Again on the effects of the fable of consumerism.

I have already written, in the past, about the fable called "consumerism". I will do a brief summary and then I will move on to show how easy it is, using this fable, to unload every problem on the common citizen, saving the guilty ones.

Short summary:

There is no "consumerism". The economy, as always, is based on who produces and who buys, that is, on supply and demand.

Now let's take, I don't know, Evian. Evian produces and sells two billion plastic bottles a year after the latest upgrade this year. Obviously, his customers appreciate and buy the bottles.

At this point, let's ask ourselves: who disposes of them? We have two solutions:

1. the citizen spends his time on recycling and the municipality, instead of building kindergartens, takes care of the disposal costs.
2. Evian puts his hand in his pocket and arranges to dispose / recycle the bottles before they end up in the sea.

You understand that everything revolves around the responsibility of the bottle:

1. if we think that the responsibility of the bottle has the person who buys it, that is the consumer, then he must take care of it.
2. if we think that the responsibility of the bottle has the one who produces and sells it, then he must take care of it.

We therefore have two choices. Either we decide that our economic system is "consumerist", that is, based on consumption, or that it is "producist", that is, based on production.

In themselves they are two sides of the same phenomenon, since demand meets supply. But there is a "but": when political choices are made, narrative prevails over logic.

If I write a fiction that talks about "consumerism", you will be willing to believe that all responsibility lies with the consumer. If the bottles end up in the sea it is the fault of the consumer, if they are produced it is the fault of the consumer who buys them, and so on. And in this way we are willing to accuse the consumer, that is, any man, and force him to take charge of something that he did not produce. And if the consumer is convinced that he is guilty, he will also accept it.

We could also build a narrative of "producism": after all Evian makes money, with the bottles. So he has a GREAT motive to produce them, and then not care: to make more money. BUT in this case, we would have inferred that Evian has both the means and the moral obligation to take his bottles out of circulation, at his own expense.

We could describe the society based on the meeting between supply and demand in two ways: producism and consumerism. Bad sociology and an even worse economy have led to the convenient lie of "consumerism", where everything is centered on the consumer, who has all the blame.

And that dialectic is now so widespread that we are willing to believe that "every Italian family produces TOT kg of waste every year". I don't think you have factories of cans, cartons, tetrapak, plastic bags and more, which are produced by other industries, but despite the material evidence, by now the belief that we are in a "consumerist" society is impossible to remove.

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Having said that, let's go to a problem that is happening these days. The lack of water in northern Italy.

This is a situation that, yes, is caused by global warming, but I would like to remind you that neither in Tunisia nor in Algeria nor in Egypt, where temperatures have ALWAYS been those of Italy, is lacking water.

The water has been depleted by a tremendous demand, but to hide a tremendous management of water resources, the hot potato is being unloaded on the population, rationing the water.

And which population, which already feels guilty for being a "consumerist", accepts everything as long as some asshole inserts "fill swimming pools" among the rationing measures: they take away the water in the house, but since they are also blocking pools, you consumer of shit think you deserve it, with all those pools that you filled.

Sure, you live on the fourth floor of a condominium and you dream of the swimming pool, but if you have drunk that your family "produces" waste, you also drink that you deserve the dry because you are part of a group that fills swimming pools. (in reality the number of houses with swimming pools is so ridiculous that it does not visibly impact the problem).

And thanks to this culture, produced over decades of the belief that consumerism exists, and the excesses and harmful effects of this model are attributable to the consumer, people are forgetting that:

1. the Po has been drained mainly by a change in agricultural cultures, which has led the entire Po valley to produce corn, one of the most water-pumping cultures.
2. to help, they put the rice fields, which require gigantic quantities of water, and empty it when instead it would be useful to conserve it, but they do not care to empty it towards the reservoirs, but they discharge it into the nearest canal.
3. then there is industrial consumption, and here no one is asking companies to recycle water with heat exchangers.
4. Farms no longer build their own reservoirs as they once did. They save space to grow.
5. There are no more dams and artificial lakes, because the care of the territory has been abandoned.

The result of all this is that an existing crisis (climate change) is AMPLIFIED by the shortcomings of a class of producers and politicians, who NEVER take responsibility, because it is enough to talk about "rationing", for a conditioned reflex, the population takes responsibility.

