>To increase their capacity for consumption, consumers must never be left to rest. They need to be constantly exposed to new temptations to keep them in the state of perpetual suspicion and steady disaffection. The bait commanding them to shift attention needs to confirm the suspicion while offering a way out of disaffection: “You reckoned you’d seen it all? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” It is often said that the consumer market seduces its customers. But in order to do so, it needs customers who want to be seduced (just as to command his laborers, the factory boss needed a crew with the habits of discipline and command-following firmly entrenched). In a properly working consumer society, consumers seek actively to be seduced. They live from attraction to attraction, from temptation to temptation—each attraction and each temptation being somewhat different and perhaps stronger than its predecessor. In many ways they are just like their fathers, the producers, who lived from one turn of the conveyer belt to an identical next.
>This cycle of desire is a compulsion, a must, for the fully-fledged, mature consumer; yet that must, that internalized pressure, that impossibility of living one’s life in any other way, is seen as the free exercise of one’s will. The market might have already selected them as consumers and so taken away their freedom to ignore its blandishments, but in every successive visit to the market-place, consumers have every reason to feel that it is they who are in command. They are the judges, the critics, and the choosers. They can, after all, refuse their allegiance to any one of the infinite choices on display—except the choice of choosing among them.
>It is the combination of the consumer, constantly greedy for new attractions and fast bored with attractions already had, and of the world in all its dimensions—economic, political, personal—transformed after the pattern of the consumer market and, like that market, ready to oblige and change its attractions with ever accelerating speed, that wipes out all fixed signposts from an individual map of the world or from the plans for a life itinerary. Indeed, traveling hopefully is in this situation much better than to arrive. Arrival has that musty smell of the end of the road, that bitter taste of monotony and stagnation that signals the end to everything for which the ideal consumer lives and considers the sense of living. To enjoy the best this world has to offer, you may do all sorts of things except one: to declare, after Goethe’s Faust, “O moment, you are beautiful, last forever!”
>And so we all travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast and open sea with no tracks and milestones fast sinking, we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries or tremble out of fear of drowning. How does one voyage on these stormy seas—seas that certainly call for strong boats and skillful navigators? This becomes the question. Even more so when one understands that the more vast the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor’s fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles.
Eli Stewart
>But there is a catch. Everybody may be cast into the mode of consumer; everybody may wish to be a consumer and indulge in the opportunities which that mode of life holds. But not everybody can be a consumer. Desire is not enough; to squeeze the pleasure out of desire, one must have a reasonable hope of obtaining the desired object, and while that hope is reasonable for some, it is futile for others. All of us are doomed to the life of choices, but not all of us have the means to be choosers.
>But you can tell one kind of society from another by the dimensions along which it stratifies its members, and, like all other societies, the postmodern, consumer society is a stratified one. Those “high up” and “low down” are plotted in a society of consumers along the lines of mobility—the freedom to choose where to be. Those “high up” travel through life to their hearts’ desire and pick and choose their destinations by the joys they offer. Those “low down” are thrown out from the site they would rather stay in, and if they do not move, it is the site that is pulled from under their feet. When they travel, their destination, more often than not, is of somebody else’s choosing and seldom enjoyable; and when they arrive, they occupy a highly unprepossessing site that they would gladly leave behind if they had anywhere else to go. But they don’t. They have nowhere else to go; there is nowhere else where they are likely to be welcomed.
Z. Bauman - The Self in a Consumer Society
Justin Flores
Noice
Thomas Sanders
RIP grandpa Soviet Major killing polish officers hehe
Mason Gomez
sucks to be them LOL
Robert Evans
So whats the solution, enlighten the masses with state sponsored advertisements run every other commercial "you do not need to buy anything unnecessary, it likely will not make your life as better as you think, you are lying and tricking yourself and making the world worse"
"making the world worse... consumerism, is one of the greatest engines that makes the world at all!"
((Influenced by: Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx)
ohh...
Logan White
Invest in commons. Don't force everybody to consume all the time. Create places where quality time isn't reserved for the rich only. Remove the pressure on people who consider themselves left behind or outsiders so they don't radicalize and eventually bring down society.
Camden Thompson
t. wikipedia
Eli Jones
What?
