‘Materialism is the exact philosophy a chimpanzee would preach if it could’

Turn on your phone and start scrolling. What do you see? We’re surrounded by influencers, singers, rappers, and other online personalities telling us how much money they make and how much they spend. Foreign cars, designer brands, penthouse suites, stacks of cash: what’s going on here?

Nobody here is bragging about their ability to meet economic needs or feed their family. Money isn’t being presented as a means to an end here, but as an end in itself.

Buying stuff purely so other people see it is referred to in sociology as ‘conspicuous consumption’, and people do it to try and increase their ‘social status’- what other people think of us, whether they respect us. Our value.

Materialism is the belief that value comes from economic productivity, wealth, and conspicuous consumption. It is both a way of living and a way of judging a person’s value. People brag about their assets to assert their social status, their worth and power as an individual. And the flipside is that they devalue people who aren’t ‘successful’ in the materialist paradigm. Every time a rapper, influencer, or someone you know calls a fellow human being ‘brokeboy’, or ‘povvo’, they are doing it to demean them, to dismiss what they have to say. It establishes a status hierarchy, with the big earner at the top. He matters more.

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But the people online who mockingly ask ‘What colour is your Bugatti?’ are just the sordid symptoms, not the root cause. The real problem is that a materialist value system has snuck its way into being dominant in our current society. And when we don’t consciously question the norms and values we grow up with, we internalise them without thinking.

You see it whenever someone judges how ‘successful’ you are based on your paycheck, or turns their hobby into a side hustle to stay ‘productive’, or looks down on you for having a ‘worse’ job. Do they really enjoy this Darwinian economic competition for basic respect, or have they just been socialised into accepting it as natural by online personalities and billionaire-owned media outlets?

Materialism is presented by the people on your screens and the suits in power as a given, as just ‘human nature’. But if we stop for just a moment to question the rationality of the norms we’re spoon-fed, the whole mirage evaporates. The idea that we should value wealth and consumption is not a given. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon whose origins and premises can be examined scientifically; just as any other brazen assertion about human nature can. We don’t need to blindly trust strangers trying to sell us the law of the jungle: there’s a massive body of scientific evidence on where materialism really comes from, what really leads to social status, and what really makes us happy and fulfilled in life.

Let’s get right down to the source: where does this all come from, psychologically and anthropologically?

Human beings do have the built-in instinct to accumulate things- although of course the extent to which they feel (or act on) this varies a lot. We evolved this because it was an evolutionary adaptation that benefited us in the context for which it evolved. As wandering hunter-gatherers, it was important that our ancestors were motivated to gather resources. Having an instinct to do this was useful because it was naturally limited by our carrying capacity and by the scarcity of resources in our ancestors’ environment.

And it was always in harmony with the many other survival adaptations in our psychological toolkit: the instincts to care, bond, cooperate and share. These adaptations were essential for motivating human beings to work together, which was essential for their survival. It’s no surprise that in the anthropology literature, hunter-gatherer bands are famously egalitarian and collaborative: in fact, many actively discourage material accumulation.

But human beings soon changed the environments they lived in, forming complex agricultural – and then industrial – societies. And evolution couldn’t keep up. That instinct to hoard, no longer needed and no longer limited, never went away.

Materialism is simply the arbitrary decision to turn that narrow slice of human behaviour into a whole worldview. It filters out all the psychological tools that make us human – rationality, compassion, collaboration – and leaves behind the residue of instincts that comprise a chimpanzee. Indeed, materialism is the exact philosophy that a chimpanzee would preach if it could. It is the value system that requires the least introspection, the least logic, the least wisdom: it’s all a massive cognitive shortcut, the lazy conclusion that just because the base instincts to hoard things and beat others can come to us most easily, these instincts should guide our whole behaviour and morality. Whenever a materialist influencer spouts some pseudoscience online and his fellow victims congratulate him on his intellect, they are all subscribing to a chimpanzee philosophy. Materialism is the only philosophy which a chimpanzee would adopt – and the only philosophy which a chimpanzee would understand.

Now let’s talk social status. Chimpanzees gain social status by competition and dominance. Chimpanzees are nearly all dead. They were brought to the brink of extinction by the one species with the psychological tools to cooperate properly with each other. Social status evolved in humans as an ingenious mechanism to get us to actually work together: because study after study illustrates that what actually leads to social status, once we sweep away all the norms and the narratives, is ‘prosocial’ behaviour.

Prosociality is a scientific term: it simply means behaviour that benefits and is nice to other people. Evolution got us to cooperate by hardwiring us to care about whether other people approve of us, and then making that approval contingent on cooperation. Not bad at all.

And once you think about it, this all makes complete intuitive sense. When you see a cool car on the street, do you think ‘wow, what a cool driver’ or just ‘wow, what a cool car’? And if that driver got out and acted obnoxiously to you or someone else, you’d lose all respect for them in a moment. When you listen to most hip-hop, you almost expect the artist to talk about how rich, how dangerous, how cool they are. If anyone in real life ever told you they were any of these things, you would immediately think they were a loser.

Now for the last, most important question: will materialism give you a good life? I think you can guess the answer. The overwhelming weight of genuine, quality-assessed, evidence-based scholarship tells us that in reality, materialism is completely self-defeating. It just locks you onto an endless hamster wheel of hunting for more and more wealth and consumption, driven by an instinct which can never be switched off. We diagnose addiction when people’s reward circuits light up endlessly and futilely at drugs, sex, and sugar: what is the pathology of the Forbes 500? All the rat race does is shunt you away from what you really need.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes human nature as “90 per cent chimp, ten per cent bee”. A lot of the time we do act like selfish apes, following our own self-aggrandising instincts and putting ego first. But real fulfilment and meaning in life come only when we transcend that; when we become a part of something greater than just number one.

Do you enjoy feeling useful? Do you enjoy loving others and being loved? Does it feel good to do good? Why do so many people volunteer, give blood, or work in charities?

Human beings are social animals. We were never meant to be self-contained economic agents interacting with others transactionally for maximal profit. All this kind of society does is produce a mass of atomised individuals who feel lost, apathetic, and anxious. In short, it produces a mental health crisis where the main cause of death in under-35 Britons is suicide.

Society’s values are simply not meeting our innate human needs for community, compassion, and meaning. Materialism can only lead to human suffering because it utterly fails to understand the basic scientific truth that wellbeing comes from others, not zeroes. It comes from giving to society rather than relentlessly taking: this is not a bleeding heart liberal plea, but a basic psychological consensus.

We need to base our society’s value systems on what will actually help us: this is rational. The chimpanzee philosophy of accumulation for the sake of it is not. Whenever someone tries to flex what they have, what they’re really drawing attention to is what they don’t. The vacuity of materialism doesn’t bring contentment. Get out of the grind, get into nature, and stop to smell the flowers. By dropping out of the rat race, you’ve already won.

This is an opinion piece by Daniel Levy, a medical student at the University of Bristol who is also taking a year to get a Master’s in psychology at the University of Liverpool 

Main photo: Martin Booth

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