CONSUMERISM - crime or essential?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all have Porsches, I must make amends. - Janis Joplin sung this in 1972, how her lyrics are somewhat ironic. That same irony that reverbrates through the saying,’ Keeping up with the Jone’s. Consummerism encourages you not only to buy but to keep buying more and more latest gadgets.. Why?
People remember few ads, commercials have an effect nonetheless. Even if they fail to sell a particular product, they sell consumerism itself by ceaselessly reiterating the idea that there is a product to solve each of life's problems, indeed that existence would be satisfying and complete if only we bought the right things Consumerism. As such, it creates artificial needs within people that directly conflict with their capacity to form a satisfying and sustainable relationship with the natural world. A narcissist aspect. Me me me.
The Earth is valued for its resources, which are assumed to be an infinite and inexhaustible. Wrong. This is a false belief of. Measuring Quantity over Quality.
Buy Nothing Day - November 27th 2004

Saturday November 27th 2004 was a Buy Nothing Day (UK), self proclaimed festival day challenges yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune into life. Celebrated as a holiday by some, a street party by others - anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending!
HOW ABOUT BUY NOTHING CHRISTMAS? Could you do it?

WHAT IS ANTICONSUMERISM?
GREEN CONSUMERISM
By purchasing safer friendlier product when needed.
ETHICAL CONSUMERISM
Buying from manufacturers tht help not hinder the enviroment or fund gun campaign and such like..
ANTICONSUMERISM...
Challenges the view that the rich nations of the world are fundamentally damaging the planet and themselves in the pursuit of material acquisition, it raises the question, "How much is enough?"
CONSUMERISM is a social and economic creed that encourages us to aspire to even more than that share, regardless of the consequences 20% of the world's population consumes over 70% of its material resources, and own's over 80% of its wealth , it is mainly concentrated in the Westernised, consumerist nations: the US. Canada, Western Europe, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Japan

A global shortage of food. False The world already produces enough grain alone to supply every single individual with over 2,500 calories per day: this figure does not even include fruit, groundnuts or root vegetables. In this sense the world cannot in any meaningful sense be said to be overpopulated.. What causes global hunger is not a shortage of resources, but the unequal distribution of those resources in favour of the rich. No solution to world poverty can ignore this basic fact: putting an end to it will inevitably involve a fairer distribution of the world's food, resources and wealth. This is not compatible with the consumerist creed of ever-increasing consumption.
Enviromental effect This many cars (450 million vehicles) is already responsible for 13% of the global carbon emissions from the burning off fossil fuels, and a larger share of the production of acid rain. If every adult or family in the world owned a car, these emission levels would be beyond any technological solution.

AN EGG IS NOT AN EGG. It is not something to be painted, or thrown at offensive MPs. It is only, according to supermarkets, a consumer product. By the increasingly widespread practice of stamping sell-by dates on the very eggshell, eggs are symbolically reduced; their sole characteristic is their sellability. Consumerism consumes; it is a shoplifter, stealing meanings. The free range of associations of "an egg" is stolen by the eggman of consumerism
Consumerism consumes; At summer sales, there are many faces pressed against the shop window panes, but there is only one expression: all-consuming bargain hunger. Consumerism consumes the variety of human features; the human face, usually a rich register of human emotion, is here reduced to a cash register bulging.

According to British Rail, passengers no longer exist. Everyone is a "customer . Patients are "customers" of hospitals in the health-service marketplace. The cash relationship is privileged over all others

Consumerism creates a McTime, a McWorld where the McSun always McShines. The creation of this MeTime seems the ultimate confection, but it is actually the ultimate consumption, and it consumes what belongs to us

