#consumerism

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#consumerism #free-will #god #goddess #greek

I will go out of my way to avoid the shopping crowds and the extreme consumerism - I hate all that. ↗

— Annie Lennox

#consumerism #crowds #extreme #go #hate

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism. ↗

— Ben Nicholson

#consumerism #corruption #soul

I don't mean to criticize anyone in any way that I wouldn't criticize myself. I think people should have fun, and have a good time, and enjoy the luck that we have to be lazy and dwell in consumerism. But I think that it's a balance. And our job as actors is empathy. ↗

— Natalie Portman

#anyone #balance #consumerism #criticize #dwell

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

— Bill Bryson

#buy #carry #children #consumerism #first

Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet. ↗

— Russell Brand

#consumerism #love #socialism #spirituality #change

Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street. ↗

— Susan Ee

#environmentalism #hypocrisy #hypocrisy

In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance. ↗

— Wim Wenders

#also #america #become #being #consumerism

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products. ↗

— Ellen Willis

#contained #continually #could #demand #easily

The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#capitalism #capitalist-realism #charity #consumerism #cultural-capitalism