Book Review: The Abundant Community

The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (2012) by John McKnight and Peter Block is a book that addresses economic and social problems that exist in modern-day American society.  The authors address topics such as: materialism, health care costs, employment, over-consumption, affordable child care, management practices, and living a “system life.”  McKnight and Block suggest that Americans have been led to believe that they can buy their way to happiness and the “good life.”  The authors suggest this belief is fraudulent. 

On pages 16-17, they write: “This belief that the good life depends on consumption is a unique worldview that is less than a century old.  It gained momentum in the 1920s and became ‘the gospel of consumption’ – the notion that people could be convinced that however much they had, it wasn’t enough.”

The authors contend that our current socioeconomic system is devised to make people into compulsive consumers.  As compulsive consumers people are taught to be in a constant state of dissatisfaction.  The economic marketplace has created institutions, the authors contend, that stipulate that they will offer solutions to human conditions.  The marketplace system encourages people to find the “fix” to their problems through professional services: police, schools, physicians.  (This is not to say that these services are not helpful).  However, the belief that people’s problems are solvable though a profit-driven marketplace rather than a community is a fraudulent promise, according to McKnight and Block. 

Examples of these counterfeit promises can be seen in the myriad number of social problems that we are faced with in the United States.  These problems include: addiction to prescription pills; high incarceration rates; homelessness; hunger; poverty; high homicide rates; and suicide attempts/suicides.  The authors suggest that American consumers have been seduced by a false promise from the market: that their happiness can be bought.  That a fulfilling relationship can be found through consuming products.  McKnight & Block argue that this marketplace promise will not bring happiness, rather it will bring discontentment and longing.  In our consumerist society, we have become addicted to shopping and filling our lives with products and material possessions.

Also on page 17, Charles Kettering – former the director of General Motors Research, wrote an article titled: “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.”  The article describes the foundation of the consumer society.  Essentially, regardless of how much or what you purchase, you will always end up longing for more.

Highlights of The Abundant Community include:

Page 31: “Systems that are constructed for order cannot provide satisfaction in domains that require a unique and personal human solution.  They are unable to provide the satisfaction that they promise because of their very nature… It is that systems have a limit; by their nature, they cannot provide prosperity or peace of mind or a life of satisfaction… The consumer economy is sustained by providing answers… The most important dimensions of being human have no clear answer. This means that the answers that systems claim they can provide are counterfeit… Love cannot be purchased, power not bought, death not avoided… What happens in system life is that we become the system that we inhabit.  We become replicable.  We are interchangeable parts.  It is the industrialization of the person.”

Page 32: “The purpose of management is to create a world that is repeatable.  But the problem with people, whether producers or consumers, is that none of them are the same.  Management’s task, then, is to overcome their uniqueness and ‘help’ them to align with what the system needs.  They standardize work processes and automate human functions or outsource them to low-cost strangers as fast as they can.”

Page 37: “What was a condition is now turned into a problem that can be solved.  That is commodification.  Personal limitations are part of the human condition, and they get split into two kinds.  One is the limitation that can’t be fixed; the other is that which can be fixed.”

Page 38: “The point is that the condition we are in is being human.  To be human means to be fallible… The system mindset thinks the human condition is a problem to be solved.  The competent community treats troubles as a condition.  They cannot be solved.  However, they can be accepted, and the person is valued for their gifts that build our community.”

Page 39: “Commodification is the process of taking a human condition, describing it as a problem, and then selling a purported solution… Professions are created and extended.  When the professions have grown powerful enough to claim much of the human condition, the complexity requires a means of ordering the work, and a manager is needed.  So we see hospitals once run by nuns now managed by chief executive officers.”

Page 43: “Systems can create the illusion of providing health, safety, comfort and the like, but theirs is a counterfeit promise.  In fact, all that they can deliver is order, consistency, and the cost value of scale.  One reason why systems cannot deliver what they promise is that they market their promises by the celebration of deficiencies.  The doctor, the school, the police, and the therapist thrive on our deficiencies and needs.”

“We are colonized by the belief that we are a diagnostic category; that we are a need, not a capacity; and that only a system, product, a professional service can satisfy that need.  If we argue with the producer or professional, we are called noncompliant, classified as an objection or resistance.”

“The reality is, human beings are fallible, and the promise of a solution or cure implies that people are solvable, even perfectable – and in the case of health care, possibly immortal.”

Page 45: “It requires the foolishness of a romantic to believe that there is a purchasable solution to our fallibility.  The effort to find a fix for our humanity only forces us into counterfeit promises and unsatisfying results.  Often we believe that if we do more of what does not work, it will finally work.  This is the dilemma of the consumer economy.  It leads us to the place where, when we reach a limit and still are unsatisfied, we think, if only we had more, we would be successful or satisfied.  More police, more physicians, more services, more teachers, more stuff.  This is not a solution.  It is an addiction.”

Page 52: “Health care is the other large market that has opened up for the private sector.  The selling proposition that a private health care system is cost and outcome effective has turned out to be a myth.  The United States pays a 40 percent premium for health care and barely ranks in the top 10 percent in outcome measures of infant mortality and adult diseases.”

Page 53: “Debt is driven by the belief that there is nothing we cannot afford and have right now.  Debt is the facilitator and lubricant of the consumer ecology.  We live beyond our means and are told this is a public service.  The solution to any personal crisis: go shopping.  Debt is the consequence of citizens’ continuing to invest in the myth of purchasable satisfaction… Our willingness to absorb the cost of living beyond our means is evidence of our perpetual dissatisfaction.  Whatever we have is not enough.  The debt we incur is the vehicle by which dissatisfaction is sustained.  It is a hangover that lingers long after the purchase.  Debt is the enabling agent or drug of our dissatisfaction.  Debt is an essential part of our addiction to seeking satisfaction outside of our family and neighborhood.” 

Page 60 – 61: “If you are a professor in a college classroom, you are in a room not of learners but of young people just sitting there as total consumers.  They do not show up to learn; they show up for a résumé that will get them a good enough job to pay off their educational debt and provide enough extra for a good consumer life.  Instead of valuing education, they are consumers interested in information.  Information is the booby prize in education.  The culture of the university is no longer a place for education; it is a terminal to pass through in order to get somewhere.  It is a high-level vocational education.  It is a credential.  It has replaced the creation of learning with the consumption of instruction.”

Page 62: “The fallacy of the consumer model is the notion that what we are seeking is, in fact, obtainable in the marketplace.  While we may know intellectually that a satisfied life cannot be purchased, we have an economy whose very success counts on our dissatisfaction and is dependent on our continuous effort to make the purchase.  The dominant cultural reality for developed countries is that once we become a customer in the consumer society, our dissatisfaction is guaranteed.  ‘Customer satisfaction’ has become a euphemism; it is a counterfeit promise.”