The celebrated social psychologist Erich Fromm said that people are divided into those who want to have things and those who want to be. Societies and individual communities all over the world can be classified the same way.
Societies that want to have things have gone bankrupt, and their economies, like living systems, have failed to resist the pressure of the human desire to buy more and more things. Today we have a financial crisis on our hands. In a sense, Ukrainians are bigger materialists than other Europeans because they began enjoying the benefits of the consumer philosophy only recently.
But this philosophy is treacherous because the more you have, the more you want to possess. After having started to accept the possibility of living on credit, we are now being told to tighten our belts. This is distasteful. But if we revised our way of thinking — which also defines lifestyle — and sought more important things in life?
According to the latest survey conducted by the Gorshenin Institute of Management Issues, 30 percent of Ukrainians intend to economize on clothing during the economic crisis. Fortunately, no one wants to economize on education. Assuming that this economic crisis is another opportunity, then maybe it is a chance for us to become the kind of people who want to be; to be professional, decent, and talented people who have discovered themselves; to be good to our friends, you name it.
This kind of change would be good even if pertains only to some of us, those who are ready to rethink their way of life and find something more important in it than what they own.
Yevhen HOLOVAKHA, deputy director of the Institute of Sociology at the National Academy of Sciences (NAN) of Ukraine:
There are many reasons behind this economic crisis. One of them is the fact that people became big consumers. But there are many other objective factors that have to do with the overall global trend. In Europe and the United States people have grown accustomed to a certain consumer discipline. Compared to them, we are small-time consumers, and we aren’t accustomed to this discipline. Let me give you an example. After the Americans began raising fuel prices, within one year they reduced their car travel by 17 billion kilometers, although for them cars are the main means of transport.
In Ukraine, these prices also began to rise, perhaps even on a larger scale than in the US, but no such decrease has been recorded. Consumer discipline in the developed countries has evolved thanks to the century-old rule of the market economy. Here it is the other way around, although we’ll have to go through the same hardships as the rest of the world, but with our own specific features.
I would like to stress that many microeconomic trends are affecting this crisis, for example, the stupid things that are being done by our government. If our cabinet had not experimented with the hryvnia this summer, we wouldn’t have the situation we’re facing today. We don’t need experimentation, and the government has to perform adequately. That’s why its members are paid 10 times the amount of the average Ukrainian’s salary. Let Ukrainians consume as many commodities as they want. The quantity will be controlled by the amount of money people have at their disposal.
We cannot lay all the blame for the crisis on the consumer. First of all, this is a government matter. If the government is intelligent, the country will suffer less during a crisis. Consumer discipline in Ukraine is a small brick in the masonry of its economic system. It will take Ukrainians a hundred years to develop a certain culture of life in a market society (we’ve been there for less than 20 years).
According to the institute’s statistics, Ukrainians are gradually becoming accustomed to the market economy. When we ask our respondents what they lack, fewer people are saying “normal living conditions.” This is very important. Even though this process is very slow, we’ll have to learn a new way of life. A new society means new laws that must be learned.