Consumerism and contrivance

Consumerism may be defined for the purposes of this post as the socio-economic order in which the (sole) power of the commoner lies in boycott. It presumes that progress is generally beneficial for the common man and only needs to be adjusted at times. Thus boycott is seen as an adequate means of restructuring.

Usually, the power to destroy is the power to extort. But boycott doesn't lend itself well to extortion, because it has to be carried out by a mass of people. Hence a boycott has to be driven by an ideology and its effect is a restructuring agreeing with that ideology.

However, if the presumption is wrong and progress leads to systemic concentration of power, the accumulative effect of (threatened) boycotts is less a restructuring than a contrivance, an arbitrary structural distortion with the intent to shield commoners from the concentration of power, an amputation in order to give people room to live.

Hence in that case society will grow ever more contrived and checkered, with highly developed efficiency in some spots and deliberate inefficiency in others, which begs the question to which extent man is willing to let his life be determined by the dynamics of his previous socio-economic guesswork.