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2006-03-19 - 1:41 p.m.

Some thoughts on an essay by George Ritzer called "The New Means of Comsumption.

The nature of a capitalist system is to keep finding ways to create a type of surplus value, to keep the thing going. To tag a product or service with a a value and sell it or trade it for a value that is more than it took to create the product, is to create a surplus. Advertising, slogans, forms of deception are vital to the system. To create a sense of lack in the potential consumer, the target system, or to suggest some sense of wholeness will come with the next purchase, the promise of fullfillment.

It leaves me to wonder if capitalism would have ever found much success in a society where the world-view was not dominated by Christian tendencies to jump to conclusions about following the right diet to get into heaven, God as center etc. The types of attitudes which seem innocent enough but are very destructive.

Capitalism seems to have found a way to entrench itself further, like any other beautiful life system, to reproduce itself. By it's very nature, it creates the types of individuals who will suckle from the necessary milk.

In western societies with rising divorce rates, with mothers who are unable to nurture the modern infant, the infant will spend the rest of its life with a psychology that is competative and achievement oriented. The achievement of the next transitional object in the shopping mall, the next position in the job. The mother waits with her caresses.

Morris Berman talks about the devolpment of children in different societies in "The Reenchantment of the World." In Bali, where the infants are not separated from their mothers, and members of the community often hold the young, the young grow up with a more fully integrated ego, not seeing themselves as being so separate from the natural world. In Jewish farm experiments where the community cares for the young, they grow up to be adults with a flat affect who would not likely be successful in a capitalist society.

Ritzer says that beyond just exploitation of the worker, now exploitation has spread to the consumer as well.

The other day, I was at Starbucks. A line of about 15 cars in the drive-thru. Nobody was inside. In an age when it has become more comfortable and normal to associate with people online, on telephones, it is frightening to have to present the self the hipster behind the counter.

Going through the drive-threw, the consumer is his own janitor, his own waiter.

Shopping kiosks, self-checkout, automated phone services and how many other forms of do it yourself systems?

Social security is in jeopardy. Poor people should not work together, if your elderly grandfather is starving, it's b/c he made some bad investments. Executives work together, not you and your own family!

The taco is a copy of a copy, it bears little resemblance to it ancestors. Like a credit it card, it represents the representation.

One of the funnier parts of the article is when he says we have all gotten used to eating Chicken McNuggets and then we see a real chicken and think "How could that chicken have the temerity to have gristle, bones and tendons, yuck."

Yesterday at a Chinese wedding I was talking to a German lady who grew up on a farm. She said that when her mother threatened to ring her neck, she took that threat quite seriously. She said the first time she remembers going to a grocery store, she didn't know what to make of that translucent bumpy thing hanging down. "Where are the feathers?" she asked her mother.

 

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