Materialism, superficiality, hedonism—the list of anathemas hurled against consumer society goes on and on, as if up until the invention of the supermarket, man had been nothing more than a soldier-monk, switching between work and prayer. But humanity has always been materialistic, even when spending time in the company of God. When medieval peasants prayed to the saints, it was not to guide them along a path to spiritual awakening, but to ask for bountiful harvests, cure their scrofula, boost their fertility and get rich. Each saint had their own set of specialties. Since this desire to consume has always been with us, we must look to identify its modern form, not in terms of quantity (are today's supermarkets any different from the medieval trade fairs?) but in the role it plays for modern man. The satisfaction of needs or the fear of running out of old is transformed into a compulsive anxiolytic social behavior, which started as a compensation phenomenon for centuries of privation, continued as an economic necessity to absorb the permanent production surplus, then became the key value of the whole liberal system and ended up today as the sole panacea for our terrestrial ennui, and this despite the fact that there are serious side effects: turning people into commodities, collective brainwashing and the squandering of resources—all problems that, on the surface, everyone appears to denounce.

Really, everyone? But who are they? We are all festering in the same vast commercial mire. Not many people, whether religious or atheist, are seen to hide away like hermits in protest of consumer materialism. Our consumer society has this magical quality, making us capable of launching the most vitriolic of diatribes just moments before purposefully heading off to the grocery store for our weekly shop, without feeling the slightest contradiction, myself included. This may mean there are no contradictions, and that if it is to perform its role correctly, the consumer act must be inseparable from the anathema that vilifies it so. But why? Because Western man, still possessed by a Christian subconscious, needs to soothe his guilty conscience by denouncing this evil, thus granting him a license to sin.