#consumerism

We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#culture #inspirational #life #tv #wisdom

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them. ↗

— Ivan Illich

#economy #environment #humanity #society #economy

Pop culture is not about depth. It's about marketing, supply and demand, consumerism. ↗

— Trevor Dunn

#consumerism #culture #demand #depth #marketing

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#destructive #different #different set #family #family life

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#consumerism #image #just #largely #make

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#consumerism #depiction #governs #logic #mass

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#consumerism #developments #eroded #family #life

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism. ↗

— Ben Nicholson

#consumerism #corruption #soul

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#buy #carry #children #consumerism #first

We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too. ↗

— Phillip Cary

#consumerism #spirituality #love