IJSP Number 3, 2021

46 Everyone seems to be fascinated by the novelties that the market ceaselessly offers and it does this in an overwhelming abundance. The generalized mercantilism, globalised in the meantime, has spread like a contemporary pandemic; it appears that no one can escape such an overwhelming and generalized disease. Why should isolated psychotherapists or a minority of supervisors escape the perfect rat race of globalised consumerism? Firstly, do they have the time or the energy to do such an unconventional and difficult-to-imagine task, or to raise such an unheard question? Secondly, do they realize in what type of system they have been entrapped because they were so preoccupied to buy, enjoy and consume as they were told? Thirdly, why should they act otherwise, if everybody else around them participates full-heartedly in the race of consumerism, which consumes all our precious time and energy? Fourthly, are they (psychologists or supervisors) some other type of people, unique and unconventional? Could they allow themselves to think outside the square box offered by the system? If at least the answer to the last question is no, we could understand that even those seemingly special professions are practiced by some very conventional people, entrapped, and arrested in that vast system that is spread across the planet. Once the needs were transformed into desires, and those desires into irrepressible desires that can be fulfilled at any time and at any cost, the orientation of life itself has changed towards the shelf life of super-market products; in the end, we will have a supermarket life, lived in a prison, even if it is a golden cage. The omnipresent desires and irreplaceable offers of our consumerism society can be found everywhere, from the urban jungle to the Amazonian forest: “They’ve got Pepsi in the Andes// McDonalds in Tibet” [5]. People are willing to queue at the releasing of a new product, as a mobile phone, or at clearance sales, to spend money on the cheapest or on the most expensive products (size does not matter), to buy luxury goods or shimmering, colourful, plastic kitsch. The consumerism lifestyle is so deeply rooted in us, in our psychological structure and in every human cell that the best key word we could find for us is homo mercatorius : “We did as we were told//We bought and sold//It was the greatest show on earth” [6]. Ultimately, why should not therapy services too, be offered and sold for such a craving and greedy market? Here too is something to be bought and sold as with every other merchandise: therapy or Prozac, marital counselling, or addiction problems, it simply does not matter. Along with the materialism of our lives, we must consider a generalized levelling process in order to bring judgment to a common ground in that grinding machine of pseudo-knowledge provided constantly and irreversibly by the news. Our new knowledge is meanwhile the knowledge of news; thought and judgment are only possible in parameters of black or white, good or wrong, true or false, established by the press, media, or the internet. As Robert Greene already observed: “Our culture depends in many ways on the creation of standards and conventions that we all must adhere to. These conventions are often expressed in