A few excellent excerpts from an essay by Wendell Berry on consumerism and how it affects society. Worth your time."When mind predominates by the satanic principles of rebellion and division, then the individual is 'liberated''; all of his or her wants and wishes are made equal to any other wants and wishes and assume the status of legitimate values or goals. The usefulness of this state of affairs to an economy based on consumption is obvious....For the present economy to thrive or even survive, it is necessary for the great majority of the people to have exorbitant or inordinate wants, to expect to get what they want, and to feel that they have a 'right' to get it....this remorseless wanting cannot be confined to the 'marketplace'; it is a general disorder, not anarchic but chaotic.
"All this, of course, lies between the bridegroom and the bride. The economy 'grows' upon the destruction of marriages, families, and households - the physical pursuit of sexual fantasy being one of the recognized driving forces of the market....
"What it does immediately is pull down and shatter the hierarchies both of creatures and of values, and this cannot happen without producing a state of profound disorder...If all the kinds were equal, all places would be in dispute, to be contended for....
"Nothing is then worth as much as what may replace it: spouse or household or public building or work of art or farm or wilderness....any given thing is the first of a series of increasingly better things....Though this process of rebellion and division will always claim the goals of personal liberation and self-fulfillment, its ultimate value is money value and its ultimate power is police power."
- Poetry and Place, pgs 179-181
You're dreamy. --C.
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