifesto was very clear: it encouraged free-market capitalism thus turning us all — to a greater or lesser extent — into nouveau-riche wannabes. It’s hardly surprising we now find ourselves morally corrupt and left with a dystopian legacy of self-inflicted despair. No gain without pain. Like an unapologetic chain-smoker who wakes up one morning perplexed he can no longer breathe, I’m afraid the time has now come for us to accept culpability. Alas, there’s no spoonful of sugar to help the nasty-tasting medicine go down. It’s gone — along with everything else.

This sorry state of affairs didn’t just happen. We enabled it to happen. We all gaily bought the metaphoric T-shirt and most of us were happy to be seen out wearing it. Ultimately the actual provenance and price tag of the garment proved irrelevant. It didn’t matter if it was wrestled from the sale rack at Primark or FedEx’d from Chanel — either way it was just another aspirational item of clothing we confused ‘wanting’ with ‘needing’. Like the transitory relief that accompanies most quick-fix panaceas, the ‘spend, spend, spend’ high never lasts. We’ve all overdosed on excess and now we’re left blubbing at the thought of having our stomachs pumped. This government has led us up a fiscal dead-end, yet there’s no point denying we played follow-the-leader, irrespective of our political allegiance. We all got sucked in to over-extending, over-spending, over-borrowing, over-loading, over-consuming, and unnecessarily upgrading our lives; placing too high a value on money, property, celebrity, possessions and hedonistic pursuits. It’s not just the Labour party that’s over; the party itself has ground to a halt.

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Ken Bishop

May 8th, 2009 1:26pm Report this comment

How curious to keep saying "we all" overindulged. I didn't. I serviced my mortgage, bought things I could afford, and paid my credit cartd off in full every month. And now I get a lecture that the recession that has cost me my job is somehow my own fault. Not only untrue, but insolent.

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