We are a culture that happens to value things that are not realistically attainable for the average person and, in so doing, renders self-esteem impossible to acquire for too many of our citizens … Despite the great material benefits that a capital-based economy affords us and that none of us should be hesitant to recognize or appreciate … when the goal is unlimited wealth, no one can ever be successful in that regard, so our standards are unattainable … and because we teach our citizens that if you weren’t an idiot and if you tried hard enough, you too could be rich and famous, when that turns out not to be the case, the average person blames themselves and suffers the psychic consequences accordingly … Psychologically speaking, we don’t have a set of values in places that renders it acceptable to just be a person of integrity …
My other concern has to do with the more material consequences of the way that we conduct ourselves as a culture … when you take a free-market, capital-based economy where the goal is to make as much cash as possible and you juxtapose that with the Judeo-Christian worldview — 'God created us in His image and then put everything here for us to use at our leisure’ … that has given us license to turn the world into a giant Bic lighter, to use at our will and to dispose of accordingly …
I don’t think it’s overly histrionic to note that Americans are responsible for a scandalous amount of environmental destruction and that we use a disproportionate amount of non-renewable resources and that we seem to do so in cavalier disregard of the fact that this is highly problematic and completely contrary to world opinion …
It’s only, I think, a naïve, death-denying creature that can, with a straight face, say 'we’ve got plenty of food, plenty of air, plenty of water — let’s keep cutting down the rainforest, let’s keep peeing in the pool, and let’s keep puking toxic waste into the atmosphere because the economy needs to keep growing.’ Ironically, the economy is an abstraction, whereas the physical world that we undermine in pursuit of [economic growth] is quite real
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