The Gospel of Consumption...a must read Orion article

[The Diest]

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

[Captain Angry]

1. Thanks for posting that.

Have you seen the Century of Self videos on YouTube about Bernays? They touched on him a tiny bit in that article, but the TV shows about him were very very interesting.

When you have some time, if you haven't seen it, you should watch all of the parts to it.

[grasswire]

2. thanks for letting us know about the Century of the Self...

...on you tube. I was quite disappointed when I learned that Netflix did not have it available.

Thanks!

If this is a topic of interest to you, I recommend the book "Land of Desire" by Leach. It's a big book from the 1990s. Extremely interesting.

[xfundy]

3. I thought this was a link to the ONION.

New glasses, still trying to adjust.

Made me think, confirmed much I'd ascertained.

Thanx.

[Saphire]

5. LOL...I thought that too.

[raccoon]

11. Me too---and I kept thinking, "how much of this is real?"

Thanks for a great link.

[nosmokes]

4. This is an excellent article,

one that really needs more exposure. Email it around and print a couple of copies to leave laying around in your doctor/dentist office or coffee shop or someplace.

[Echo In Light]

6. Thanks for posting. Marcuse quote:

"The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment ... Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe." ~ Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional man. Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society.

[sendero]

7. I believe that the "theology of abundance"

.... as practiced by most mega-church televangelists, is a lynchpin in our current economic debacle.

People wanted to hear, and were sold, that Jesus wants them to have a BMW and a tract mansion, and they thought god would rescue them from their economic profligacy.

They are about to find out that god doesn't care about their middle class keep up with the Joneses trappings.

[old mark]

8. Just saw a TV show

about a man who nearly 20 years ago was going bankrupt. A lifelong christian, he believes that poverty is sinful. Not wanting his family to suffer the consequences of his inability to keep a job, sin and loss of heaven, he killed them all, wife, three children and mother in law, insuring in his mind they would go directly to heaven. He then went to the kitchen ( where he had just murdered his own son), made and ate a
sandwich, and went upstairs to sleep. He drove away the next morning, remained free for nearly 18 years. He is now in prison for life, still believes he will "see his family in heaven." I don't know if this is a result of the gospel of prosperity, but it sounds a bit like it to me.

mark

[sinkingfeeling]

10. That was John List in 1971. It was his mother that he also killed.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/family/list/1.html

Asked why he had not just killed himself when he saw debt mounting up, he explained that suicide barred him from heaven. He had a better chance of going to heaven if he murdered his family and then sought forgiveness. In fact, he fully expected not only to see all of them in heaven but that they'd have either forgiven him or would not know about the "tragedy that had happened," as he'd put it in his trial statement to the judge. He suspected they would all get along as before.

[blindpig]

9. More on Edward Bernays

Hard to say enough about Edward Bernays. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, is regarded as the father of public relations, an appalling appellation, imho.

Here's what Chomsky has to say:


American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.

Here's a link to Bernays's 'classic', 'Propaganda'. Read it and weep.

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html

It should also be noted that the National Association of Manufacturers was heavily involved in the creation the pseudo-philosophy of libertarianism, the retro-fitted philosophy of greed.

http://populistindependent.org/

This has a lot to do with how we got here.

[ronnie624]

12. Good essay. Thanks.

As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: “We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society.” As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg’s six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet.

[windoe]

13. Had a book years ago

and on the back it said, 'A society without leisure is doomed to fail.' I am not sure but Leisure may have been the name of the book, may have been from the 40's from the impression I got of the writing style.

[asthmaticeog]

14. Bookmarked

Good link, and some pretty good stuff in theis thread, thanks.

[guruoo]

15. They know the more citizens work, the less time they have to avocate in their own behalf...

Bushco's vision of of what is "uniquely American"...

Bush: "get any sleep?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIjo-dWE1Jg