We aren’t programmed by nature, we were programmed by economic interests.
Adding a relevant quote (also see an additional quote in a separate reply to this one in regards to how people can protect/conserve nature if given the chance/freedom to do so)
“There was a day when the prevailing American culture was the mass marketer’s worst nightmare. Frugality and thrift were central to the famed “Puritan ethic” that the early settlers brought with them to America. The Puritans believed in hard work, participation in community, temperate living, and devotion to a spiritual life. Their basic rule of living was that one should not desire more material things than could be used effectively. They taught their children, “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.” The Quakers also had a strong influence on early America and, although more tolerant and egalitarian, shared with the Puritans the values of hard work and frugality as important to one’s spiritual development. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both important early American writers, viewed simplicity as a path to experiencing the divine. The consumer culture emerged largely as a consequence of concerted efforts by the retailing giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create an ever-growing demand for the goods they offered for sale. The American historian William Leach has documented in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture how they successfully turned a spiritually oriented culture of frugality and thrift into a material culture of self-indulgence. Leach finds the claim that the market simply responds to consumer desires to be nothing more than a self-serving fabrication of those who make their living manipulating reality to persuade consumers to buy what corporations find it profitable to sell: Indeed, the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created, and it was nonconsensual for two reasons. First, it was not produced by “the people” but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an ever-ascending scale. Second, it was nonconsensual because, in its mere day-to-day conduct (but not in any conspiratorial way), it raised to the fore only one vision of the good life and pushed out all others. In this way, it diminished American public life, denying the American people access to insight into other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture (if such consent were to be given at all) with real democracy. The populist cultures that grew out of the hearts and aspirations of ordinary people in America stressed the democratization of property and the virtues of a republic based on independent families owning their own land and tools, producing for themselves much of what they consumed, and participating in communities of sharing. Theirs was the model of a strong social economy, supplemented by involvement in the money economy at the margin of their lives.” / “Gradually, the individual was surrounded by messages reinforcing the culture of desire. Advertisements, department store show windows, electric signs, fashion shows, the sumptuous environments of the leading hotels, and billboards all conveyed artfully crafted images of the good life.” (from the book “When Corporations Rule The World [20th anniversary edition]” by David C. Korten)
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