The unstable West does not know if it can escape its destiny of self-consumption.

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In our language, the word “consumerism” always has a negative twist. There is practically no mouth from which this word does not come out with a whiff of stale moralism. It is said, of course, that consumption is necessary for economic development and growth, that the function of production is to satisfy demand and that consumption is the sole purpose and the sole aim of all production. On the other hand, we never hear a defense of why consuming, in the broadest sense of the term, is in reality something that is one with life. Imagine, then, in the era of climatism and a sort of pagan return to a celebration of nature and the noble savage, how one can fail to understand this very simple reality.

Consuming is, paradoxically, the first creative act. Through the consumption of what is, in fact, it is possible to recreate and give life to something else. Consuming is one with the act of transforming. Like when you plan wood to create a table, like when you chisel marble to create a statue. The same thing happens, in an even more exemplary way, with energy. By consuming we give life, we create new orders, we allow the generation of new things that in turn will feed this creative-destructive cycle. And in this path of consumption and creation something always gets lost. If there is something we, as humans, can be certain of, it is that we are finite beings, which does not simply mean mortal, but that we are made of time . If there is a fabric, an ultimate fabric that holds the human together, that fabric is precisely time. Quantitatively, time is nothing other than the measure of everything that is consumed. Everything we know we know exclusively as temporal. There is no possibility of thinking except in time and through time. Even the eternal, that which would be structurally timeless, we cannot help but think except through an interminable temporality. But if what we are made of is precisely time, we have always known, that is, since the beginning of our thinking in Greek mythology, that chronos devours its own children. And if time devours us, who are time, we ourselves are nothing but power that consumes, dissipates, dissolves, but does not simply nullify but transforms. Nature models over the course of millions of years, and finally dissolves. Man, through his own consumption, accelerates “natural time”, burns and creates incomparably more rapidly. Thus he himself becomes a creator, accelerates natural evolution, becomes himself creative “nature”. To do so, however, he must consume, he must erase-transform the existing, the given, the “natural”. History is this process in which nature is taken in hand by man and is simultaneously created and consumed.

Of course, this does not apply in any way only to “things”. In Hegel, philosophy (thought) is seen as a corrosive agent of the past and of given structures, like phosphorus: it gives light but burns. This dissolving work, of consumption of the existing, carried out by philosophy is what reason does: by understanding the world better and better, it organizes it into concepts that dissolve, consume, what was there before. And so we would proceed towards a “better”. Reality or illusion? It matters little, because without the idea of ​​this growth through working, through consuming, there would be no destiny for man. Because man is time that consumes, transforms, increases. Capitalism is an unsurpassed reflection of all this.

In this great work of assimilation and transformation that consumes everything, that removes certainties and finally eliminates what appears to be given by some superior and immobile natural order, political structures also change (improve?) over the centuries. From the rigidity of “despotisms” we arrive at liberal democracy, which continually consumes itself through the division of public opinion, debate, old governments that fall and new ones that arise only to fall again, and in this cyclicality everything is always in crisis and at the same time vital. In short, not to make it too long, the acceleration of this consumption, of this consumption of the West and of everything that was fixed, stable, given in it, has been one of the essential reasons for its success: creative destruction, not only of things but also of concepts and dogmas, that is, of every certainty . Everything is consumed precisely because we recognize it as finite and transformable. There is nothing untouchable. Thus the act of consuming is the creative act par excellence, it frees up space and thus gives space to the new and the unexpected. But this consuming everything, which is also the dramatic side of the story, is the beating heart of the West, and it is an inevitably and structurally nihilistic heart.

This process of self-consumption of the West, and therefore of the world that, little by little, becomes entirely West because it becomes an agent of consumption-transformation, seems to be incapable of being interrupted. Otherwise, we fall into a deadly stability. If we are time, in fact, we cannot stay. However, we cannot consume ourselves infinitely (precisely because we are structurally finite). So, the question would be, is it possible to escape from this circle of self-consumption? Or is it, instead, necessary to "fulfill our destiny" by taking consumption to the extreme?

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