My name is Marco
and I'm a philosopher at Massey University
in Auckland. I specialise in
political philosophy and ethics
and today I'll tell you a bit
about how I ended up here,
quite a distance away from my origins in
former East Germany.
Some of you may have wondered why the
title of my talk mentions Lenin.
Is he a socialist or
worse,
is he Commy you might ask. Well at
least I was at some point because I grew up
in the German Democratic Republic after all.
The part of Germany that 
considered itself socialist.
I'm from a place about 40 to 50 
kilometres outside
of Berlin.
When I was little I went through all the
state-operated parts of the educational
and political system.
For instance, at age six I joined the
Young Pioneers.
At age 10, I became a Thälmann Pioneer and
age 14 I enlisted in the Free German Youth.
All of these were kind of like the scouts but
with socialist doctrine and 
socialist practices of course.
If you immersed in that kind of community
and especially when you grow
up in it, absorbing that doctrine and
taking on the practices 
performed around you,
happens pretty much automatically. 
So for that reason alone
it makes sense to label my younger self
a socialist.
But that's not actually why
Lenin is in the title of my webinar.
Instead, and some of you 
will already suspect that,
it's a reference to a movie from 2003.
I highly recommend it. I'm sure it's on
the streaming service that starts with "N".
Anyway, the film's about the end 
of East Germany.
It's about the woman you can see in the
picture, call her Christine.
She falls into a coma just before the
Berlin Wall comes down
and, when Christine wakes up a 
few months later,
the doctor says she can't have any
stress or excitement because it would
kill her, because she's still so weak.
The problem is during the months of her
coma, former East Germany has changed
so radically, it's virtually impossible
to avoid stress and excitement.
For example, if Christine were to set
foot in a supermarket
she would die immediately.
I'll come back to that thought 
in just a minute.
Now when the Berlin Wall came down, 
I was 16.
The end of East Germany came quite
unexpectedly and it happened so quickly.
I remember walking into
our kitchen
and telling my parents, "I just saw on TV,
the border crossings to West Germany are open."
And they were like
"what are you talking about, don't be silly".
But I was right they were.
Here's the interesting part, within just
a few days my world began to change at a
pace that was almost dizzying.
You would not believe
how quickly the trucks full of
consumer goods came rolling 
across the border to us.
Before that happened, we could go into
the supermarket, which were all owned and
operated by the state of course,
and we could get pretty much everything
we needed to feed ourselves.
Fruit and veggies, bread and butter, flour
milk, sugar, eggs 
and so on. Hunger and malnutrition
were not a thing for us.
I read in a Time magazine article that,
quote, "there was only so much the 16
million citizens
of the communist German Democratic
Republic could buy,
in a sealed off country of scarcity,
shortages and joyless austerity", end quote.
I don't think I quite agree 
with that statement,
though keep in mind that
as a child and teenager my perspective
was probably a bit different from that
of East German adults.
Typically of course product variety was
largely absent. If you wanted flour,
you had a choice between two unbranded
options -
unrefined and refined. They came in a
plain paper bag had the words "wheat flour"
printed on it, along with weight
and price, and that was it.
But then that's really all we required in 
terms of our flour needs I want to say.
Once West Germany's trucks arrived, our 
supermarket shelves became unrecognisable.
Suddenly there were 5, 10 or
20 brands of flour. Actually there were
5, 10 or 20 brands of everything.
Many of the things we, actually many of
these things we had actually been aware
of already.
You may not know this but East Germans
could actually watch
West German TV broadcasting, at least in
most parts.
We didn't have advertising of course, but
they did,
and we had been watching it for decades.
East Germans knew
many products, brands and
commercials and commercial jingles
from the screen, even though
none of them were ever available to us
Now suddenly, they were.
Everything was right here in front of us,
and that's just supermarkets of course.
As you can imagine, the same was
true for all other domains of consumption,
clothing, entertainment, furniture, 
vehicles et cetera.
And East Germans wholeheartedly 
embraced western consumerism.
We bought lots of stuff, often replacing
the things we had already,
because they were now so undesirable.
For instance, before the wall came down
you had to pay more than
17,000 Eastern marks
for a second-hand Trabant.
I'll share the screen with you to 
show you what that looks like.
So the Trabant was one of the two cars
manufactured in East Germany.
Within months, I, who previously had not 
been able to own anything like that of course,
could buy a well-maintained second-hand "Trubby", 
for just a few hundred marks.
In fact whenever my Trubby broke down,
I bought another second-hand one simply
because they were so incredibly cheap.
No one else wanted them.
All in all, by the time I got my
Management Master Degree and left
university in Germany,
I had had four or five of them.
Perfect car,
unless of course you wanted reliability
or speed or comfort. Excellent for a
penniless student though.
Anyway East Germans took to consumerism
like a pigeon takes to breadcrumbs.
The goods and services that West 
Germans have been consuming,
we now consume too - with little to no restraint.
Okay fast forward a bit into the future,
I had worked as a Management Consultant
for a few years now and realised that
I did not enjoy maximising shareholder
value.
