Means Without End: A Thomistic Critique of Consumer Culture
Introduction
In the Western economic life of today, consumption has taken on a role that extends far beyond utility. Material goods that were once thought of as instruments, ordered toward the support of life, have increasingly become symbols of identity, success, and personal worth. The unnatural normalization of lifestyle inflation, curated self-presentation, and widespread reliance on credit all suggest that acquisition is no longer simply directed toward some higher end, it has begun to function as an end in itself.
This is not merely an economic observation. It points to a deeper confusion about what the human person is, and what he is for. The results of that confusion are not difficult to see. Reports showing depression, anxiety, and isolation are rising, especially among the younger generations who are most taken by this consumer culture, despite levels of wealth and material gain that would have been unimaginable even a few decades ago.
There is, however, an older and much more coherent account of human flourishing. An account that does not begin with consumption, rather with purpose. The classical tradition, deeply developed and most recently brought into popularity by St. Thomas Aquinas, holds that human beings are ordered towards a definite final end, and that all lesser goods only make sense in relation to that end. When that order is reversed, the result is not freedom but disorder, because the will becomes attached to things that are not capable of satisfying it. What consumer culture presents as self-expression and fulfillment is, viewed through a Thomistic lens, better understood as a misdirection of desire. It treats instrumental goods as though they were ultimate ones and in doing so obscures the good for which the human person is actually made.
This paper will argue that contemporary consumerism, particularly in status-driven identity and debt-fueled acquisition of endless possessions, represents a teleological disorder in which material goods are elevated to the level of the final end. To make that case, the paper will first lay out the Thomistic account of happiness, the hierarchy of goods, and the distinction between use and enjoyment. It will then examine how consumer culture inverts that order in practice. Finally, it will trace the moral consequences of that inversion, especially the erosion of temperance and charity along with the popular acceptance of envy, and consider what a recovery of rightly ordered desire might look like.
The Thomistic Account of Happiness and the Final End
Any serious critique of consumerism must first begin with a question: what is the human person actually for? Without a clear answer, the idea that consumer culture disorders human desire has no real foundation. Thomas Aquinas does not, in fact, leave the question open for debate. In the opening questions of the Prima Secundae, he establishes that those actions alone “are properly called human which proceed from a deliberate will,” [1] and that this deliberate orientation toward ends is what separates rational creatures from those who act by instinct or compulsion such as animals. Most ends, however, are not final in the absolute sense. Money is chased after for what it can buy or obtain, pleasure is sought for the satisfaction it provides, health because it enables a person to live longer in pursuit of other ends. Aquinas digs deeper into the question of whether this chain ends somewhere, and his answer is unmistakably clear: all men agree in desiring the last end, since “all desire the fulfilment of their perfection, and it is precisely this fulfilment in which the last end consists.” [2]
This ultimate end Aquinas identifies with what he calls beatitudo. He distinguishes between an imperfect happiness which can be gained in this life through virtue and the right ordering of temporal goods, and a perfect happiness consisting in the direct vision of God. [3] This distinction matters because it means that material goods, when rightly ordered, can actually participate in the ordering of the person toward his final end. The problem arises not with created goods in themselves, but when they are elevated to a final end. In question two Aquinas examines whether wealth, honor, power, or pleasure can constitute genuine happiness, and his answer is the same in each case: they cannot, because “wealth of this kind is sought for the sake of something else, viz. as a support of human nature: consequently it cannot be man’s last end, rather is it ordained to man as to its end.” [4] His most decisive statement comes in article eight: “It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired.” [5] The reason is structural. The object of the human will is not any particular good but the universal good, and “naught can lull man’s will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation.” [6]
If the human will is in fact ordered by nature toward a good that no created thing can provide, then a culture that constantly pushes human desire toward created goods as though they were ultimate ends is not just failing to satisfy people, it is actively harming them. The anxiety and dissatisfaction that characterize modern consumer culture are not accidental side effects of an otherwise good and noble way of life. They are instead a predictable result of a fundamental disorder in the orientation of desire itself.
