Quotes About Consumerism

The liquid modern variety of adiaphorization is cut after the pattern of the consumer–commodity relation, and its effectiveness relies on the transplantation of that pattern to interhuman relations.

Politicians who call for the resuscitation of dying or terminally ill 'family values', and serious about what their calls imply, should begin by thinking hard about the consumerist roots of the simultaneous wilting of social solidarity inside workplaces and fading of the caring–sharing impulse inside family homes.

Al explorar el mercado en busca de artículos de consumo, son atraídos a los comercios con la promesa de que allí encontrarán las herramientas y materias primas que pueden (y deben) usar para volverse "aptos para el consumo", y por lo tanto cotizar en el mercado.

El anhelo reemplaza al deseo como fuerza motivadora del consumo.

Consumer freedom means orientation of life towards market-approved commodies and therefore precludes one crucial freedom: freedom from the market, freedom that means anything else but the choice between standard commercial products. Above all, consumer freedom successfully deflects aspirations of human liberty from communal affairs and the management of collective life.

Primero, el destino final de todos los productos en venta es el de ser consumidos por compradores. Segundo, los compradores desearán comprar bienes de consumo si y sólo si ese consumo promete la gratificación de sus deseos. Tercero, el precio que el cliente potencial en busca de gratificación está dispuesto a pagar por los productos en oferta dependerá de la credibilidad de esa promesa y de la intensidad de esos deseos.

It is the turnover, not the volume of purchases, that measures success in the life of homo consumens.

Cuando la relación está inspirada por las ganas ("las miradas se encuentran a través de una habitación atestada"), sigue la pauta del consumo y sólo requiere la destreza de un consumidor promedio, moderadamente experimentado. Al igual que otros productos, la relación es para consumo inmediato (no requiere una preparación adicional ni prolongada) y para uso único, "sin perjuicios". Primordial y fundamentalmente, es descartable.

T]he existential setting that came to be known as the 'society of consumers' is distinguished by a remaking of interhuman relations on the pattern, and in the likeness, of the relations between consumers and the objects of their consumption.

I]n consumer culture choosing and freedom are two names of the same condition; and treating them as synonymous is correct at least in the sense that you can abstain from choosing only by at the same time surrendering your freedom.

A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument. There

new techniques of mass persuasion. "We must shift America from a needs to desires culture," Mazur said. "People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.

Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. We

La gente, aveva concluso Dusty, può fare a meno di tante cose; il problema è che non riesce a non andare a comprarle.

I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple making. We have done so partly because we have reduced it to the intellectual assimilation of ideas, partly because of the abiding impact of cultural Christianity embedded in the Christendom understanding of church, and partly because the phenomenon of consumerism in our own day pushes against a true following of Jesus.

Whether we choose it or not, almost all expressions of church in the West are implicitly vulnerable to nondiscipleship, professionalized ministry, spiritual passivity, and consumerism. The problem is rooted in the profoundly nonmissional assumptions of the system itself.

People gravitate toward products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable--MAYA.

Some consumers buy products not because they are 'better" in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they're buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.

This sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.

Shopping Malls: Modern cathedrals to spending money. Theyre designed to disorientate us and make us stay longer than we need to. Every brick is there to manipulate us to buy.

Last December I saw an advertisement outside an electronics store. There was a little boy, delirious with delight, surrounded by computers, stereos, and other gadgets. The text read: "We know what your child wants for Christmas." I stared at the poster, then said to no one in particular, "What your child wants for Christmas is your love, but if he can't get that, he'll settle for a bunch of electronic crap.

Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.