consumption

  1. “…Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.” “But the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Those plays, where there’s nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing.”
    Aldous Huxley
  2. As television begins to render invisible the traditional concept of childhood, it would not be quite accurate to say that it immerses us in an adult world. Rather, it uses the material of the adult world as basis for projecting a new kind of person altogether. We might call this person the adult-child… Television promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with childishness - for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for consequences, and almost promiscuous preoccupation with consumption.
    Neil Postman
  3. I would develop the idea that it is we ourselves who are undermining our own identity - by the terrible way we speak, the appaling architecture we put up, our lack of respect for the landscape and historical buildings, our dubious urbanization, the way we’ve given up on the plurality of trades and small businesses, the depopulation of the countryside, the construction of ever greater monuments to consumption without increasing the productivity and efficiency of our own industries or making a sophisticated attempts to market our own products… We are becoming just another globalized country.
    Václav Havel