The Hierarchy of Goods and the Disorder of Consumption
Now that it has been clearly established that the human person is ordered toward a final end no created good can supply, it is helpful to explore how Aquinas understands the relationship between that end and lesser goods. This relationship is not one of simple rejection. Every good has a proper place in a hierarchy, and the moral life is comprised of relating to each good according to its actual place within that order.
Central to this account is the distinction Aquinas borrows from Augustine between uti (to use) and frui (to enjoy). To enjoy a thing is to rest in it as a final end. To use a thing is to employ it in the pursuit of something higher. For Aquinas, only God is properly enjoyed in the fullest sense. All other goods, including material possessions, are properly used, that is, received and employed in the movement of the person toward his final end. [7] The disorder Aquinas perceives is not the possession of material goods but their misuse, treating what is meant to be used as though it were meant to be enjoyed. Holy Scripture explains this clearly: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth…but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Mt 6:19-20 RSVCE). The problem is not treasure itself, but where the heart takes its final rest.
This is the disorder consumerism creates at a cultural level. William T. Cavanaugh, in his book Being Consumed, argues that the defining feature of consumer culture is not that people want too much, but that desire has been severed from any objective end. Drawing on Augustine, he observes that desire cut away from its true end “becomes a desire for nothing,” [8] because to pursue created things for their own sake, forgetting their source and final end, is to break the link that holds them in being. The free market does not resolve this restlessness but institutionalizes it. As Michael Novak acknowledges, the market economy has no common telos, only what he calls an “empty shrine” where common goals once stood. [9] In the absence of any objective good, what fills the void is not freedom but the libido dominandi, the disordered will turned in on itself. The Catechism speaks to this condition directly, warning that the tenth commandment “forbids avarice arising from a passion for riches and their attendant power.” [10]
Consumerism as Disorder and Its Moral Consequences
The teleological disorder identified above does not remain abstract. It produces observable moral consequences that Aquinas’s framework allows us to name directly. When material goods are elevated to the status of final ends, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are completely undermined. Temperance, which orders the appetite toward genuine goods, is the first to fall. A culture built on the constant stimulation of desire has no interest in temperance. On the contrary, as Engelland and Engelland observe, consumerism represents a mentality that “regards human success in terms of having goods rather than being good and of having possessions instead of moral character.” [11] Consumer culture does not treat the intemperate person as a problem to be corrected. It treats him as a success.
Charity suffers as well. Aquinas understands charity as the virtue that orders all loves rightly, directing the person toward God and neighbor as genuine goods to be sought for their own sake. Consumer culture, on the other hand, trains people to treat their own self-interest as the only reliable guide for how to act. Cavanaugh observes that in the absence of objective ends, what prevails is sheer arbitrary power, one will against another. [12] This is not merely a social problem. It is, in Thomistic terms, a failure of charity at the level of culture, a systematic formation of persons away from the other and toward the self. Beabout and Echeverria identify envy as the particular vice that status-driven consumption generates, noting that consumer culture fosters “an intense desire to acquire, consume, and possess material goods” that without temperance and self-mastery spawns “greed, avarice, and envy.” [13] These are not incidental features of consumer society. They are its predictable fruit, the vices that naturally grow when desire is severed from its proper end and redirected toward the accumulation of created goods.
Objection and Response
The most common objection to this line of argument is straightforward: life is short, pleasure is real, and the pursuit of material goods is simply what rational people do when they are not constrained by religious obligations they do not share. Why should the Thomistic account of happiness carry any authority for someone who does not accept its theological premises? This is essentially the hedonist position, and it deserves a direct response.
Aquinas’s reply does not begin with theology. It begins with observation. Even on purely natural grounds, the pursuit of material goods as final ends demonstrably fails to satisfy. Aquinas is clear that happiness must be “the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether,” and that “if something yet remained to be desired,” it would not be the last end. [14] Created goods always leave something remaining to be desired, which is precisely why consumer culture produces not contentment but an endless cycle of acquisition and dissatisfaction. Durheim observes this from a different angle, noting that consumer culture forms persons who are perpetually asking “what do I need now,” a question that by its very structure can never be finally answered. [15] The hedonist position does not actually deliver what it promises. It does not maximize pleasure. It traps the person in exactly the restlessness that Aquinas predicts will follow whenever the will mistakes its means for its end.
