A while back, a friend of mine sent me a whole bunch of bargain websites which have coupons for all sorts of junk. Baby formula, flat-screen TVs, free this, discount on that. It made me think about how our mailbox is stuffed full almost daily of junk, in the form of coupons and alerts on all kinds of deals. Beyond even that, my own credit card company sends me blank checks to write against my credit, and this same friend told me I better get a credit card that has rewards or I'm really missing out - 5% off gas, 1% off all purchases, etc. He, and many others like him, make it a habit to change their spending behavior based on what other companies are offering, rather than spending what is needed only, in the right places.

Could I use a buy one/get one free coupon on some baby formula? Sure, of course I could. Some of these bargains truly end up saving one money. But it also made me think of American consumerism and our preoccupation with bargains and deals.

Rather than spend time and changing spending habits so they revolve around finding a few bucks off junk we don't need or want - which, ironically, causes one to spend more than one would otherwise - my wife and I have found we work best by continuing what we always did even before our son was born. We buy food in the most basic, least processed form possible (with the occasional treat thrown in), and make as many of our own meals as possible. We realized that they typically don't have coupons for things like bags of lettuce, carrots, almonds, or bananas; usually the coupons are for non-perishables like canned goods with lots of salt and/or corn syrup.

Outside of food, we put as much of our savings as possible into a liquid yet higher yield instrument than today's regular savings accounts. At least this way, the little bit of interest one earns compounds and grows over time, the idea being that you never really need that money, but if you did, you might look in your statement one day and find that it grew a bit since the last time you checked.

Instead of spending my time clipping coupons and finding junk to buy that I wouldn't want anyway, I'm buying a life insurance policy and taking advantage of my local bank's money market rates. We were never your typical American consumers to begin with and in fact have less junk and spend less on telecom services (cable, internet, phone) than we did five years ago. Rather than focus on spending more to save more, always chasing the carrot on the stick, we've curbed our overall spending so we have more time to be a family.

Fight Club is, at first, a dark comedy about an individual lost in modern society. He lives in a condo, eats junk, and has an addiction to buying furniture - because what the hell else is he going to do with his money as a single, well-paid, obedient member of the middle class? He also develops insomnia and looks at the world through a very dark lens: flourescent lights in his office keeping everyone satiated like monkeys in a cage; constant caffeine and junk addiction with piles of trash all around; the false sheen of the world in the form of corporate offices and airports. There are some great one liners early on ("this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time") and some very clever moves by director David Fincher to make this Chuck Palahniuk novel come to life on the screen. The little we learn of Jack's past seems to paint a picture of a generation, which makes for good metaphor and necessarily complicates Jack's character to make him more interesting.

The real fun, however, begins when our main character meets a fellow business traveler named Tyler Durden. Phase I of this mission of a film is to critique modern society lightly and playfully, while Jack (played wonderfully by Ed Norton) trudges through life and support groups he has no business going to, just so he can "cry and sleep". Phase II is the process of Tyler warming Jack up to the idea that there are more important things in life than lightly poking fun of society even while doing nothing about it, in classic hipster fashion, and asks Jack to do him one simple favor - "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." This blossoms into an underground movement of Jack-a-likes; business men who travel and deal with corporate nothingness all day who simply need to feel something real. Many of these followers, named "space monkeys" in hilarious fashion by Tyler, fall into line and do what they are told because they know that destroying modern society and following a strong leader for a worthy cause is much better than continuing to live with no goals and no leadership. As Tyler says - "we're the middle children of history, men - no purpose or place. We have no great war; no great depression..our great war's a spiritual war; our great depression, is our lives."

While entertaining in its own right, Fight Club ultimately fails to answer a question it can't help but pose to attentive viewers with its nihilistic attitude toward modern society: It's all well and good to destroy a society if people are so helpless that no other method will do (think the wonderful Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins) - but what then? The complete picture is outside the scope of the film and these questions are not answered, neither by Chuck Palahniuk (author of the novel), nor by David Fincher (director). It's too bad, because the film seems to almost get there but can't quite make the leap, focusing instead on the main character's ultimate decision to fix his own twisted mind instead of using the immense amount of energy he's built to help rebuild society. This film focuses entirely on the destruction of modern society while taking some fun jabs at it, and for those purposes, it's worth a watch - you'll find yourself rewatching it many times over the course of years, and thinking to yourself on what a society built by Jack and Tyler Durden would look like.

One of the fundamental problems we face in the West is how to reform a system designed to thrive only on constant economic growth. As environmentalists like John Feeney and Pentti Linkola point out, the limited resources on our planet guarantee that's an unsustainable way of organizing society. So, one becomes "anti-consumerist," or someone who believes in limiting how we use our Earth's resources to produce things people want to buy. But where does that lead us?

Anyone wanting to buy a book attacking consumerism is faced with an embarrassing range of choices. There are so many different tracts, using so many different terms, saying more or less the same thing. The differences between competing brands of soap powder are more significant.

To the extent there is any originality in Lawson’s work it is to blame the rise of turbo-consumerism on what he calls ‘free market fundamentalism’. From this perspective a group of rabid free marketeers, led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, led an intellectual revolution which ultimately led to an obsession with consumption. In Britain it was Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, who put the ideas into practice.

It is also hard to square the idea of free market fundamentalism with the massive role of the state in the British economy. The most striking indicator of this is that state spending in Britain is equivalent to about 45 per cent of gross domestic product. This is a huge distance away from the minimal role of the state favoured by the likes of von Mises and Hayek.

Clearly there's hypocrisy at the core of leftist-oriented anti-consumerism. Europe has never really embraced free market principles like America has, and even if we isolate the US, we have to take into account the recent rounds of bail outs and government-owned sectors now increasingly adding up to something resembling European-style capitalism.

So we barely have "free" markets in an absolute sense, if such an economy can even exist in reality, but how do we construct a society not built upon the principle of constant growth? If we want the government out of the market as much as possible and offer consumer choice, we need to look at this equation:

Population size X average per capita consumption = total consumption

To reduce the consumption we need to reduce the number of people on this planet, as well as our consumption rates, but clearly the most fundamental factor in the equation is the population size. The fewer we are, the more we can consume without overshooting the planet's carrying capacity. So the real elephant in the room is overpopulation, which right now is such a sensitive moral issue that only leaders like Michael E. Arth, Pentti Linkola, Albert Bartlett and NWO oligarchs dare to address it in public.

We don't want the government to destroy the open market, because it leads to European socialism, which spells slow death for civilization. What we do want is to honestly tackle the population issue, not just in the third world but also in the West, because although the latter doesn't suffer from an overpopulation problem as big as in, say, Africa, it still maintains insane consumption rates per capita. We can solve this by moving away from the idea that you are what you consume, to the notion of you are what you make out of your life in relation to your community, family and culture. The Western consumerist religion is a problem of culture and values, and not something that can be solved with leftist-oriented policies calling for government intervention.

We are Conservatives and believe in Conservative solutions. To be a Conservative anti-consumerist simply means you believe in higher values than radical individuality and the right to consume. You believe your function in a community is more important than occupying a rung on the commercial ladder. This is why commercialism per se isn't bad; our priorities and values are. We need a better humanity focusing on reviving great art, great architecture, great science, and joyful exploration of the future with the wisdom of the past to guide us:

The conservative wishes to channel change without losing sight of some critical points of reference. These are tradition that is established folkways, and the existing attitudes and preferences with which we are endowed. In this case, change is welcome but it is to be structured in such a way that we do not lose our essence in the process.

Our essence is our inseverable bond with the planet that sustains our very existence. Never bite the hand that feeds you.