A Meta Argument

I had a very interesting discussion with a close friend recently in which the issue of needless consumption leading to excessive waste generation came up. I agree with the idea completely but then we stumbled upon a facet of the problem that was much more interesting, atleast to me. The question is, how do you define needless ? To put it succinctly, since this is not what I want the subject matter of the post to be, there is no way we can say that what a third person is consuming is excessive when we ourselves indulge in so many things which are not strictly needed for bare survival. Like our laptops, and cars and automobiles etc. If these things are not luxuries to us then a fourth television set should not be a luxury for person X. Expecting others to cut down on consumption when we ourselves can survive on a lot less is hypocrisy. But the bottomline is this, increasing needs is the other face of the coin we call 'development'. Its not that we cannot live within lesser means, its just that we choose not to and its a basic human tendency. We personally choose a level of comfort that we are not ready to give up for 'social good' and 4 televisions happens to be as honest a level of comfort for person X as a motorcycle or an expensive mobile is for us. So its futile to think that we can save the planet (I am not too bothered) by reducing 'excessive consumption'. There are two problems with this expectation:

1. There should be an objective measure of excessive consumption which there is not.

2. In the absence of such an objective measure, some self-righteous people decide that 5 cars is excessive or gas guzzlers are excessive and expect others to cut down on their luxuries when they themselves and not ready to cut down on their own. And this is just not morally right (well, I am using morality loosely).

So either we should come up with an objective measure of excessive consumption or we should take it for granted that 'excessive consumption' is inevitable and goes hand in hand with development. Therefore, if someone wants to save the planet, he should probably stop urging others to reduce their 'luxuries' and focus his efforts on other solutions.

But what if we decide to formulate an objective measure of 'excessive consumption' and this precisely is crux of these ruminations. Is it even possible ? Its not possible because we are trying to apply the cold impartial scissor of objectivity to something as subjective as individual personal comfort. There obviously cannot be a rational equilibrium state to this problem. What is possible is a sort of an arbitrary uniform law forcefully putting down a random limit on consumption. But we are not talking about random arbitrary laws here. We are talking about rationality. So the bigger question is this:

"Are there problems to which there are absolutely no rational solutions and is it in our own advantage to realize it so that we can tackle our problems more efficiently and realistically ?"

According to me, thats how it should be. The above discussion was just a small part of a bigger issue. Although I neither have the intelligence nor the energy to prove a humongous number of things decisively, I am pretty sure that most of those things will never get proven because of their inherent subjective nature and I will gracefully admit defeat right now than go on.