Mason Sanders
>So whats the solution, enlighten the masses with state sponsored advertisements run every other commercial "you do not need to buy anything unnecessary, it likely will not make your life as better as you think, you are lying and tricking yourself and making the world worse" who knows if they wouldn't accept it, given that it's only a massive thirst for needless consumption that forces them to spend most of their lives toiling to afford it
i live in a relatively ascetic manner and i've accumulated a decent sum of money at a young age on a meager income
Alexander Cook
it's not like consumerist society will be possible in the long term anyway, given impending environmental collapse
Brayden Jones
bump
Thomas Parker
The obsessive hatred, bordering on psychosis, against products — i.e. against man-made objects — seems to be the hallmark of the pseudo-intellectual today. Hatred of consumption, a problem which no sane, healthy person has ever had. As if food and clothes, as if eating or dressing were bad. Such is the pseudo-intellectual's craving to appear to be raging at something, that he will rage at life's basic necessitities if need be.
The "consumer society" should have been called the "slave society", since there's nothing wrong with consuming, it is indeed the basis, the prerequisite, of all growth. Marx was at least healthy in focusing on production; Baudrillard's obsession with consumption is neurotic. Why not reduce it to zero and die of thirst in a few days, you fucking nihilistic little prick? Better yet just stop breathing; oxygen too is something that we consume.
>In a 1955 speech, John Bugas (number two at the Ford Motor Company) coined the term "consumerism" as a substitute for "capitalism" to better describe the American economy:[7] >“The term "consumerism" would pin the tag where it actually belongs—on Mr. Consumer, the real boss and beneficiary of the American system. It would pull the rug right out from under our unfriendly critics who have blasted away so long and loud at capitalism. Somehow, I just can't picture them shouting: "Down with the consumers!"[8] ..Such is the optimism/naivety of healthy worker-bees.
Nicholas Gutierrez
>consume consumer capitalism materialism individual society capitalism All of these academics sort of blend together at some point
Kevin Anderson
It's called the neoliberal project, user. It is what has successfully been killing any form of social contract and what has been disintegrating community spirit in western society and is doing so to this day.
Justin Rivera
Are you saying there hasn't been a shift in societies in the 50s/60s from a civil society (of citizens) towards a consumerist society (of consumers), initiated and guided by rich interest groups powered by the implantation of artificial needs through the rise of advertising?
Jose Carter
>Invest in commons As in a place for commoners? What the dump and the playground isnt good enough for you? This is why we cant have nice things?? Because every little critter wants infinite of them? And theres not enough to go around? It is needed many people to make the nice things, and not have them, so that those who do not can enjoy them?
Robert Adams
>As if food and clothes, as if eating or dressing were bad Nobody is saying that. Are you obstructing the point and subject in this thread on purpose? Nobody is talking about the act of consuming in a biological sense here.
Lincoln James
>who knows if they wouldn't accept it, given that it's only a massive thirst for needless consumption that forces them to spend most of their lives toiling to afford it >i live in a relatively ascetic manner and i've accumulated a decent sum of money at a young age on a meager income
How old are you? What is your rent like? Do you plan on having kids? What do you see your 40-60 years like, in terms of money, save a bunch of money, and retire?
If everyone lived like you, the world would be shit, we might as well be monkseys.
Evan Carter
>disintegrating community spirit It's part of the richness and greatness of Western civilization that it can tolerate the existence of so many millions of losers and retards, while still forging full steam ahead with its goal without skipping a single beat. The degenerates call this steamroller effect of our culture — the marginalization of all groups not contributing to our culture's goal, and their reduction to clown- and freak-show status by our media — "social alienation", "materialism", "globalization", "desensitization", or any number of other nasty names; while between us it is known as simply "power".)
Subhumans believe that the world "has problems", and that when these problems have been "solved" our lives will all be "happier", having at last attained, as a species, a kind of utopian state. But in reality things work the other way around, since our "problems" do not diminish but intensify and multiply the more that we progress. Mankind today has a literally unimaginably greater number of problems than it did a mere few thousand years ago: so many more that a single person's brain no longer has the capacity to contain them. We have so many problems today that we don't even know all the problems that we have, whereas all prehistoric man had to do, more or less, was find food, water, some shelter and a wife. And it's precisely our problem-creating, problem-multiplying capacity that makes us so capable and strong — or, rather, this capacity is merely a symptom of our increasing strength. After all, lazy people and complete idiots don't seem to have many problems: they are happy just hanging out or whatever and never worrying about a thing. subhumans become ever more hysterical and lose their minds with every such problem that we create: because, as we'll be seeing at length, they don't belong to mankind but to a far lower species, and the increasingly dangerous and hostile territory towards which we are steering mankind's ship scares the bejeesus out of them. Which is perfectly understandable, when considered from their point of view, but what is not understandable and completely unacceptable is that that point of view has been allowed to spread unopposed and dominate to such an extent that this era of unprecedented growth of health and strength that we are living through is near-universally considered a corrupt, degenerate and declining era! In short, solving problems is for subhumans, what humans do is that they create them, and the best of them create, as we'll be seeing shortly, the most and worst problems.
