The Gospel of Consumption: Of Subservience to Machines, Human Welfare, and Kellog's Six-Hour Day [View All]

[Subdivisions]

An excellent article on where we are today as Americans:

...snip...

Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s (Ed.: Yes, that Kellog's) vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.

Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.

Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, marketing them—and counting the profits.

KELLOGG’S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg’s book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black’s bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today.

...snip...

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962

This is one of the better articles I've read lately. And, I read A LOT OF ARTICLES. I hope you'll read it too and comment.

Is there a way to break out of this madness that has been created for us? I remember when I was young, in the late 60s. Life seemed so grand then. The air was sweeter; the sky bluer. And, the entire family including aunts, uncles, cousins, grand-parents, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and family friends WERE ALL THERE every birthday, milestone, and holiday. Then, we all eventually went off to follow the almighty dollar and everyone got away from each other. And, here it is, 40 years later and I haven't seen some members of my family in decades. Literally. We just bacame too far-flung in order to pursue an income. And, in the process, we lost what we all once had. Family and community. And now, we all go off to work, by ourselves, alone. And all we can really be thankful for relevant to this exodus from family and community is the memories some of us are fortunate enough to have of a time when love, family and community, rather than greed and money and self-indulgence, ruled.