Materialism is largely regarded as a bad thing, a symbol of either your circumstantial or existential squalor. The consumerist super-factory churns outs heaps of steaming slag to be swallowed and refused by an organizable foam of ‘customers’. These customers are equally part of the machine, the refuse the true byproduct of these processes. Customers, however, are not all equal. Both have open jaws, provoked by a void, but one category is motivated by the growling, physical void. The other group drools with the disconsolate existential void, an extra-substantial void. Like plugging a hole with soapy foam, there is the appearance of fullness when filled with material, but time will diminish the filler until the hole is, once more, rapidly losing air.

Materialism is not, however, a sickness itself. You can’t blame a hungry man for his need to eat or a lonely person’s need for physical comforts. No, materialism is a symptom of human suffering, regardless of the root of that dis-ease. Materialism is reminder that humanity is still sick, is still animal, still, ourselves, material. Some would recommend this to be a ‘connection with our heritage’, but I would argue it’s a severing from our evolution.

Materialism is, at best, settling and, at worst, a weapon. The existential void of those with access to basic necessity begins to siphon essential matter away from the existent voids as the motors that motivated them when they were hungry now find themselves running without purpose. This howling consumption is called greed and is also widely regarded as a bad thing.

But how do we stop this? How do we heal humanity of its myriad suffering and allow ourselves to shift the paradigm?

Postmaterialism in its original conception was the sociological inclination that people who were born into a situation when the existent void was filled, could transcend into higher concerns of autonomy and self-expression. When love, food and shelter were provided, need was not a concern, vulnerability and security were not obsessions. They sought to help improve democracy, explore ethics and expression, equality and charity. But why then, aren’t the richest and most powerful people also the most liberal, open and charitable?

Culturally we have settled for the material. We have all known need abundantly, whether physical, emotional or psychological. When we do come to know “enough”, however, we remain on habits of fear and insecurity. Our impoverished spirits still hunger for more. It’s become a cultural axiom at this point:

Never Settle.

Be more, have more, see more, consume, produce, consume. We’re taught to buy and we’re taught to sell. And this all comes from the materialism, a near Aristotlian essentialist realism. Our need has been hacked and it’s created the disparity between classes of people.

Rising through the echelons of society provide no reprieve from consumption, but, they do offer a supposed class of "higher consumption". The masses consume essentially. They know need and seek to fill those needs or assist in their psychological tolerances to the tasks required to make ends meet. The working class consumes inexpensive, easily produced, prepared and consumed food, often with the added benefit of a dopamine kick of

Material is an old vernacular, a bleeding language that the artistic elite refuse to let die. They not only heave their incomes into their own consumption of raw materials, but, also into the alchemization of those materials into "art objects". They naively offer a credibility to consumption and materialism through a grandfathered ideology of material exaltation.

and, as with many cultural evolutions, the movement away from materialism must start artistically.