Happiness is not materialism

Everybody seems to agree, except for the sarcastic rich, that materialism doesn’t bring happiness. Is it true? If it is not, why are so many people racing for more material goods? When SGI counsels us to help everyone become happy, are they simply talking about money?

If you have been listening to and reading SGI experiences for years, you know that there are very few that talk about some particular material item, such as getting a new car. Those I have heard like that have treated the new item as a means to another, higher goal. The car might be desired so that the person could go to school or to a job.

Deprivation, on the other hand, is concomitant to unhappiness. If you cannot afford necessities, such as medical supplies, you are pretty sure to be unhappy, and to chant for some relief in this regard. To generalize, some money is of tremendous value, and then the utility of it declines. This is the same “utility saturation” that marks almost every material object. The first car you own is very valuable and useful, the second less so, the third even less so, and the fourth less than that, unless you are a specialist such as a car dealer, restorer, racer, or something similar. Because of the burden of caring for the vehicles, the actual usefulness of the Nth car might be less than the cost of ownership.

It’s the same for most items. Food is mandatory for survival, and more and more allows one to choose healthier items, but after a while, there is only so much time and attention and money one can usefully spend on food. Obesity is obviously the wall one runs into.

For non-food items, most have a maintenance cost, which is exacted in both money and time, and the more we have, the more nuisance it is to keep it all maintained, safe, up-to-date, clean, or whatever the particular vulnerabilities of the item is. The burden of maintenance builds up as we accumulate items. This is just another piece of the utility saturation problem. Having more than you can use of something might be no big deal, if you never have any contact with it. However, there are almost always costs.

What about money in the bank? Why not have more and more and more money? There are obviously large numbers of people who think that this is the metric for life. The more money you have, the happier you are. Many of them are still living on the low side of the wealth and income distribution curve, so they haven’t yet appreciated that the millionth dollar isn’t nearly as nice as the first.

Money and possessions do give a kind of cheap happiness, through status competition and attention. If you’ve got a lot of money, people pay more attention to you, for the purpose of getting some or just because you might give them some clues as to how to get it, or whatever. To the extent that having a lot of attention brings happiness, this might. The other side of this belongs to those people who don’t want the attention of others, but they want to feel superior. If they can exceed some record or level of somebody else, they feel better. It’s like a sibling rivalry situation, except you pick and choose who your siblings are. Often, once you achieve superiority, the bloom fades quickly, and you need to find someone else to beat. A continual fix of competition and success keeps them stoked up.

Buddha taught us about the futility of all this. Being better than someone else, or dominating them, doesn’t make us happy, it alleviates our unhappiness of desiring to be better. Buddha teaches us to stop desiring this goal, and to be happy because we do not have unfulfilled desires. The same holds for money. Buddha didn’t live in a money culture, but possessions took its place. By not trying to get more possessions than others, or to beat some imagined goal, we can be internally happy.

Our culture regards the Buddha’s thoughts as worse than heresy. This is one reason why kosen-rufu is not a piece of cake. We are opposing the social design of our culture.

Buddhism undermines the social contract we have with each other. When the nation was formed, the founding fathers inspired their contemporaries with some goals that resonated. They talked about setting new standards for justice, freedom, liberty, and more that were far beyond the standard of England, their mother country. These great ideas were embodied in our constitution and Bill of Rights, and have inspired generation after generation within the United States, and countless others throughout the world. However, they are fairly passé at this point. We have transformed our nation.

We have built our nation into one that is based on unhappiness. Our national success was formerly based on the ideals we espoused. For most of the history of the United States, we were not a very rich nation. We were a hard-working nation that built itself up and up.

This all changed with the invention of the consumer culture. Now we work very hard, with advertising, to increase everyone’s unhappiness. Our society functions by selling everyone consumer products, either imported or domestically manufactured. Corporate success depends on consumer unhappiness with what they have. We have entire, hugely paid, staffs in all large corporations, given the task of increasing the nation’s unhappiness by making them think they need some new goods, some new food, some new experience, some new spectacle, some new trip, and on and on. National advertising is solely concerned with making sure no one thinks they are happy, and the only way to be happy is to be a bigger consumer.

Buddha is the exact antithesis of this. He had everything there was to offer based on his birth as a prince. He dumped it all to live as a homeless teacher. For almost all of his life, he possessed nothing except a robe. He lived on charity. Yet his teachings have spread to hundreds of millions.

His understanding of materialism was not unique. There have been no rich religious teachers. In order to understand life well enough to become someone like this, you have to realize the futility of materialism. Yet the masses of consumers in America and around the world at blasted hundreds of times a day with the message of materialism.

How much endurance can an average person have when faced with the onslaught of advertising? Every mass media is stuffed to the brim with it. The more vulnerable of our society, those who do not have strong background training in resisting consumerism, fall prey to it for their entire lifetime.

Does SGI practice help or hurt this situation? There is no prohibition that seniors give to new members telling them not to chant for material things. It is even encouraged, as when some wish is fulfilled, it serves as a verification that the process of dai-moku (chanting) focuses the mind and help achieve goals, even material ones. We only need to remember that study is a critical component of SGI practice. Buddhist study is the key to breaking out of the consumer mentality.

If, as in our hopes, Buddhism and SGI became widespread in America, would that lead to some dire economic consequences? Just suppose that materialism began to be abandoned. How would our society function? It was Henry Ford who understood that workers and consumers were the same people. If we cease consuming, what work is needed? Or better stated, if we reduce our consuming to a low level, what will happen to all the employment that is solely based on stuffing consumer goods down our throats?

What would happen to our nation, if our GDP, the measure of goods produced, starts to drop because domestic consumption declines? Once again, we return to the question of Buddhism and stability. A highly Buddhist nation, where the population simply rejects materialism, would not have a great industrial base. This means, that if another nation sought to conquer and capture it, it would not have the ability to defend itself economically. In the modern world, weapons win wars. Weapons are built by a nation’s economic base, and if that base has shriveled, there will be no basis on which to establish a weapon industry, even if the Buddhist nation decided to defend itself.

So, once again, it appears that our hope of a world of Buddhist nations, living without conflict, is a pipedream, as the situation is unstable.