Consumerism
HEGE Series
Seeing the Wood for the Trees The ‘salvation’ of the natural environment falls to man. He alone has the power to determine not only his own fate but also that of the natural environment. Far from Christianity being the one that surrenders nature to the arbitrary will and power of humanity, it is the non-Christian view that does this with astounding self-righteousness. — Archimandrite Vassilios Papavassiliou
The American Way (The System of Organized Crime) that monied elite (plutocrats, oligarchs) of the New World hatched by way of the Civil War (aka Second American Revolution) transformed Americans from citizens into “consumers” in order to enslave everyone (not just African-Americans) to their industrial Economy.
This is why all efforts at having a consumers union to counterbalance The System have been ruthlessly squashed.
Consumerism is a euphemism for western consumer capitalism, a sleight of hand that avoids reference to capitalism so as to conceal the connection.
Consumerism is the engine that drives The Machine of Capitalism.
Without the engine of consumers (and Labor), Capitalism would go nowhere, because products are good for nothing unless consumed, bought with money by consumers by which producers derive their profits, the process that ties citizens to the economic treadmill and keeps them securely imprisoned there.
The real bottom line is that products do not just appear out of thin air from “capital” (money), but require Labor to produce, and consumers to purchase in order to keep the wheels of The Machine of Capitalism spinning.
Consumerism | Wikipedia
Consumer Reports | Wikipedia
CR Consumer Reports
CR Consumer Reports Advocacy
Consumer Reports (formerly Consumers Union) | Influence Watch
Buyer Aware: Harnassing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace
Explore Buyer Aware
Buyer Aware | Amazon
A New American Consumer Culture
In Buying We Trust; The Foundation of U.S. Consumerism Was Laid in the 18th Century
Consumerism as a moral attitude
Healing Ourselves and Healing the World: Consumerism and the Culture of Addiction
American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture
How Humans Became 'Consumers': A History
Consumerism, Conformity, and Uncritical Thinking in America
Consumerism as Narcissism and Entitlement in Consumer Moral Leadership
At the Lost and Found — Edward Curtin
Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.” Yet losers also exit empty-handed. Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things. Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss. It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society. Too many possessions and too much information. Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes. There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed. One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.
Affluenza
Affluenza | PBS — the worst pandemic in human history of most contagious and rapidly spreading dis-ease there is
Adam Curtis
See — Adam Curtis - The Century of the Self
New Dream
NewDream.org | More of What Matters
More Fun Less Stuff Starter Kit
Living Lighter
Simplify the Holidays
Dream of a Nation
Hoarding
Clutter (overconsumption) is a form of hoarding
Clutter raises $64 million to store what won’t fit in your closet
Marie Kondo | Wikipedia
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Marie Kondo and the fantasy of a tidy life, explained
What is KonMari and why are people folding their shirts weird?
Marie Kondo Is No Cure For Our Hyper-Consumer Culture
Thrift Stores Can't Keep Up With All the Junk and They're Saying the Signs Lead to Marie Kondo
The ‘Marie Kondo Effect’ Comes at a Weird Time for Thrift Stores
This Woman Upended Her Career to Follow Marie Kondo's Tidying Methods — and Now Makes Thousands Per Consultation
Consumer Propaganda
When western consumers think of propaganda, they typically think of massive military parades of overt “hard” totalitarian states, audio broadcasts from loudspeakers and radio (and audio/video on television) expounding the virtues of totalitarian leadership, and billboards, posters, artwork, paintings, sculpture, statues, etc. propagandizing the same.
What western consumers rarely, if ever, stop to consider is how western capitalist bread and circus, commercialized modern mass spectacles (such as holiday parades, sports events, and music concerts) are the western counterpart to totalitarian military displays. Of course, these consumer displays are not militaristic, but they still represent war — war not only against other forms of economy, but against the Divine Creation of God (including humanity), that turns humanity from Love of God to Love of Mammon (money, material things) and turns everything Divinely Created into trash indiscriminately tossed into the landfill. They also lead to war in order to procure all the “raw materials” needed for creation of all the consumer stuff.
Few further realize how inundated they are with covert ”soft” totalitarian propaganda from consumer capitalism (The American Way) that hides beneath a facade of “freedom” and “democracy”, exalted in comparison to what is marketed as enemy lack of “freedom” of totalitarian states. Western capitalist propaganda includes media reporting (repetitions) of the mouthings of politicians about “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights”, “national security”, blah, blah, blah, but more importantly consists of Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing. The latter are the most ubiquitous forms of western propaganda, occurring everywhere, not only in the west but in every westernized and westernizing nation, infiltrated into everything and plastered onto anything imaginable.
