The End of Mindless Consumerism? ...... Some food for thought.

[marmar]

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

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Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't

- Mignon McLaughlin

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You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.

- Vernon Howard

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To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

- Elwyn Brooks White

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Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

- From the movie Fight Club

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Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

- Edward Abbey

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Who covets more, is evermore a slave.

- Robert Herrick

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Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty.

- Socrates

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The goal for the corporations is to maximise profit and market share. And they also have a goal for their target, namely the population. They have to be turned into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want. You have to develop what are called "Creative Wants". So you have to create wants. You have to impose on people what's called a Philosophy of Futility. You have to focus them on the insignificant things of life, like fashionable consumption. I'm just basically quoting business literature. And it makes perfect sense. The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another. Whose conception of themselves, the sense of value is just, "how many created wants can I satisfy?" We have huge industries, public relations industry, monstrous industry, advertising and so on, which are designed from infancy to mold people into this desired pattern.

- Noam Chomsky


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[1Hippiechick]

1. Go to YouTube, search videos for "Happiness Machines" - 6-parts, 10 mins each. n/t

[cliffordu]

2. If it is the end of mindless consumerism there will be MANY who feel like it's

the end of the world, as they DO worship at the chapel of Unbridled Consumption.....

[marmar]

11. True....when one's worth is measured by stuff.

n/t

[codjh9]

3. Yep, I pretty much realized that years ago. All good quotes - hadn't seen a few.

Tell that to the McMansion crowd.

[marmar]

12. "Tell that to the McMansion crowd."

They'll have to learn the hard way.

[Blue_Tires]

4. k+r

[The2ndWheel]

5. Only if energy is expensive

The cheaper it is, especially if it's clean and green, the more we will consume.

[marmar]

6. But consuming less is cleaner and greener......

Even with cheaper and greener energy, consuming a lot requires extracting a lot of resources from the earth, and that's very un-green.

[The2ndWheel]

9. Most of the world still isn't hooked into the dominant socio-economic system

Humanity will consume far more before we consume less. Sort of the way the sun will expand as it burns out. Unless our ability to extract and harness energy is decreased. We consume more today than in 2007, 2000, 1990, 1980, 1960, 1940, 1930, 1920, 1860, 1776, 1492, etc, etc. We won't consume less if we keep doing what has made us able to consume more every year. The cheaper the energy, the more ways we find to use it. We'll discover some new ailment, or a new way to fit this into that, or a new way to do X twice as fast, and again, we're still only working with less than half of humanity.

[Union Thug]

7. Great quotes, all spot on. Bookmarking for later use. Thx!

[NNN0LHI]

8. Shame me all you want you still ain't getting my Blu-Ray

[CrispyQ]

10. My husband told me about an aritcle he read last night at work.

Some people making $100k a year are living paycheck to paycheck. That is simply unbelievable to me. That is so much more than what we make. I can't imagine what they spend their money on. ???????

[LBJDemocrat]

13. I've seen it with my own eyes.

They live in really fancy apartments and go out nearly every night of the week with "high-maintenance" girls. At least the younger ones.

[gratuitous]

14. The oil companies kind of screwed the pooch

By the way, "screwed the pooch" isn't a reference to Sarah Palin.

But the sudden increase in gas prices caused a lot of people to go from mindless consumerism to mindful consumerism. Not only did gas prices go up, everything dependent on cheap energy for delivery got more expensive: food, clothes, other consumer goods. When people who are living paycheck to paycheck see their discretionary income vanish at the supermarket, they cut back in other areas pretty quickly. Gone are the nights out, the movies at the cineplex, the vacation air travel.

In a perverse way, the overreaching of the oil companies in grabbing everything they could ruined nearly 50 years of Madison Avenue advertising in convincing Americans to consume at the greatest rate they could. When you're paying $3.50 a gallon for gas, and you suspect it might cost $4 a gallon on your next fill-up, you get pretty careful about your spending habits, which is death for a lot of discretionary purchases.