Discuss: The Gospel of Consumption

I have noticed this shift as well. I termed the change “post-capitalism”: the shift from “Find a need and fill it.” to “Create a need and fill it.” We have become completely possessed by our possessions, we “need” more as much as we feel a need to create it. It is a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless public sentiment changes. I say that public sentiment must change because I do not believe what the article seems to assert about the reason behind this shift being due to a small group of people. Instead, we ourselves have both lain and fallen into this trap and therefore it is up to us, the citizens, and not the government or the corporate heads to get us out.

The matrix is alive and well in
this country for sure.
Spread the word and start to destuff why you still can.
Get rid of anything that is junk
and just laying around your house.
A lot of this junk will be the death of a lot of people .
Remember the people from katrina
trying to save and take some of
that junk with them.
I remember seeing people pushing
tv’s in baskets.

I wonder if James A. Emery would agree that forced conversion to HD TV is one of those insidious links in the “shackles of irrational regulation”.  Even in our consumer based economy, the pump apparently still needs to be primed by forcing the purchase of ultimately useless stuff.

People need to disconnect from
the matrix before it’s to late.
Do not connect a tv at all.

Get a portable radio with batteries
and tune into the BBC.

Isn’t Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Froid? Using his theories to control the needs/wants of consumers and leading the way for our impoverished self worth today? Excellent article and I would love to see more of this kind. I sought a degree in Business Administration because I seek to undo some of the mind bending and getting inside the culture of excess is the best way. Professors scoffed at my ideas of anti marketing and teaching consumers that value of an item is based solely on its worth to you as consumer.

A cartoon in The Oregonian, a fine newspaper here in Portland, made the connection between the Wall Street furor and Hurricane Ike’s devastation, a ghastly coincidence. If any reader wishes to explore what could be called a prophetic weather forecast, she or he ought to find a copy of AFFLUENZA: The All-Consuming Epidemic (2005, 2nd ed.) by DeGraaf,Wann and Naylor. Global greed and global warming are pathological and, I believe, share a virus in common. At least some individuals will suffer while knowing why! Small comfort.

We are a sheeple who eat what we are fed, and accept it as nutrition.

“Would you like the red pill or the blue pill?” asks the pharmacist when, in reality, we didn’t even want a pill in the first place.

I encourage my fellow sheeple to read articles, watch some serious documentaries, and wake up, but sadly, no one has time, and no one wants the responsibility to even acknowledge the issues of today.

Instead, we elect someone else to make these decisions for us, as these issues give us a nasty feeling in our stomachs, however, nothing that isn’t easily cured by a magic pill that makes everything all better.

It takes a revolution just to get us in to town…
but a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

Let’s keep waking people up out of this somnambulistic way of life.

Even worse than the consumption-driven global financial meltdown we are witnessing is the “fool’s errand” in Iraq………

“The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people, and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.”
~ Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001