Consumerism as a Religion

I found this interesting little blurb on Axis of Logic...

Consumerism as a Religion

In the United States, materialism is the religion and shopping malls are the churches - all 46,000 of them. Consumerism is the liturgy and the prayer is the longing for more things. The worshippers earn the money and pay the bills when they come due. Finance capital makes the whole enterprise possible.

As a religion, consumerism teaches the gospel of material value, individual freedom and personal anonymity in our cities and towns. In the countryside, the holy writ teaches us that agrarian traditions, customs and cultural norms are heresy. Everywhere, it discourages intra-familial relationships, social cohesion, support systems and community. It teaches the righteousness of competition with one another and that working together, dependence on others, meeting one another's needs, and sharing our possessions are sins to be overcome. Skeptics are shunned and their heresies condemned. Marketing strategies and advertising techniques are employed to bring unbelievers into the fold - even the little ones.

Marketing Strategies: Consumerism lies at the heart of capitalism, both for its own survival and also as an instrument that targets traditional values in any culture. The capitalist system depends upon an ever expanding market for an increasing number of products in the global corporate empire. It relies on production of new products, no matter how trivial and on sophisticated marketing machinery necessary to penetrate new markets.

The capitalist machine develops methods to sell people what they do not need and often do not really want. An old fashioned maxim in invention, production and sales marketing was once "meet a need, don't create one". Over the years, marketing techniques have been developed to convert "wants" into "must have" and desires into essentials. Cellular telephones serve as an example. Everyone in the family, including children "need" a cellular telephone and if parents object the phone is sold as a security item for keeping contact with the child who may have an emergency. A cheap cell phone gave way to one with a camera and an MP3 player which now gives way to a "Blackberry" with enhanced computer capabilities. A myriad of other products come to mind, burdening family incomes, creating family conflicts and undermining cultural norms and values. If it were not for this power to corrupt, strong non-material values would reverse an expanding market.

There is much more, and it is an interesting read...

KFC Goes for the Gold!

In the midst of our ever burgeoning waistlines, KFC has decided that more is better. They are test marketing a burger which replaces bread with two pieces of fried chicken. It is rumored to have more fat, salt, and calories than most other burgers offered by the competition. It is called the "Double Down".

Read more here...

Scientific Illiteracy Running Rampant...

It seems strange that barely 40 years after man walked on the moon, there are still people that believe the Earth is 5000 years old and flat, or that humans and dinosaurs existed together. The old predictions of the 1960's, with visions of George Jetson and Flying Cars, seem to have been forgotten. It has been replaced with a sort of stolid illiteracy for all things scientific, among large segments of the population. Why is this so? Politicians debate climate change as if it is some whim someone made up, while educated scientists have 30 years or more worth of data on record. The science sections in newspapers and the media have been reduced or totally eliminated, and science in the classroom is almost completely gone at the ages where it makes a difference on youth. America used to be the most advanced scientific nation on Earth. What has happened? Why hasn't the pace of advancement kept up? As we go into the the early years of the 21st century, it seems with the exception of military hardware, we have slipped back a few notches on the development scale. Technological development appears to have stagnated somewhere near the end of the last century. Anti-intellectualism is rampant. Please tell me I am wrong.

Is this a backlash of the old religion, against the new religion of science? Is it because our capitalist system reduces everything to the lowest, non-threatening denominator in order to make a quick buck, with everything else ignored or shunned? What if the old adage about the Soviet Union stifling creativity and innovation was true in reverse, and that unbridled Capitalism stifles scientific progression?

This could not be a good thing.

Those who truly understand science, real science, will be the ones who prevail in the future. Real science is not afraid to challenge long held beliefs or assumptions, and owes nothing to anybody. It is it's very nature that makes it unpopular in this country. If America is not willing to devote itself to scientific understanding, then it deserves what it gets.


"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore, not popular."

- Carl Jung