Why Luxury Matters
Zeus, an influencer who advocates for a luxury lifestyle.
The idea of luxury can be seen as trivial or materialistic. This is often the perspective of a person who wonders why “fools” pay thousands of dollars for a bag from Dior, when something similar can be acquired for a fraction of the price.
Is it because that individual is caught up in a game of status? Could be. Research on biology surfaced by Jordan Peterson indicates that status and hierarchy are fundamental components of human nature. While democratic ideals have seen an important flourishing in the past several centuries, it can never truly eradicate an inherent dimension of “vertical organization” that is present in the cosmos. I began to first notice this when I emerged out of many years of addiction to alchohol and marijuana. I discovered that all those leaders in society I had dismissed as “just like me” had actually—in many cases—spent years and years cultivating mastery, while I had not. Thus, as I began the arduous journey of refining myself in a new way, I too began to see how there was a lot of effort and investment I was putting into my life that may not be immediately noticable to the casual bystander, and yet it was clearly shaping the way I saw and moved through the world.
Thus, the idea that status is irrelevant to spiritual life seems to be only a partial truth. There is often a vertical dimension to human development. Whether it is to acquire more knowledge, ascend to heaven, cultivate greater success — there are elements which seem related to “increasing in quality” and not just quantity (where quantity would be the horizontal dimension).
Thus it could be that luxury indicates status, but underneath this idea of status, is a reality of greater cultivation that either exists, or is aspired to. Thus, greater cultivation in of itself seems unlikely to be something that can be criticized on its own terms. Thus a bag from Dior may consist of similar materials to something from Zara — yet it serves as a symbol of greater cultivation. Which in some sense is a democratically decided ideal, as it is society and those with the choice of where to spend their resources who are choosing to patronize Dior as the outlet for their indication of status.
We are emerging into another dimension of luxury… which is a sense of high cultivation. Luxury is a sense of refinement. “The best example of a thing.” Thus luxury is important in a world where we encourage humanity to strive to be the best. Often, creating the “best of something” can be a game of diminishing returns, where something that is 90% of the way there, may require substantially less investment than something that is 95% of the way there… and to make the additional climb to 98% would be similarly heroic. Thats where “the best of something” requires an increasing amount of concentrated investment to cultivate that thing to its highest form. This is why also in free market economies, “the best of something” can tend to capture an entire market, especially if the problems of distribution are mitigated.
Thus, luxury matters, not because the price of the thing, nor the aggregate volume of money or energy that a luxury system accumulates. It matters because it is incredibly difficult to create, and represents “the best of something.” In this way, a luxury item carries a feeling of god-like perfection that is unfettered by ordinary constraints.
This is relevant to archetypal cosmology because we know that the world is constituted of archetypes. A luxury good is one which attempts to reach for an archetypal ideal without consideration — or despite of — the material blocks standing in the way. It is an attempt to sculpt something that is as “perfect” as possible. And for this reason, underlying luxury is a spiritual ideal of perfection which is not so different than than which is espoused for in many spiritual paths. The primary difference is one is searching for perfection in energetic form, while the other is material. And if one takes basic Buddhist or Einsteinian or Jungian ideas about a fundamental equivalency between spirit and matter, or energy and matter, it suddenly does not seem so trivial to aspire for the highest form of cultivation in any of these dimensions.
Of course, with material luxury goods, it is expensive to create something that is “the best of something” — especially when compared to versions of that ideal which are “good enough.” Thus luxury is expensive, by definition can not be supplied to everyone, and in some sense indicates a status that is ultimately conferred upon by the spiritual striving for an archetypal ideal which underlies it.