THE LANGUAGE OF consumerism is the language of hunger. "Appetite" for products must be created. Markets can be "glutted" or "satiated". Consumer "tastes" must be "satisfied". As "stores" replace "shops", the link with food supplies is stressed. Consumerism depends on persuading customers that their ' wants are actually their "needs" and further that these needs have the force of food-hunger, the literal appetite, for prey. Bargain "hunters" is a telling phrase, but the hunting instinct is revealed in subtler ways. Hunters circle Harrods the day before the sales begin, marksmen marking the marked-down objects, wounded prey to pick off the more easily. Red is the colour of sales reductions but it can be read as Hashes of blood red, alerting the hunter to the vulnerable animal, its price "cut" and "slashed", and the bigger the red reduction, the more bloodied the beast and the more reduced its resistance. In supermarkets, consider the wire shop- ping baskets, little cages to trap mew- ing bargain-cubs. Consider the specific pleasure of bringing the shopping indoors, bringing the prey back home. Trolley-rage happens at the checkout why do people get so twitchy there, if it isn't because, in some atavistic memory, that moment is recognized as the climax of the hunt, the nervous thrill of the kill at the till?

THOSE WHO "KNOW that enough is enough", goes the Chinese proverb, "will always have enough." For consumerism, there is no such thing as enough. Those whose appetites have been satiated must expand their appetites, must manufacture a hunger for luxury, superluxury, and deluxeury to out-Harrod Harrods. But the ultimate consumer is consumerism itself, and the things it consumes are ours: our rich varieties of human expressions and relationships, our music our colours, our letters, our time, our resources, our uses and abuses of eggs. Consumerism preys on our ancient hunting hunger and our fears of scarcity; it persuades us that we are the predator, but we are really the prey. It is consuming us, it hungers for us and it feeds off us. It is a voluptuary on full glut, and it cannot get enough of us. For consumerism, enough is not enough. just as an oeuf is not an oeuf.


REFILL NOT LANDFILL! We are a throw away society. Brought up on buy now pay later. Who is paying for this us or the future generations?

Thanks for the applause.

How does nobody else have an opinion on this?

buttercup wrote:

How does nobody else have an opinion on this?

And what did yoy post orignally here?
I know you have opinions so what was you other than clapping.

I think I'll wait. From previous threads it seems either people on this forum don't like discussion, don't care about anything or are put off by my posts so I'll remove one variable to test the others...

If you don't talk, then you can't expect to have a conversation or debate.

... and you say you haven't been watching Sherlock ... ?

buttercup wrote:

... and you say you haven't been watching Sherlock ... ?

Watched the old ones though.

So, this little experiment would suggest that either nobody else cares and/or nobody else likes discussion.

However, other evidence seems to suggest that I've been upsetting the little ones.

Result: Inconclusive...

Not everybody jumps to attention and joins in immediately or for that matter is interested in same things. People will talk, espeically when I tazer them.

In that case, set phasers to stun; We wouldn't want any fatalities.*

I think that consumerism is mind boggling. In my eyes, it begs the question - is there anything that will fill that hole?


* Although, ironically, it seems that a taser's stun mode is the most dangerous... ?

Why do you feel the need to fill the hole if you removed consumerism out of the equation?

I often feel the need to fill the hole with no rhyme nor reason*

Well, by hole I mean the innate emptiness that I think comes with being human or, in fact, with sentience and self awareness. I believe that this is a driving force in a lot of our behaviour; For example, the desire to 'keep up with the joneses' is about self validation but, despite using a futile scale, what else is there?

I guess that our generally egocentric attitude is an overcompensation for that but I wonder if other parasites are aware that they're parasites.

I was having this conversation with someone the other day, when did it become okay to knowingly, and intentionally, make substandard products? Sure, it makes sense for the manufacturer in a short-term economical sense but, as you've said, it's most certainly not sustainable and I feel that it's a rather more dramatic shift than we often think.

I just hope that the 'green' revolution becomes more than just gimmick.



* I apologise...

Interestingly, from what I understand of Marx, our current trajectory seems to follow the prophecy ... the bursting of the capitalist bubble and inevitable rise of the people's communism.

I wonder what you think about that.