Aaron Kelly
Have you recently been to a public playground in a city user? Try to spend quality time in a public space for a while. This used to be different.
Nolan Wilson
dude They Live lmao
Cameron Davis
>Nobody is saying that. Are you obstructing the point and subject in this thread on purpose? Nobody is talking about the act of consuming in a biological sense here.
If I (and thousands of others like me) cant have 5 yachts, 17 cars, 2 private planes, 300 rental properties, 7 homes, 4 wives, 23 kids, 200 fast food franchises, 100 walmarts, an infinitely diverse portfolio, my $3,000 bottle of champagne with lunch everyday, muh virgin child blood, there really is very little point in living, don't you think? If I cant walk by a homeless man jangling a change cup, and get a stiffy (not my upper lip) thinking about the 30 new custom suits I just ordered from italy, and the 3 million I am dropping on my daughters sweet 16, what good is this world?
You see we are the Grand Supreme Ideal, shimmering away at the horizon, we are what all others are judged against, we are the Golden Carrot, ever dancing away, from the hordes of profane masses, trying to get their nibbles; we lift all up out of their perverse and unpoverished slumber, we give them something to live for, to fight for, to aim towards, without us, there is only brutish beast, and grotesquely follyful creature, who just eat, shit and sex, great, liberate the masses! They all, each and every one, deserves the finest possible things; oats, loafs, and orgasms, for ever for all!
Lucas Nelson
>Mankind today has a literally unimaginably greater number of problems than it did a mere few thousand years ago That point is simply moot. "A mere few thousand years ago" "Mankind" didn't exist as a concept. People hadn't measured the earth yet nor cartoghraphed it. I could further argue that existential problems haven't multiplied but have pretty much stayed constant: You are well, happy and thriving or you are sick, in pain and dying. That is literally all there is. You can downplay how horrifying and dangerous and insecure life must have been back then in your idiotic caveman example that doesn't make sense, as much as you want. The sum of suffering as well as that of shit we don't know is constant.
Jonathan Adams
>If I (and thousands of others like me) cant have 5 yachts, 17 cars, 2 private planes, 300 rental properties, 7 homes, 4 wives, 23 kids, 200 fast food franchises, 100 walmarts, an infinitely diverse portfolio, my $3,000 bottle of champagne with lunch everyday, muh virgin child blood, there really is very little point in living, don't you think? Absolutely missing the point. It is about people who live in existential fear and turn to mob politics when they radicalize, organize and rise up. Those people will tear your 16 year old daughter a few more love holes to make you feel their despair if they get the chance.
Aiden Clark
>Have you recently been to a public playground in a city user? Try to spend quality time in a public space for a while. This used to be different.
Its not 'spaces' necessarily that people want... though I suppose they can... many people appear to desire 'things' and 'experiences'...maybe... not sure what much more there is really
Jackson Adams
Quality time, user. That's what it's all about. And the problem is that this is seemingly becoming a more and more exclusive thing for elites and the rich.
Grayson Phillips
>Absolutely missing the point. It is about people who live in existential fear and turn to mob politics when they radicalize, organize and rise up. Those people will tear your 16 year old daughter a few more love holes to make you feel their despair if they get the chance.
But just as there are millions of them, there are millions of me... and you think we live anywhere near them..... lol.... If the hordes of masses arose, they might make it a few miles past city limits, before they started eating each other for sustenance, and having sex to quickly spawn more vermin
Jacob White
Security.
William Walker
>oats
Jayden Perry
I don't know where you live, but it's exactly the cities where these people live and dwell. And no, there are way less rich people than there are poor.
Nolan Gomez
>Quality time, user. >Security
What type of security?
How is quality time possible? There is only resources, business enterprises, and operating hours. What the bosses say goes. "Mista boss massa, cana missa get a sum quality time, m-my comrade on the internet said I deserves it"
"sure, take all the quality time you can get...youre fired"
Everyone is competing for 'good'/lucrative jobs, why is the weekend not good enough for this quality time you speak of?
