Consumerism

the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable; also : a preoccupation with and an inclination toward the buying of consumer goods

Consumerism is practical capitalism which is a system concerned with the flow of an imaginary substance called money, and the creation of complex systems condusive to the circulation of this imagined substance.
Many are fooled into thinking that consumerism is a utopian creed about the creation of heaven on earth arising from the creation of products beneficial to man and that money is the catalyst that enables circulation of these products to occur. This is erroneous: it is the products that exist so as to facilitate the circulation of money, not the other way round.
Though, as usual, the issue of consumerism is more complex than simply this reduction, as explored a little earlier here. Which isn't to say that the manipulation of matter by human intelligece is necessarily negative, but the exclusive materialism of pure consumerism must inevitably lead to the leakage of all meaning from civilisation. This nihilistic end-point of civilisation is the magnet towards which is drawn the current ethos & its societal structures. Dostoevsky viewed the various new isms as themselves negative spiritual entities injected into life by the dread spirit with the express intention of leading to the collapse of truth. He, as shown in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, seemed to consider that at the top of the power pyramid that the human agents of this process were actually conscious of their role as opposed to the unwitting propagators of lfe-denying processes which they didn't understand.