To Be or To Regulate?

I heard a commentary during a discussion on the European economic crisis on one of the major international news channels, that the pressing philosophical question today is not the eternal dilemma expressed by Shakespeare's Hamlet as 'to be or not to be?', but instead the somewhat less eternal, rather worldly 'to regulate or not to regulate?'

I found this pretty alarming:

The commentary indicates that we have reached a complete economisation of the perception of existence. Life and being alive seemingly are no longer the greatest mysteries to humankind, having been replaced by the unpenetrable complexity of the ideological battle between rational economic men of the Kenysian and Hayekian camps. (click here for in-fight footage of this epic struggle.)

What is more, the commentary implies that our consumerist, capitalist system is still fine in its core and that the social, economic, and political issues we are currently facing around the globe are just a matter of a few misconfigured systemic variables. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are experiencing cracks in the socio-economic structure not because we've made a few wrong decisions along the way, but because the very essence of our system is unsustainable! The cracks in it thus are not 'something gone wrong' but emergent property! To put it differently: The cracks are the 'more' in 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts'.

While lots has been said and written about the dysfunctional socio-economic factors of the system, its unsustainable nature has its root in the psychological factors, its ethos:

As homo consumensis, we live passive lives, experiencing ourselves one dimensionally at best as we relate to the world around us through the ideologically preferred mode: consumption. We consume products, lifestyles, natural resources, habitats, people, relationships, ideas, nothing is spared in the enactment of our role within the whole. In this same enactment, we willingly offer ourselves for consumption, be that on the job market, a 'networking event', or a date, sacrificing our existence to the consumerist powers in order to taste the 'blessings' of the consumerist powers.

The homo consumensis has thus created a society that sees the world which surrounds it (including society itself and the people that make it up) as a mere resource of calorific value in the existential quest to develop consumeristic potential. To summarise this way of being in a not-so- easy-to-digest punchline:

You are when you consume, you are what you consume, you are to be consumed.

Need evidence? Raise your awareness to how we are straining our environment with the consumerist way of being. Raise your awareness to how we are straining non-human life with the consumerist way of being. Raise your awareness to how we are straining our societies with the consumerist way of being. Hell, just take a moment and raise your awareness to how we are straining our very selfs with the consumerist way of being.

If you raise your awareness, it should become apparent that in our approach to being, we are missing the point: In the unfolding of our consumerist existence, we are destroying all other.

Regulating the speed or intensity with which we unfold this mode will not change its direction of focus; we will only be able to slow down or accelerate the destructive process.

To an aware observer, surely this is no way to be. I believe Keynes and Hayek would agree.