Tag: consumer culture

Categories
- Prevailing Conceptions Discourse Human Nature

Which brand are you?

“The reality of man is his thought…”

The world is in a state of oppression.  This is not an unknown fact – any media source will recount the various expressions of social disintegration throughout the world.  The riots in Turkey, the tension in Egypt, the plotting of terrorists, the violence, the scandals, the corruption…it all seems indistinguishable at a certain point.  A common characteristic to them all is that each is an instance of external oppression.

What about the United States?  By some accounts, we have less terrorism, less corruption, less rioting.  From a certain perspective, we have freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from threat.  Some can claim we are a less oppressed nation overall.  Perhaps, however, this belief that we are less oppressed is itself one of the greatest oppressions.

The United States is dominated by a culture of consumerism – today’s inheritor of a materialistic worldview.  This is a different type of oppression, insidious, exacting, and stifling.  The discourse of our nation has been hijacked by the interests of corporations and government; so, while it is true that one has a choice – without threat of violent recourse – of whether to side with this or that political party, or support this or that technical recipe, or opt for this or that legalistic procedure, what is not up for debate is the framework within which the political system operates, the value that inevitably comes with advances in technology and who they serve, the circus of legal advocacy that has masqueraded as search for truth.  In other parts of the world, oppression takes the form of brute violence against the physical body, religious hypocrisy that can be detected with little sight, or obvious suppression of the rights of one group of people by another seemingly more powerful group of people; whereas in the United States, the oppression takes the form of a manipulation of identity.  Instead of being able to think about the systems within which our society operates, we are manipulated – through classroom, pulpit, and newsstand – to regard the human being as a consumer.  A consumer of whatever political topic is most convenient for the upcoming campaign; of whatever knowledge and skills are currently the criteria to assume a coveted post within some corporation to uphold our economic status-quo, of whatever foods and medicines are promising the lure of easy fix, of whatever technology can deliver convenience in exchange for adoption of values, of whatever trend is being deposited in the mind.  The question is never “why?”, but always “which?”.  To me, the most striking point – and the one that makes this type of oppression all the more apparent – is that those segments of the population that seek to distinguish themselves by attempting to identify and fight oppression, in fact only distinguish themselves by adopting different types of patterns of consumption.

An oppression that is external – that is violent and ugly and hurtful – is at least one that can be identified.  Hypocrisy, suppression, corruption, can be known and fought.  It is because this oppression targets the body and external conditions of a human being, not his essential reality.  However, when the sights of oppression are trained at the identify of an individual, then his mind becomes restricted, his thoughts become suppressed, his reality is oppressed.  How can one fight an oppression when one does not even know that one is being oppressed?  When one’s identity has been manipulated to regard as normal what is clearly a distortion?

“What “oppression” is more grievous than that a soul seeking the truth…should know not where to go for it and from whom to seek it?”

“The perpetuation of ignorance is a most grievous form of oppression…”

Categories
- Oppression Human Nature Justice

The Stimulus of the New

Medical treatment of drug addicted patients involves assessment of abuse, addiction, and tolerance. Consumerism is an addiction. Commodities, physiques, and sensations are its drug of choice; corporations the drug lord; advertising the dealer. The mystique of the unknown first lures an unsuspecting customer in. The first hit lasts as long as heaven should. Subsequent hits take less of an effect. Higher doses and new brands are necessary to maintain the sensation. Appetites for drugs and commodities alike grow. Finally we find insatiable greed tears a family, a community, a society apart. Often, relationships are characterized by an energetic initiation, a meteoric consumption, and a rapid disintegration.  Conquest, challenge, mystery drive the interaction. The stimulus of consumption gone, so too is the friendship. The market has found its invisible hands into human social relations. Mutually commodified and exploitative relationships are manifestations of consumer values. Is consumer culture to this extreme a re-manifestation of the practice of prostitution?

Categories
- Oppression - Prevailing Conceptions Development

Materialism

Today’s vision of betterment is dogmatically materialistic.  The interpretation of reality that progress equals economic development, and that people’s happiness would only be the result of better health, food, education, living conditions, etc., has consolidated itself to become the deciding factor in the direction of society.  In the West, this relegated spirituality and religion to the realm of personal preference – each individual could hold whatever belief or relationship with transcendence that he wished, but society’s course would not be influenced.  (This fragmentation is already problematic in itself, independent of the content of what is being fragmented.)  Throughout the rest of the world, where the view that human nature is fundamentally spiritual is a common truth, the ideological imperialism of the West marginalized people’s deepest convictions – rather than challenged them directly.  Faith became impotent to direct society, something that it had done for millenia prior.