And those who shower every four days, those who wash their underwear every week (WOMEN! THE UMBRELLA SHOWER IS HERE! as if the problem were the difference between two showers a week, and not a farmer showering 15 hectares of corn every day. Your panties must be huge.

As if that weren't enough, while the problem is that crops that drink water like sponges have replaced the traditional ones, which quietly spent the summer dry, the fucking vegan comes to tell me that to make the one kilo steak it takes 15,000 liters of water. If he knew how much water his vegan polenta cost, maybe he would have the decency to shut up.

But no one will dare to protest, precisely because of a conditioned reflex, which derives from decades and decades of self-whipping, of acts of pain, where one repents and regrets being consumers, when no one goes to knock on the PRODUCERS 'door.

We can compare it to durum wheat, which normally does NOT need any additional irrigation, except in an emergency, with a maximum of 40mm in the whole cycle. Less than 10%, compared to 600 for corn.

You understand that it is time to ban some crops. And some irrigation techniques. You understand that they will NEVER do it, because it is enough to say "rationing" and the "consumer", oppressed by decades and decades of guilt for being a selfish bastard pleasure-seeker, will beat his chest and start running around with yellow-brown underpants that Putin appreciates these weapons a lot.

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The ramifications of the dialectic that speaks of "consumerism" are manifold. They range from those who believe that families produce waste, to those who really think that it is necessary to wash less to remedy the lack of reservoirs and artificial lakes, as well as wicked productions by farmers, and in general when it comes to a problem linked to the lack or abundance of something, the consumers are always beating their breasts. NEVER manufacturers.

And so we discover that Coca Cola is not guilty of the cans and bottles it sells. It turns out that Evian is not responsible for the bottles of water he produces. That the packaging companies are NOT responsible for all the blisters containing the food we buy, from steaks to vegetables. That the electronics and appliance companies don't seem responsible for the things they sell, that the producers of anything have nothing to do with their waste, at the very moment they sold the product to us: you touched the girl and now you marry her, they say. Take your responsibility.

No company seems to be responsible for ANY overflow of waste THAT PRODUCES AND SELLS, when in the end it is the common citizen who takes care of it, who has to put effort and time into it, and by the state, which spends money (of the citizen) for the problem. however, he could spend on other things.

Convincing the population that it should be those who produce waste to manage them, out of their own pockets, is very difficult: they tell you that if you did not buy them, then they would not produce them. So it's your fault buying them, not them making them.

As if to say: I pulled the trigger, you are the one who died. If you stopped dying, no one would pay me to kill people. What to do with it if people aren't bulletproof?

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This invention of "consumerism", understood and conjugated as the fault of the common person, is one of the most comfortable things both for those who produce waste, (and no, it is not families, who are a proxy: what the family is '"Waste" before the purchase was "product"), both for those who cause disasters through mismanagement, and then give a damn.

Personally, my opinion is very simple: there are people paid to manage the water resources. It had been known for months that it was raining little. Global warming has been known for years. That you let yourself be taken by surprise makes you understand one thing: the consumer has nothing to do with fucking anything. The problem is upstream.

But as long as you believe you are consumerist pigs, as long as you believe that your vegan polenta costs less water than a steak, and you don't change your mind even when you see the crops of corn and exotic fruit literally dry up the Po, until you you will feel guilty for being a consumer, we will never get out of it.

We force Apple to take back and manage EVERY cell phone it sells. We require every bottle manufacturer to take back EVERY plastic bottle they sell. We force Coca Cola to take back the cans and bottles. ALL. From the first to the last: tot go out, tot fall.

Information technology exists, RFIDs exist, the chain can be managed. It has costs and the MANUFACTURERS have to bear them.

Because waste was once called "products", and this convinced you that YOU produced it.

And similarly, this consumerist thing has convinced you that you have drained the PO by showering, but it just so happens that the PO dries up when they irrigate the corn, while you always showered.

Stop flagellating yourself. There is no consumerism, there is production. The water was there, had it not been wasted to cultivate a plant that until 1500 only grew on the banks of the rivers of North America.

And yes, upsetting the territory by introducing the production of an alien plant can drain rivers and desertify.

It wasn't your underwear.