...
Over the past 100 years we have been persuaded to become the ultimate consumer, perhaps against our will, and most definitely without our conscious knowledge.
Below is from "A Brief History of Consumer Culture" published on
The MIT Press Reader. Which is an article adapted from Kerryn Higgs
book “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet”
Sobering words to ponder:
Frederick Allen wrote in1931, “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate
consumer. Unless [the consumer] could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the
whole stream of six-cylinder cars, [], cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric
ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.”
"President
Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed
the demonstration “on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and
desires,” hailed an “almost insatiable appetite for goods and services,” and
envisaged “a boundless field before us … new wants that make way endlessly for
newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” In this paradigm, people are
encouraged to board an escalator of desires (a stairway to heaven, perhaps) and
progressively ascend to what were once the luxuries of the affluent."
…
If the soul has a say in where it was to be placed on earth, the conscience keeps no remembrance. If it was merely a request, how does it know that it was granted or den
...
Wisdom from my aviator husband.
...