The field of development was rooted in these underlying materialistic assumptions and values.  Since the end of the World War II up to the present, global development efforts have been judged, by their own standards, a failure, often causing the opposite of their intended, well-intentioned, and idealistic goals – resulting in the widening of the gap between the rich and poor, the plunging into hopelessness of whole peoples, the desolation of vast geographic areas and ecosystems.  Economic activities, rather than knowledge, assume the central role of social existence; while knowledge is reduced to information, and is valuable insomuch as it can aid economic growth.

Even diverse worldwide economic systems, different in their approaches and methods, still nonetheless held the same underlying assumption.  Whether a state-controlled system, seeking to liberate the populous from struggle; or a system of competitism, invoking the “invisible hand” to create a prosperous society if each individual sought his own economic well-being; all yielded similar results: a host of personal and social pathologies, including anxieties, prejudice, apathy, breakdown of family life, ineffective educational systems, and consumer culture, just to start.

Economic growth is not the problem; it is essential, provided it is in the context of building a just and unified world civilization, having both a spiritual and material component.  Materialism’s error was in the arbitrary attempts to divorce humanity’s physical development from its spiritual development.  Both need to advance coherently.

Categories
- Science Justice Oneness

Defender of the Interests of All Humankind: Justice

Ideals are wonderful as they are, but what really can we say are the practical implications for speaking or believing in a principle as lofty as the spiritual concept of ‘Justice’? Are its implications for social and economic development really as profound as they seem to be presented? Are we not hedged in and confined on many sides by practical, real-life constraints about what can be done? What can we do as a student, a mother, a school teacher, an engineer, a sick person, a doctor, a para-military force, a grocery bagger at the local Walmart, a child playing in the dust of a day care sandbox? As organizations, governments, and multi-national corporations, perhaps the question seems as tenuous to answer as it does for the individual. Equally futile it seems for collectives and individuals alike. As individuals or communities, the question begs of itself, it inquires of Justice, the question asks the principle, “What really can be done?” What can one sincere heart do, if she or he wanted to, to assist in the materialization of the structure of justice in the world we live in? The enthusiastic social activist says, “what am I to do?” The vengeful communities of the disadvantaged conglomerated into like-minded and similarly victimized social sub-factions, appropriately named and extant on every college campus, ask, “what are we to do, if we wish to enact the principle of Justice within society?” Finally, the corporation and materially rich institution says to itself, “what”, as it inquires, “am I do to about my conscience – it being that I seek to see Justice realized world-wide before my days on this earth come to an end?” So speaks the voice of Justice as it ponders its destiny during its days in the hearts and minds of women and men, communities, and institutions. So speaks the discourse on Justice as presently manifest in human deliberations, thoughts, and discourses of society.

Practical Implications of the Principle of Justice: From Ideals and Concepts to Realities and Reconstruction

I built this iPad, says the late CEO. I built this iPad for $800 bucks a piece. A cost of this technology was the human lives I destroyed to manufacture the 10 million units I sold on American soil with Chinese sub minimum-wage labor. Suicide, STD’s, family unit decimation, mass relocation, biohazardous dormitories, temporary economic surges with counteracted depressions, itty-bitty living space – these are all my concerns regarding the building of my iPad. iPad is progress, however. iPad is science, speaks the conscious pride of our people, boasted on CNN for all to glory in. Behold, as if to say, our human ingenuity. iPad is a cultural phenomenon, an accomplishment felt for all by all. It redounds to the conscience of the species as a symbol of the transcendent genius of our race. Beggar and orphan alike delight in its beauty and efficiency. CNN reports: Chinese orphan sells kidney for iPad II.

