Will social behavior lead to an "savage" economic state?

In this course we have seen the development and changes in different societies. We have discussed the factors of the theory of value, impartial spectator, cost and labor, etc. In this post I mainly am going to focus on Heilbroner’s chapter of “The Savage State of Thorstein Veblen.” The behavior of society is dictated by our human dignity; this is largely influenced by the views that others have. In his description of the leisure class, he refers to the different values of goods; he states the more expensive goods are better. From this I concluded that our human dignity is based off society’s perspective of accumulation of wealth; meaning the more material wealth people have, then the “better” they will feel about themselves because that is society’s view. This relates to my topic of the development and change of societies throughout time because some societies take pride in the work that they have accomplished, not the wealth that they attain.

For example, American Indians performed hands-on work to try to out-perform one another; they would base this off their labor. Their pride came from work, whereas in society today the pride comes from how much wealth one person has or the ability to buy expensive goods. If someone in their society did not perform as expected, then they would not receive the level of respect that could be obtained.

Society today has completely changed; people heavily rely on technology and machinery rather than their own sweat and labor. Veblen would consider this to be disgraceful due to the fact that nowadays people are less willing to perform hard-working, hands-on tasks then before. This reliance on machinery disables the working class to grow due to the fact that people are more interested accumulation of wealth than taking pride in the work that they have done. If more people were interested in out-performing one another with their work, then it would lead to a high-performance, full working class which would ultimately lead to a more efficient economy.

            The major issue in society today is that people base their dignity and standing among peers by the amount of luxury goods that they have. The main contributing factor is technology; technology leads to mass production. Society is becoming more of a “savage” state because they are more interested in making themselves look better with their luxury goods and are too concerned about what other people think. People today are not so focused on the quality of work the produce due to the fact the technology enables them to produce in large quantities at a similar quality.

My question is this; do you think that people today are too focused on what other people think about their jobs, wealth, and material goods and less focused on their productivity and efficiency with work? With the view that society holds on importance of flaunting the luxury and wealth, do you think that this will lead to a savage economic state in which people care more about wealth than they do their work?