The state where natural human needs are distorted into infinite, unquenchable desires through systematic conditioning.
Modern society treats hyper-consumerism as a sign of economic health. We are told that the desire for “more”—more gadgets, more status, more variety—is a natural human instinct. This leads to what we experience as chronic anxiety, debt-slavery, and a sense of permanent inadequacy.
Infinite desire is not a biological reality; it is a pathological deviation from our innate nature (fitra). In a godless system, material consumption is forced to fill the vacuum left by the loss of transcendent meaning. We have attempted to use finite material goods to satisfy an infinite spiritual hunger.
Liberation requires recognising consumption as a choice rather than a necessity, we can decouple our identity from our public identity, and focus inwards. This shift allows for “Frugal Abundance”, where less material volume leads to a higher quality of spiritual and social presence.
The same mechanism operates beyond consumption. Any system — financial, social, institutional — can pathologically deviate from its own founding premises without anyone deciding to abandon them outright: incentives drift, defaults change, and the system’s daily operation slowly stops resembling what it was actually built to do, until the deviation itself gets mistaken for how the system always worked. Naming a failure this way — deviation from a premise, not a flaw inherent to the premise — matters because it reopens the question the “this just doesn’t work” framing forecloses: restoring the original premise, rather than replacing it.