Zachary Reed
>I don't know where you live, but it's exactly the cities where these people live and dwell. >And no, there are way less rich people than there are poor.
There is welfare, everything is fine, the feeding hand will not be bitten, or it will need only to slap once
Adrian Anderson
>The sum of suffering as well as that of shit we don't know is constant. Your ignorance of contemporary population statistics, torture and natural science is astounding.
Owen Morris
I wonder what the end of the argument really is, reading this thread. You want more of what? Society to give more to you? Bosses need to be more considerate and lessen your stress? Stress is a personal thing, and there's no end of people who spend all the money they can to absolve negative emotions. Are we supposed to all stop and cater to every individual? I don't think so. Asking for someone else's time and resources is more selfish than requiring more reliance on yourself. If you want to expect the world to be kinder to you for no reason, you've proven that you have no worth as a person, nothing to offer others. In the OP quote the psychology of situation is portrayed as a negative, when people love getting what they want especially when it helps them enjoy life. It suggests that instead of actual worth being presented that the person buying is somehow an addict who can't control themselves. If you paint people as helpless, they will see themselves that way. Just as if you give people courage to face their own problems and leverage their wits to win other's favor they will profit. So, to all the liberals out there, are you saying that we shouldn't be teaching self-reliance?
Because I've never seen a therapist say "it's everyone else's fault, blame them and you'll feel better." Even in the case where it is really someone else resources, we have the most generous system in history these days for the benefit of the lower classes. Do you want the self-reliant and intelligent people to work solely to support the lazy and self-indulgent? Or just have those competent dedicate ever more of their day to the poor until their wages make them as miserable as the stupids? Is that the future you're aiming for?
Jonathan Hughes
>I don't know where you live, but it's exactly the cities where these people live and dwell. Well its a good thing bad breath cant melt steel beams, the maybe with those vulgar mutants, I should slightly hold mine
Josiah Perez
>So, to all the liberals out there, are you saying that we shouldn't be teaching self-reliance? """Capitalism"""/the state of the world, is communism for the wealthy, and serfdom for everyone else.
Millions of years ago, and prior, monkeys, banded together because working together was better than working alone: built massive ships to sail the seas, nuclear reactors, country clubs, palaces, kingdoms, cities, villages: and now you want to teach the peasents self reliance? Here is a potato, there is some dirt, this is better for us all if you go be self reliant, hurry or you might make us miss our cruise.
Ryder Moore
>In the OP quote the psychology of situation is portrayed as a negative, when people love getting what they want especially when it helps them enjoy life. One. People love getting what they are told they should want. Two. It is a minority or at the very least a vaining majority that is even allowed to get 'what they want'. The rest suffer in shame and envy and the feeling of being left out. Are you not seeing the problem there? Or the danger to societies? >to all the liberals out there, are you saying that we shouldn't be teaching self-reliance? >liberals What has that got to do with anything? This is about social problems within a society. It concerns your 'conservatives' and your 'liberals' alike. >Because I've never seen a therapist say "it's everyone else's fault, blame them and you'll feel better." That metaphor illustrates the point. The therapist is a person that is in a privileged position and who most likely doesn't meet a lot of poor people. Also have you heard the saying that it is not a sign of health to be adjusted to a sick system, user? >Do you want the self-reliant and intelligent people to work solely to support the lazy and self-indulgent? self-reliance as you seem to picture it doesn't exist; unless you life on a farm off the grid. If you live in society you are always dependend on shittons of people and things outside your control. To work every day to make money is not real self-reliance. Also and more importantly and as I stated before several times now: It is not about lazy and self-indulgent people (as you picture them) - it is about those in existential fear, shame and anger. The future I see worth aiming for is one in which I don't have to invest in armored vehicles when I want to take a trip through the countryside and where I can walk in public and through a park without having to fear to get stabbed or shot by gangs.
Mason Young
bump
Gabriel Flores
That's an obviously shitty "solution", because it doesn't solve the core problem: production.
