Reddit reviews Happier Than A Billionaire: Quitting My Job, Moving to Costa Rica, and Living the Zero Hour Work Week

> These structures of society have shaped the thinking of members of society to focus on the individual rather than the community.

No, that's a false view from social constructivism. As humans we innately have both considerations for individual and community cooperation. In fact, this was the very topic of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

In fact it is your very point that cooperation with the community is vital to the success of humankind that caused the evolution of altruism. Specifically, it was the reproductive success of the individuals with genes to drive notions of community cooperation -- in balance with individual considerations -- that allowed those genes to flourish in comparison to solely individualist genes.

As you suggest, we benefit from each other thanks to a variety of economic factors, including safety in numbers, division of labour, comparative advantage, and solving the Prisoners Dilemma. But we also benefit from individual considerations. You can't simply ignore that. There is a balance, and we have those built into our cognitive functions, and social constructs don't eliminate that.

In fact, you've got it backwards. It's exactly things like using our collective government that solve such problems. Generally speaking, problems you identify are social Prisoner's Dilemmas. Things like environment are solved by creating a centralize enforcement of common best interests. As in the link, there is no means to solve it as individuals. No amount of, "Hey, let's all do it together" can every solve such problems; all it doesn't is increase the ability of individuals to exploit the sacrifices of others. It's called the Free Rider Problem. Once you understand the trap of the Prisoner's Dilemma and it's related problems like the Tragedy of the Commons and the Ultimatum Game, and recognize where they exist throughout societies, you begin to understand why we need to solve them through common enforcement agencies like a democratic government (as in the first link).

While social constructivism doesn't work, this doesn't mean that "thinking about community" doesn't help. We do have innate tendencies to norm toward our in-group (tribal) averages, so if more people seemed to focus on community then indeed that could promote people working in communities. But that doesn't seem related to capitalism or consumerism. Capitalism has nothing to do with individuals, but is purely based on the principle of up-front investment (of time, energy, effort, labour, money, whatever) to earn back more than the cost of the investment. That will always be true because it is an inherent law of the universe; it happens in any socioeconomic structure.

Consumerism also isn't a thing that creates other things, as the title suggests. Consumerism is an output; it's a description, not a prescription. People don't sign up to some consumerist set of beliefs; it merely describes the state in which we have excess capacity compared to what we need. We can now afford unnecessary trinkets, so we focus on our whims. But that is a consequence of standard of living, not of some socioeconomic structure -- except for the ability of that socioeconomic structure to enable the very prosperity the results in consumerist luxury.

The only way to do away with consumerism is to drive down our standard of living so that we only have enough to get by on. And to do that you have to force people to do it against their will. Remember, people today can work a lot less and consume a lot less if they want to. I have a friend who retired at 40 and moved to Costa Rica and lives in a modest house there doing fine, and likely will. She isn't wealthy at all, probably lower middle class before retiring. (Heck, you can read about people doing this in Happier That A Billionaire.) Most people don't though. We work as much because we want the marginal increases we get from it.

I hope you don't think that such a world would be a better place: forcing people against their will to have lower quality of life so that they can't consume luxuries so that they rely on other people more to get by so they think more in terms of community.

I really don't see that people an option people would like. I certainly don't. Rather, I think the better solution is exactly the democratic government approach, with a lot of reform though. Those reforms I would suggest would take far too long here though.