Mindless Consumerism Quotes

What seems worst of all, though, is that even the leaders don't recognize this. The greatest danger of the whole mess is that all this Western-American conditioning has been on autopilot for centuries. Nobody is in control of it anymore. It's a mindless goliath wandering the Earth, devouring lives, erasing potential, and following its every whim—regardless of how irrational, obscene, uneducated, enslaving, or backwards its actions are. The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

If we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we're at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).

Midnighter: I told you this wasn't going to end well... Bendix: ...but...I did what you...what the Authority...never could...fixed earth... Midnighter: No. You just gave them peace through corporate control and ignorance... through mindless consumerism. Bendix: Bulls*%t! The air is clean...no wars...people are happier...you can't deny...it's a finer world.

Thoughtful reflection has been replaced with mindless games and digital consumerism.

Democracy is popular because of the illusion of choice and participation it provides, but when you live in a society in which most people’s knowledge of the world extends as far as sports, sitcoms, reality shows, and celebrity gossip, democracy becomes a very dangerous idea. Until people are properly educated and informed, instead of indoctrinated to be ignorant mindless consumers, democracy is nothing more than a clever tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the rest of us.

In the wake of the country’s newfound wealth, a religion of consumerism had spurred a mindless pursuit for greater corporate profits. This greed-fueled race eventually led to companies sending millions of manufacturing jobs overseas, resulting in the decline of the cherished middle class who made their living making things. For the first time, America’s children were looking at a lower standard of living than their parents. Corporate profit and material possessions were the new idolatry, shoving God’s message of ‘love thy neighbor’ into a dusty corner.

Who amongst us can claim true satisfaction from living a hedonistic lifestyle? Why I loathe myself with sufficient fury to dream of murdering myself is no great mystery. Making a pact with the devil’s henchmen, I callously plodded along tackling one superficial milepost after another, conquering thinly guised goals that reek of greediness and self-indulgence, all in a futile effort to stave off the inevitability of my doom. My professional work was devoted to promoting the private agenda of clients with ample cash to spare. I spent free time shopping for baubles. Similar to other Americans caught up in securing acquisitions and escaping through mindless recreational activities, shopping and pleasure seeking was my mantra.

The G.R. wasn’t big on spelling out its creed; it had no priests or ministers, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction. It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing improvisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms—no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable.

These models will recognize the inter-connectedness of all things, turning away from the mindless materialism and consumerism that has destroyed the ecological capital on which we rely.

These two trends - the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture - have an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up. I've always taken solace in this dynamic. It means that while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can't fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you've thrown out the packaging for that new pair of sneakers, that latest model iPhone, or whatever the surrogate is. Then you have to find a way to fulfill the void again. It's the perfect formula for endless consumption and perpetual self-commodification through social media, and it's a disaster for the planet, which cannot sustain these levels of consumption. But it's always worth remembering: at the heart of this cycle is that very powerful force - the human longing for community and connection, which simply refuses to die., And that means there is still hope: if we rebuild communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism.

In the post-World War II era in the United States the shape of the cultural landscape has configured the self of the middle and upper classes into a particular kind of masterful, bounded self: the empty self. By this I mean a self that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning—a self that experiences these social absences and their consequences “interiorly” as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger. It is this undifferentiated hunger that has provided the motivation for the mindless, wasteful consumerism of the late twentieth century. The post-World War II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost, and unknowingly it fuels the new consumer-orientated economy: the self is empty, and it strives, desperately, to be filled up.

I am not on a mission that involves preaching doomsday. Yes, there are definitely a lot of pollution-based problems in the world. And, yes, we most certainly need to change our consumption and production ways radically in order to stop ongoing climate change, inequality, and mindless consumption. But I think that one of the many reasons this “turning things around” is so hard is that the way we are being told to change things is lecture-based and fear driven.

The way Richie saw it, something had happened to mainstream music during the post-grunge phase of the ’90s and so far this year’s releases had been the most vapid of the lot, save for a few that maybe had some artistic expression if you listened hard enough (and excluding the Chili Peppers record, which ruled). Corporate major labels and MTV had joined forces in a union of evil to destroy all semblance of art from the world and churn the charred remains—not art anymore but products—through a dollar factory of unfettered capitalism, squeezing out the big bucks as quickly as possible before the whole crazy ride comes to a screaming, bloody end. Which it would. All of this would come to a tragic end; the whole western world had gone mad, taking mindless consumerism to dizzying new heights as most of the East scrambled to get in on the action. Meanwhile, people like him and Alabama slip through the cracks and no one in this apathetic hellhole gives a shit, too busy patching over the vacancies of their lives in desperate attempts to forget the dreams they abandoned when they sold out to the machine. Of course he and Alabama were junkies. Of course they were thieves. What choice did they have when you got right—right—down to it? Their fates had been sealed when society had set itself upon this dark path, and there would be many more Richies and Alabamas to come so long as it stayed the course.

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation—our sense of “higher” and “lower.” It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality.

Those in power love it when we hold on to our fake optimism year after year, instead of revolting against these worn out celebrations. They love it when they see millions of mindless consumers storming stores to buy and consume more shiny and glittering gifts, as if they are genuine signs of loving and caring for each other. They love it when we keep quiet and do business as usual while ‘hoping for a better new year.’ So, let’s declare it loud and clear: We are not happy! Also, there is nothing new with these traditional celebrations hijacked by businessmen who have reduced them into nothing more than an excuse for consuming goods.

Liberalism is an ideology created by capitalists to maximize capitalist profits. Consumer capitalism demands free trade, borderless nations, weak government, a small State, liberal attitudes, low taxes, political correctness, and multiculturalism. Consumer capitalism opposes anything that gets in the way of maximum free trade. It hates regulation, laws, rules, taxes, nationalism, protectionism, religious or political controls. It wants the world to be one big marketplace with no values, no causes, no principles, nothing at all to obstruct the fullest degree of mindless consumption. Consumer capitalism produced the modern crisis of immigration and multiculturalism. These have nothing at all to do with the left wing. If the right wing predatory capitalists had the slightest shred of intellectual integrity, they would blame themselves for all of the world’s ills. Instead, they have created a fake, fabricated enemy called “Cultural Marxism” on which to heap culpability.

Consumerism is not bad, but reckless and mindless consumerism is not just bad, but downright injurious to the health of not just the individual, but of the entire society.