Carson Fisher
don't assume you know anything about me, idiot
the only monkey is you, you're nothing but aquiescence to the most base thirsts for short-term gratification
Liam Richardson
the dumbest thing I've read in a long time, congrats
Christopher Fisher
production wouldn't be lucrative without consumption
put your money where your mouth is and stop buying needless garbage from the billionaires you supposedly despise
Wyatt White
Most people have had shit unprivileged lives forever, I don't see why it's a problem that we have jews in suits lording over wageslaves buying sony tm flatscreens rather than kings ruling peasants, on the large scale
Jordan Flores
Poor people are useless — society ITSELF has decreed this, not any particular individuals or groups, but the combined efforts of all members of society put together — while rich people are the most beneficial, most helpful people around, judged by the community itself. But what about those who became rich by stealing? That's why we have the police. We are aware of the issue and are countering it (quite successfully too, all things told). That we cannot reduce theft to zero is not an argument against this proposition, since life itself is based on what the common people think of as "theft", and there would be no life at all in the universe (i.e. there would be no universe, since the universe is a collection of lifeforms) if it were somehow possible to completely eliminate "theft" (which goes to show that law and order are not goals in themselves but merely temporary expedients on the way to a far more important and essential goal).
As for becoming rich by peddling shit — and who the fuck are you to judge that what the people embrace and willingly pay money for is shit? Are you not mr liberal populist democracy guy? Are you not mr subjectivity, different folks for different strokes guy? But you are in fact mr hypocrisy guy, which is why you reflexively hate all "Mane Streem" aspects of culture — i.e. all popular culture itself, which is merely democratic culture — merely the cultural manifestation and ultimate result of your very own democratic principles.
e.g. McDonald's is preferable to starving, and the poor individual (i.e. the largely useless individual, from the perspective of society) has the right to determine whether he prefers to put his income into a new cellphone or higher quality food. After all, he's merely going to be cleaning the toilets in the labs in which the scientists will be working, a function that can be fulfilled just as well on McDonald's as on wholesome food (and probably even better, since they'll have less energy and vitality, and hence bear the drudgery of toilet-cleaning far better. Hell, they may as well do drugs) The scientists, meanwhile, will be eating good food both because they deserve to, since they are more useful to society than the toilet-cleaners, and because they are smart enough to invest in it; and those who aren't.. are welcome to make their own choices on the matter, whatever those may be.
"But the subhumans are not well informed about the effects of nutrition!; mislead by advertising, society", you say. But when a celebrity rag makes millions and nutrition guides peanuts, you see where the priorities of subhumans lie. It's not a cabal that's keeping the subhumans uninformed — it's the subhumans themselves who are unwilling and unable to benefit from the tremendous decades and even centuries-long state-backed efforts to educate them.
Jaxon Lewis
Only you can't disprove my point. We have new things to suffer from and to fear. I stand by that it's a constant in the human condition.
Ryan Howard
Wow. This is the most cringe inducing retarded shit I have read in a while. And that's saying something.
Gabriel Collins
t. subhuman
Josiah Perez
>we have new tortures and pressures that are more intense and have more explanatory power in scientific endeavours >>but suffering and knowledge are constant through time! In that case none of the reforms you pray for will ever materialise or change anything. It is constant afterall.
Buddhists, Christians, democrats, socialists, communists, anarchists: Precisely because none of them already have the utopia that they are all so desperately looking for, it'd be ridiculous to take their absurd, incoherent ravings seriously, as ridiculous, indeed, as taking business advice from a homeless person.
In Paradise there will be no thinking because thinking is an activity that presupposes flux, and flux presupposes conflict. But lack of conflict is Paradise's essential feature! therefore lack of flux, therefore lack of thinking. Therefore thinking beings will not be possible there. Which is why it was such a stroke of genius on the part of him who said that only the "poor in spirit" will inherit Paradise. Indeed!
Zachary Turner
You don't know how revolutions and uprisings work, do you
Jose Brown
If your theory is better than mine why are you the one with the ressentiment?
Dominic Sullivan
No. The difference is in consciousness. And it's a huge one.
Spoken like a true intellectual.
Noah Martin
What?
Gavin Gray
So everybody that is uneducated is a subhuman. It figures. You are an absolute fucking retard.
Considering that education has become a human 'right' now, you could at least use it as a qualifier.
Anyway, that is a vast over-simplification of my post. But what would be retarded about that, anyway?
Daniel Morales
>i live in a relatively ascetic manner and i've accumulated a decent sum of money at a young age on a meager income You got hit by a mail truck, too?
Brody Rivera
>There is welfare, everything is fine, the feeding hand will not be bitten, or it will need only to slap once Keep telling yourself that. But the number of people who are basically forced to live without dignity is growing and they are organizing themselves. It's already happening. Some elections already blow their country and everything the current elites see sacred to shit. Wait and see.