I'm not saying maximising shareholder
value for multinational corporate
conglomerates is unimportant,
but it's just not what got me out of that.
So I decided to move to New Zealand
instead.
to Dunedin in fact. That place reminded
me,
kind of reminded me, of East Germany in a
number of ways.
People dress pretty unpretentiously,
you saw almost
no fancy cars and the houses were all
cold and draughty in winter.
I loved the beer from the first minute.
And then I was lucky enough to enrol in
a first-year ethics paper at Otago
University.
I had no idea how awesome philosophy was
and that they give you a degree for
something so interesting and fun,
quite incredible. I had actually found
the thing that did get me out of bed.
So here I am now,
living proof that you absolutely can
reconsider your life choices
and change track if you'd like to.
Now for my PHD research I decided
to focus on the ethics and politics of consumption.
So I looked at both; how we do consume and how we should and shouldn't consume.
The main conceptual perspective I chose
was the notion of human need. What things
do we actually need to live
adequate human lives.
To the degree that our consumption
isn't necessary for our flourishing.
It struck me,
it is really difficult to justify.
We hear parents use such
language, such need language,
with their children all the time. For example,
you might hear someone say
"you don't need another toy you already
have too many".
It's no accident I think that I was so
attracted to the idea of need.
Looking back, my basic consumption needs
were always perfectly satisfied when I
grew up in East Germany.
I had all the food I needed to grow and
be healthy,
all the clothes are to protect me from
the elements,
a home to keep me sheltered, public
transportation to get around
and so forth. So one should
wonder, if the consumption related needs
of East Germans were
satisfied, how exactly did the radical
change and
increase in consumption when the war
came down, contribute to their 
flourishing as human beings?
Especially, and here are some images for illustration,
especially when our consumerism
harms the environment so greatly. 
For example,
consider marine pollution with plastics.
And also when our consumerism
implicates us in a lot of human
suffering, especially in developing countries.
I'm not saying that the radical increase
in various freedoms 
in East Germany didn't lead to
better human lives. For instance, the
freedom to leave the country
and the freedom to practice religion,
which previously we didn't have.
But those improvements in our flourishing 
did not result from consuming more.
In my research I also became curious
about what I call "liminal
communities". Liminality is a
concept borrowed from anthropology,
the Latin word "līmen" means "threshold".
And since liminality is a threshold concept,
I use it in my work to refer to communities 
that stand at the very margins,
or largely outside, of the structures of
consumer society.
For me the Amish of America are one such
liminal community.
The Amish have successfully remained
outside of mainstream America
by strictly regulating their
consumption practices.
For instance, the Amish do not drive cars,
only horse-drawn buggies.
Horses are used because
that way the Amish prevent themselves
from going very far.
In fact their buggies
don't even have rubber tyres, you 
can see that in the picture.
They intentionally use steel rims
because
rubber would make the journey too
comfortable and they don't want that.
Again, by making buggy rides unpleasant
the Amish
keep close to their local communities.
The Amish value the social capital
that exists within their close-knit
communities so highly,
that they refuse any and all
technologies that would
threaten these ties.
It doesn't mean they refuse all modern
consumption of course.
Whenever some new good or service
appears on the horizon,
they sit down as a community and discuss
what would the adoption of this new
thing do to our chosen way of life 
and to our flourishing, to the way in which we flourish.
If it's clear the commodity is incompatible with
that value,
they reject it. For example, like TVs,
radios and
computer game consoles. If it is not
clear what the impact would be,
they may decide to allow it
provisionally. Simply to test it out and
see what happens. If the consequences are
unacceptable,
the commodity is "verboten", which means
forbidden.
The Amish to speak German.
Notice how
radically that differs
from what happened in East Germany in
1989.
We didn't sit down to deliberate how our
flourishing
would be affected by allowing western
consumer goods across the border.
In fact we never even sat down and truly
discussed which
aspects of our East German way of life
would be worth preserving to begin with
and, in my
eyes, that is a huge missed opportunity
for large-scale political participation.
I find the relative lack of large-scale
intense discussion of how we
should and shouldn't consume in
New Zealand equally unimpressive,
at a time when our global climate
is coming crashing down about our ears.
The question of what we actually
need to live well, deserves a great deal
of attention I think.
But perhaps actually our current
pandemic can help us focus on that a little bit.
I think it, to some degree,
highlights that we can
still flourish in a time when
we can consume, at least
not the way we did.
For instance, we can still live really
well, despite being unable to fly abroad
for beach holidays and despite the
absence of fast food.
There's a lot of consumer stuff that we
don't actually
need in our lives.
Thank you so much for your time and
attention with regard to this little talk.
If you'd like to learn a little bit more
about philosophy at Massey University,
you can simply find our blog that we're
currently building
at the address: www.MasseyPhilosophy.com
and if you want to send me any questions
or thoughts regarding this webinar,
you're welcome to email me too
of course at: M.Grix@massey.ac.nz.
Once again I cannot promise that I'll be
able to respond
to each message but I'll definitely read
them all.
So thank you so much once again for
dropping by today, I really 
appreciate your time and your attention.
And for now, I hope you have a good day and kia kaha.