See — Advertising (photo gallery at bottom of page)
With each new technological innovation (such as digital technology), consumer capitalist propaganda becomes ever more noxious, in the face of each and every consumer 24/7. Westerners (and those westernized and westernizing) tend to see capitalist propaganda as simply informative communication about product availibility, without realizing that advertising seeks to psychologically manipulate consumers into buying, and without understanding that products represent The System itself, that products are the media by which capitalism operates and propagates itself.
Consumers grow so accustomed to capitalist propagandic assault that they tune it out, but the propaganda unconsciously affects them all the same — emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. Westerners familiar with the capitalist environment rarely question or analyze, much less criticize, its affects. They take the Consumer Capitalism environment as a given, as if it's the only way things are or can be, or the greatest thing that could ever be, because the propagandized capitalist environment is all they know and what they have been propagandized to value over any other system of Economy.
See — Ad Council
Yet, that system was corrupted almost from the get go by organized criminality during the Gilded Age (1870-1900) by what came to be known as Robber Barons, and later, not simply by mafiosa gang type organizations (which aren't actually all that organized), but by white collar organized criminality. In the early stages of that growing nexus of criminality between big business, government, and organized crime, two major propaganda ploys were perpetrated on American consumers in order (like magic tricks) to distract attention away from the nexus that was forming. Those major propaganda ploys were the anti-communism red scare (McCarthyism, "Creeping Socialism"), and the war on drugs (Gangster Capitalism).
These ploys consisted of ancient, age old finger pointing at the outside like first occurred in the Garden of Eden — Adam pointed at Eve, and Eve pointed at the serpent. Neither took responsibility for their own actions, chosing instead to claim the threat came from outside, rather than inside themselves. Likewise, the US nexus of organized criminality created a false exterior threat to “national security” to absolve itself of any suspicion so that it can continue to abscond riches from the masses of consumers — the false threat of "Creeping Socialism" (red scare of McCarthyism) and the false threat of mafiosa gangsters trafficking in illegal controlled substance (first alcohol during Prohibition, then drugs which continues to the present).
As a system, consumer capitalism relies on nature, or the Creation, for the “goods” it produces, and on ever increasing “growth” in production and consumption to keep the wheels of capitalism churning. Consumption must exceed production in order for capitalist owners to profit, and at least equal production in order to stagnate, lest the whole house of cards come tumbling down.
Completely reliant on the Creation for its existence, the net effect of the consumer capitalist system is to ultimately lay waste, to trash the whole of Creation with no concern for anything or any creature, not even humanity. Ever increasing environmental destruction, animal species extinction, human diseases of environmental origin, and land fills testify to that fact.
The land fill is the icon of consumer capitalism, the burial ground of all Creation itself, where everything that was once the icon of God (the visible face of God in the works of His hand) is killed, destroyed, desecrated, discarded and buried in the dust of the earth, without so much as a cross to mark its demise. Obviously then, the inspiration for such a system as consumer capitalism can only be satanic-demonic, because it is satan (the father of lies) and his minion of demons whose intent it is to destroy everything that God has made, deemed good, and loves, especially humanity.
Should the destruction of Earth ever become complete, humanity will probably by then have transformed itself into transhuman A.I. (artificial intelligence, i.e. robots). Transhumanism is already prophesying immortality of the human individual via digital uploading of soulless human intelligence (mere human knowledge, information — not Divine Wisdom) to robotic “brains”. This will enable the satanic-demonic desecration to continue unabated to the furtherest, darkest corners of fartherest flung lifeless galaxies, where humanity would never survive without being transformed into The Machine. At that point, destruction of humanity as the last living vestige of Creation would be complete to the satisfaction of satan and his demon minions who even now are inspiring such devilish transhumanism, so that satan can reign supreme in destructive chaos over remains of the crumbling universe which was created as Divine Cosmos.
But satanic-demonic destruction will never reach that point, because God has revealed through St. John's vision of The Apocalypse (Revelation) that on the eve of destruction He will come to settle the score and finish setting His Cosmos right again, which all along, and even now He is so doing. He will be the one to actually destroy by fire His Creation that is fallen into chaos by way of satanic-demonic temptation (inspiration) of humanity, and to then recreate it again purified of all chaotic evil, all lack of comm-union with Himself.
Eve of Destruction — Barry McGuireI am... making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? ... — C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man 1943
See —
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing
Mad World, Love of Money
Capitalism, Gangster Capitalism, Organized crime, Corporations, McCarthyism, "Creeping Socialism"
Media, Pinocchio, Desire
The Beast
End Game
The omega point of consumer capitalism is the land fill — the churning of everything Divinely created ex nihilio (out of nothing) into some thing (product) by which all Creation is trashed by humanity.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” — 1 Peter 5:8