Justice implies that progress cannot be defined in terms of this situation. That which progress consists in must rather be of utility to a larger majority of possible beneficiaries of human struggle within our global population. That which constitutes scientific and social progress must answer the global travesties of shortages of infrastructure in literacy, education, health, peace and security, non-corrupt governance, intellectual open-mindedness and freedom from the ravaging influence of materialism. Misapplication of the priorities and resources of science towards esoteric playthings for the fetishes of an elite minority is no science at all.  Inventing contraptions to satisfy the entertainment quest of an increasingly parasitical technocracy is nothing for our species to take pride in. Addictions progressively increase in the cost to the buyer and in the quantity of stimulant needed to generate the effective euphoria. Western elite technocrats are at the tipping point where fetishes become desperate and insatiable and break under the crushing exhaustion of the world’s collective resource-cash unable to satisfy the irresponsible habits of consumption. Cars and global warming. Alcoholism and social responsibility. Television and activism. Night clubs and emotional integrity. Apple products and Foxconn’s rural genocide. Ultimately, concern for justice prevents humanity from defining progress in a way that endorses sacrificing  the well-being of global prosperity and the planet itself to technological breakthroughs for privileged minorities. In design and planning, Justice ensures that limited resources are not diverted to the pursuit of projects extraneous to a population’s internal social and economic needs in structure, application, or resource-allocation. Need is the imperative here. Massive global need determines the fact that social solidarity, literacy, agriculture, healthcare, and international relations are the topics in which glory can be achieved in inventions. Not hand-held 3G enabled contraptions. Development programs that inculcate just and equitable goals will engage the commitment of the masses of humanity. Mass commitment and coordination is the sole force upon which the generation and application of solutions to universal and important human needs fundamentally depends. Virtues such as honesty, a dedicated work ethic, and united collaboration are harnessed towards the achievement of enormously challenging global achievements. Every member of society, every institution, and every social community or group  has the capacity to learn to trust the unity and cooperation of the collective as a destiny that champions the rights and participation of every contributor, and assures the benefits and basic standards to which all are entitled, and most importantly, that applies the products of science and endeavors that utilize planet earth’s inherited human and material resources for the prosperity of all individuals equally, equitably, and with an unerring justice.

Categories
- Prevailing Conceptions

Consumer Culture

Today’s consumer culture, a byproduct of the cult of the individual’s materialistic religion, is unapologetic as it reinterprets every aspect of human history and behavior within its single-minded view, as it imposes its ideology through a cultural hegemony, as it infiltrates its value in all social systems and structures – education, media, law, health care, and development being far from immune.  If one analyzes it deeply, it is simply no more than the triumph of animal nature and impulse, free now from any religious restraints, however superstitious they may have been.

One clear example is its effect on language.  Behaviors which at one point were characterized as moral failings are now rewarded, encouraged, and prized.  Selfishness is referred to as a commercial resource; truth is reduced to a negotiable commodity; pride is viewed in terms of social value; manipulation is called advertising.  The loss of meaning in our language reflects the profound loss of meaning in all relationships that make up civilization – breakdown of family life, weakening of community ties, dysfunctional educational systems, institutional power-struggles, the worldwide crisis of authority.  And this is perhaps the greatest crime of consumer culture.

Categories
- Three Protagonists Human Nature Oneness

Cult of the Individual

Society is plagued by a cult of the individual that has gone so far as to see association with other human beings merely as a means through which an individual acquires commodities that satiate his private desires. Presuppositions of the individual’s paramount importance amongst the structures of society, and materialistic assumptions that individuals desire inanimate or personally consumable pleasures enjoyable mostly in private, this cult casts human nature in its own mold of convenience to suit its structural agenda. Ignored and marginalized lies the importance of collective and community life as well as the power and productivity generated by institutional capacity. Dissuaded and castigated remain the achievements and glory of public reputation, community responsibility, and collective destiny. These are less easily commodified and consumed; these are difficult to acquire; these are not deemed valuable in the consumer culture currently propounded. The individual becomes the sacrosanct end and society the denigrated means. Consumer culture’s iron clad grip on the global conscience originated historically as a ruse foisted onto the materially developed populous, propelled in part by a profiteering consumer agenda in whose interests it is for human masses to remain so haplessly addicted, and perpetuated in part by people’s own temptation when confronted with instant gratification. With corporate tycoons as ecclesiastics, financial motivation their will to power, the marketplace as their temple, satiety as its heaven, and commodification as ritual – the cult of the individual has become the orthodoxy of a new materialistic religion.