Enough Already

When is enough, enough? We may have lost our faculty for critical thinking, our sense of civility and capacity for empathy but as a nation we remain world class consumers. We buy goods and services sufficient to keep about 1.5 million workers on the Amazon payroll. I know the feeling. I’m one of those consumers. When we are not online buying, we are in line at Costco, that shrine of excess. How fast can I eat a dozen pears before they turn to mush?

Capitalism legitimizes greed without end unless it coexists with some ethical force as a corrective. And greed turns into shopping which brings out the scolding preacher in me, a voice I allow to vent now and then even if I may be talking to myself.

As a gross generalization it can be said that the  word enough is not in the vocabulary of the one percent. There’s a hole in their imagined bucket which can never be filled. As the Bard said, Apparel doth oft proclaim the man (and woman). I suppose accessories are also included. I submit that the person proclaimed is the persona, not the real self. No designer watch or electric car can fill that empty space within. Jeff Bezos owns cars worth eighty million dollars. (Everybody needs a hobby) Did John McCain really need seven residences? (It must be a burden to remember where he left his toothbrush.) Could it be that the yearning for more is misplaced? 

Now I must disclose that I am no ascetic. I am enriched by beauty and greatly admire women's adornments, style and fine fabrics. I regard it as wearable art. When is it enough? I have no idea.The object itself is not the problem. It is an acquisitive impulse that warrants a pause and self examination. 

However, apart from things, there is a far different sort of possession in which you never get enough of that wonderful stuff, according to Wlliam Blake. 

The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, said he.                                                                                                           

Blake was a visionary whose philosophy was antithetical to the accumulation of material goods. He warned against the false god of money and how power corrupts. His notion of excess is an expression of passion, that inexplicable urge toward ecstasy. His poetic sensibility found him reaching for the divine. I suspect the wisdom he meant was an enlightened state which transcended all earthy goods. Only at that perch can we know what is enough.  

Can we love enough, forgive enough, evolve enough to retain our wonder? In that sense I don’t believe there is such a thing as enough. Keep on keeping on.

I must remember to take Blake-consciousness with me on my next visit to Costco. I would start eating my dozen pears at the checkstand if only they were ripe. Thirty percent of our nation’s food gets thrown out. We have yet to learn what’s enough. Shame on us. Our excess has yet to bring us to wisdom. A modicum of dispossession might lead us to Blake’s notion of excess.