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And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The Coward with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.

A century on from Oscar Wilde’s immortal poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, death comes gift-wrapped and perfumed, in beguiling guilt-free varieties, delivered with a toothy smile and prophecy of material salvation. Betrayal gets absolved as the consumer age supplants conscience with craving, and duty with self-devotion. Even with our beloved Earth and the future of humankind balanced on a knife’s edge, our killing feels strangely like a bargain.

Aimed squarely at the things we love, today’s big guns pound away from under the camouflage of normality. Greed, arrogance, discontent, false needs, compulsive desire — hardly a fair fight. Bloated egos, inflated expectations, and grandiose entitlement deal a mortal kiss. Anything still breathing can be clubbed with shallowness, willful ignorance, moral cowardice, and a near-zero attention span.

In Escape from Evil, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker describes consumer culture as a second-rate religion that has programed a society of ‘cheerful robots’ to martyr all to “a grotesque spectacle of unrestrained material production, perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history.”

With business-as-usual in the face of multiple global emergencies — climate change, global warming, habitat destruction, extinction of species, loss of biodiversity, pollution, deforestation, land degradation, ocean depletion — it is hard to miss the evil, or at least the madness. Spreading poverty, growing inequality, the commercialization of children, collapsing mental health, the ‘death of mind,’ the obesity epidemic, and so on — with a culture like that, who needs enemies?

If consumer culture were a separate individual and assessed psychiatrically, its diagnosis would be criminal psychosis of the most fiendish variety. Oblivious to overarching realities, and a sickle to everything in its path, this headbanging reaper would be shackled, castrated, and incarcerated deep underground. But since its lunacy is agreed-upon, we lap it up.