Conclusion: Toward a Rightly Ordered Desire
The argument of this paper has been that contemporary consumerism, particularly in its expressions as status-driven identity and debt-fueled acquisition, represents a teleological disorder in which instrumental goods are treated as final ends. By examining the Thomistic account of happiness, the hierarchy of goods, and the distinction between use and enjoyment, it has been shown that this disorder is not merely cultural or economic but anthropological, getting to the very foundation of what the human person is and what he is for. When desire is severed from its proper end, the virtues of temperance and charity erode, envy and avarice take their place, and the person is left in a condition of restlessness that no amount of acquisition can resolve.
The remedy Aquinas proposes is not the rejection of material goods but their reordering. Temperance does not demand poverty. It demands that created goods be received and used in right relation to the final end, as instruments of a life ordered toward God rather than substitutes for him. This is what Beabout and Echeverria mean when they argue that the antidote to consumerism requires “taming and disciplining” the concupiscible desire through the cultivation of virtue and self-mastery. [16] It is also what Cavanaugh points toward when he argues that true freedom is not the absence of ends but the capacity to desire rightly, to want what is genuinely good and to pursue it in the right order. [17] Holy Scripture reminds us to “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:2 RSVCE). This is not a counsel of world-denial. It is a counsel of right ordering, the same ordering that Aquinas insists is the condition of genuine human flourishing.
What this reordering looks like in practice is not complicated, even if it is demanding. It means forming habits of detachment from goods that have come to function as identity markers. It means recovering the classical understanding that what a person has is always subordinate to what a person is, and that what a person is finds its meaning only in relation to what he is for. Aquinas is clear that the virtuous person is one whose appetites have been trained to respond rightly to genuine goods, not suppressing desire but directing it toward objects worthy of it, and that this ordering of appetite is precisely what temperance accomplishes in the moral life. [18] This is the work of a lifetime, and it is not work that any individual can accomplish in isolation. It requires communities, practices, and above all a clear account of the final end that consumer culture has done its best to obscure.
The spiritual emptiness that characterizes so much of modern life is not a mystery. It is the predictable consequence of a culture that has inverted the hierarchy of goods, placing at the summit what belongs at the base, and leaving the human will with nowhere to finally rest. The Thomistic tradition does not simply diagnose this condition. It offers a coherent and demanding alternative, one grounded in a clear account of what the human person is, what he desires most deeply, and what alone is capable of satisfying that desire. Recovery begins not with a change in economic policy but with a change in the orientation of the heart, a reordering of love toward the good for which the person was made. As Augustine wrote long before Aquinas systematized it, “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” [19]
Notes
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 1, a. 1, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.
[2] ST, I-II, q. 1, a. 7.
[3] ST, I-II, q. 3, a. 2.
[4] ST, I-II, q. 2, a. 1.
[5] ST, I-II, q. 2, a. 8.
[6] ST, I-II, q. 2, a. 8.
[7] ST, I-II, q. 11, a. 3.
[8] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 24.
[9] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 10.
[10] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 2536.
[11] Chad Engelland and Brian Engelland, “Consumerism, Marketing, and the Cardinal Virtues,” Journal of Markets and Morality 19, no. 2 (Fall 2016), 298.
[12] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 15.
[13] Gregory R. Beabout and Eduardo J. Echeverria, “The Culture of Consumerism: A Catholic and Personalist Critique,” Journal of Markets and Morality 5, no. 2 (Fall 2002), 356.
[14] ST, I-II, q. 2, a. 8.
[15] Benjamin Durheim, “Converting Consumerism: A Liturgical-Ethical Application of Critical Realism,” Religions 10, no. 5 (May 2019), at https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050338.
[16] Beabout and Echeverria, “Culture of Consumerism,” 356.
[17] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 11.
[18] ST, I-II, q. 56, a. 4.
[19] Augustine, Confessions, I, 1, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.