Lead us into temptation, by James B. Twitchell
A powerful look at why we are consumers, and what commercial products and their lure mean to us as a society. “Born to shop” is not just a motto; it’s a basis for American lifestyle choices. Twitchell has researched how shopping makes us feel, and how that relates to being part of the group, being safe, and being treated deferentially. I especially enjoyed reading about how people like Tommy Hilfiger scope out what’s happening “on the street” by sending teens out with videocams (cell phones) to report back. Just a reminder: you can relieve stress, be part of the group that you feel closest to, leave with a pile of things that excite and delight you, and not spend a dime by visiting the library to “shop.”
2 comments:
I fell across this after reading Twitchell's book. I would just like to add that the defining characteristic of the book is that Twitchell immediately and repeatedly denounces all those who say that consumerism is fake (e.g. it is foisted on us and doesn't make us happy) and says that, in the reverse, consumerism is what we want and does make us happy.
He offers no evidence for these claims, and really ends up making the polar opposite case to the ones he has already derided - meaning that he falls prey to his own criticisms. There are plenty of examples of people who consume unhappily. There are plenty of exapmles of people who do not consume happily. He does not attempt to explain these (except to villify such people). While it must be accepted that many people do want to consume, he does not stop to consider whether people can want what is actually not in their best interests.
He ends up by buying an expensive car, saying that he enjoyed this consumerism and did it knowing fully well what was happening, yet says that now he wants to buy a new one. It is hard to figure out whether he really enjoyed the consumerism of buying a car or is saying he did for the book.
May I also add, further to my previous comment, that Twitchell argues elsewhere that materialism and consuming is better than religion ("The great con game when we had very few things was the promised pie in the sky", by which he means we used to suffer in poverty because we believed in God):
"Really, what's happened is that we've moved all those promises down here into this world. I don't know if this works or not. But who cares whether it works. We believe it works. We think things make us happy. My personal view is probably .0001 percent of that is true."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/16/twitchell2.html
Twitchell's defence of consuming and materialism is that, "hey, it's 0.0001 more truthful than religion". Not the sort of truthfulness quantity I expect to get from life.
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