Consumed

american woman

"Changing someone's emotional state makes physiological changes in their body and alters the actions they are likely to take.

This is the purpose of sales and modern advertising techniques.

To change how you feel about a product or company is to change the likelihood of your making a purchase." - Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh

"The triumph of stupidity and manufactured ignorance is on full display in US political life and is matched by a savage militarization of the culture, an intensified level of daily violence and aggression, the withering of the social, and the withdrawal into private obsessions.

People smothered in a fog of exaggerated self-interest." - Henry A. Giroux

Tiny Dancer

"When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero." - Ivan Pavlov

bag lady

The End of Global Consumer Culture

Finding Happiness Outside of Material Consumption

The unacceptable collateral damage of overconsumption

How I Freed My Mind From The Cult of Materialism

"In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied core needs into permanent shoppers, consumer product producers must dumb down consumers by shaping their wants essentially taking over their lives by encouraging impulse buying, cultivating shopoholism and manufacturing new desires." - Benjamin R. Barber

Theorists of consumption understand there is no primal need to own things.

Theorists of consumption understand that acquisition itself is dependent upon a conditioned, fabricated Pavlovian need engineered by advertisers.

~ Can't Find My Way Home ~

Planned Obsolescence

The Light Bulb Conspiracy

Hold Your Head Up

Thorstein Veblen, a theorist of consumption, understood acquisition was for exhibition, "in order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient to merely possess wealth or power. Wealth or power must be put on display."

Thorstein Veblen coined the term 'conspicuous consumption'.

"Misleading advertising leads to over consumption but that may be offsetting the under-consumption associated with monopoly prices." - Edward L. Glaeser, Gergely Ujhelyi, December 2006

"The FTC and the FDA don't have enough resources to go after every product sold under false pretenses.

Consumers should be highly skeptical of claims made for any pill, patch, cream or device.

We like to think of consumers as our agents in the field." - Matthew Daynard, senior attorney FTC advertising practices division

The Demoralized Mind

The very meaning and significance of life is expressed in consumptive terms.

TV hucksters, pesky telemarketers and direct junk mailmen define identity under the contemporary Cartesian principle: I consume therefore I am.

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek spiritual satisfaction in consumption.

The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns.

The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats - his home, his car, his hobbies, his pattern of food consumption.

We require "forced draft expensive" consumption, things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."- Victor Lebow

No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature

Seven blunders of materialistic consumerism

1. Wealth without work

2. Pleasure without conscience

3. Knowledge without character

4. Commerce without morality

5. Science without humanity

6. Worship without sacrifice

7. Politics without principle

Mahatma Gandhi

"Like most habitual shoppers, I was looking for something that I wanted more than I needed, something I could not necessarily describe but would recognize when I saw it.

I was looking for something I had bought new long ago but had lost and was expecting to find once again.

Call me a constantly lapsing recovering consumer.

I am not proud of this, though I am not ashamed of it either.

It means is that I am an entirely average American, easily driven by complex and unpleasant realities to the escapist distractions of stuff.

I am a member of what social critics call the "bewildered herd," though I like to think that I am less bewildered and more self-aware than most of my fellow cattle, even when I find myself buying another pair of high heels that I can't really walk in and don't need." - Erin Aubry Kaplan

"The word "consume" brings us back to the origins of separation in fire, a metaphor for our civilization's consumptive linearity.

Indeed, the conversion of human bonds into money resembles an oxidative reaction in chemistry, which replaces existing internal chemical bonds with new, lower-energy bonds to something from the outside, an oxygen atom.

Money is like the thermal energy liberated thereby, no longer bound to any individual and thus free to perform work.

Incinerating relationships and converting them into services severs bonds.

A purchased "service" is as generic as the money that buys it.

Social relationships embody wealth in the form of bonds or ties, which can be liquidated, turned into a commodity, and sold back as a service.

No relationship is exempt from this colonization of the social space: not parenting, not sex, not friendship, not trust.

Let's start with an example of this colonization that also exemplifies the inauthenticity of commoditized relationships: the "hospitality industry".

Hospitality bespeaks a generous, welcoming attitude of sharing one's home.

How would you feel if you shared the home of a friend for a few days and were then presented with a bill, with 500% markups for each telephone call, bottle of water, and item of food you consumed?" - Charles Eisenstein

This web site is not a commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes only.

This website defines a new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie - a rational gnostic mystery religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a "hate crime."

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world economic system, corporate media worldwide, the global industrial military entertainment complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on coöperation. Coöperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through corporate media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

All views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time.

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