the story of stuff-the consumer happy american culture
15.May.08 | culture, music, politics, poverty |Victor LeBeau, a retailing analyst who helped shape our economy after WWII said:
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 our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.
(ht: the story of stuff)
This quote certainly shed an enormous amount of light on this video by Radiohead “All I Need”
There are a ton of spiritual and moral implications surrounding this, and although I’m not sure exactly how it all fleshes out it is certainly something I am thinking though and questioning on a bigger scale.
(All of this thought was sparked by the Radiohead video and furthered by watching the video with Annie Leonard The Story of Stuff)
Chris Kirk |
15.May.08 @ 3:30 pm
The Story of Stuff is an incredible piece. Thanks for sharing it. I agree that it raises a lot of questions. The challenge is to begin to remove ourselves from the “grid,” refusing to allow corporations to control our lifestyles. A poignant image for me is the individual with solar panels on their house which generate enough power that they actually sell energy back to the electric company. Could our communities begin to live,not consumers of society, but producers of a new economy which produces mutual benefit, not just for us but for the system itself, suberting and changing it with a new way of being?
Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw write beautifully about this in their new book, “Jesus for President.” I’m very interested to see what happens as communities of faith engage in creative withdrawl from our marriage to consumeristic capitalism. We have the ability to write our own “story,” and we should have a lot of fun doing it.
monts |
16.May.08 @ 9:31 am
There are a couple of houses around these parts of Chicago-land that have solar panels on their roofs, even a house nearby that has a big propeller for creating wind-energy. I never knew they generated so much that they were actually able to sell some of it back to the power companies. That’s interesting, and smart! Talk about paying for itself!
Steve |
16.May.08 @ 9:58 am
Monts, so, does this mean we have to give back our iphones?
monts |
16.May.08 @ 9:59 am
oh crap.