Very true, there was a time when people were community minded. When everything benefited everyone as much as possibly could be without being overly concerned about the many things they could own. When people question their possible existence in the future, actual community standards disappear along with morals creating the mentality of the end supports the means.
A couple of things about that. First, when I sold Real estate for a while at the turn of the century my broker talked about the phases a family goes through financially. The lowest is "survival". At that stage, you are not even thinking about how nice your car is, or what cool stuff you want. You simply are concerned about the rent payment, food, etc. I forget the names of all the other phases, but each level of prosperity brings new "concerns" and new "future hopes. The last is where you are filthy stinking rich. At that level, money is irrelevant. What you are concerned about is power. But everything between those two phases involves getting a more comfortable life, a more stable furure, etc. The challenge is that sometimes a more comfortable life comes at the expense of your future, especially if it is done through debt.
Second thing: Television. There was a time before television where there was not a lot of consumerism. You bought what you needed, and you might see something someone else has and think, Hey, I should work some overtime because I would like to have one of those. But you only saw what was around your "neighborhood". But thanks to television, you can be dirt poor and still have massive consumerism foisted on you at every turn. It literally creates an appetite for things you will almost certainly never be able to afford. This sows both dissatisfaction and unrest.
This hit me hard when I dumped TV in 1997. I expected some changes, but the one that really surprised me was the "consumerism" simply vanished from my life. Sure, I saw a guy driving a Scion FR-S back in 2012 and thought to myself, "what the heck is that?" I needed a small car for my long commute and I've always been about small and efficient cars. So I looked it up on the internet, found out it was only $25k, took one for a test drive, and pulled out my check book. But my desire was not fueled by television bringing it into my house. I saw in my neighborhood, I liked, I bought. But if I was inundated with commercials for that and all the other cars out there, I might have thought it was "too cheap" to own. BTW, It now has 200,000 miles on it and going strong.
But the thing is, our whole world is no longer an agrarian society. A fraction of the people can produce enough food for everyone. So, what else is everyone supposed to do? I came to grips with this when I sold hi-fi back in 1982. My life felt so pointless, being a salesman trying to talk people into buying something they may not really need. Then it struck me: Every VCR or hi-fi I sold put money into the pockets of the janitor of our store, the back office employees, the driver of the truck that delivered it, the oil worker that supplied gas to that truck, the factory worker that built the truck, the factory worker that built the VCR, the sailors on the ship that brought it across the atlantic, the grocery workers that sell food to all those people, etc.
I could expand, but you get my gist. we are in a world of plenty, and all we have to do is find a way to bring value to other people and they will pay us for our part, while we pay them for our part. It is a big circle of an economy. And even the rich play their part. I have a billionaire brother in law. He pays the captain of his main yaucht more than I make. And the crew is well paid. He has an entire fire department on his Montana ranch, yet even gets into it with them. He and I spend half a day trying to get one of his Peterbuilt fire engines started. It was a fuel problem.
The bottom line is that the key to survival is bringing some kind of value to other people, and in a perfect society there will always be a number of unemployed people, but their ranks are constantly changing. I've been on unemployment three or four times in my life, but never for more than a few weeks. That is the way it should be.
All it really takes for everyone to be relatively happy is to spend less than they earn and don't fill their life with desire for "stuff" that, though they may want it, they really don't need. That is not really that hard, physically, but it can be very hard, emotionally. Just like losing weight can be hard, though it's a very simple thing to do. Just eat less than you really need for a while.
