Obedience To Corporate-State Authority Makes Consumer Society Increasingly Dangerous, By Yosef Brody

Obedience To Corporate-State Authority Makes Consumer Society Increasingly Dangerous, By Yosef Brody

Fifty years ago this month, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram published a groundbreaking article describing a unique human behavior experiment. The study and its many variations, while ethically controversial, gave us new insight into human tendencies to obey authority, surprising the experts and everyone else on just how susceptible we are to doing the bidding of others. The original experiment revealed that a majority of participants would dutifully administer increasingly severe electric shocks to strangers – up to and including potentially lethal doses – because an authority told them that pulling the levers was necessary and required (the “shocks,” subjects found out later, were fake). People who obeyed all the way to the end did so even as they experienced tremendous moral conflict. Despite their distress, they never questioned the basic premise of the situation that was fed to them: the institution needed their compliance for the betterment of the common good.

The Brief, Tragic Reign Of Consumerism—And The Birth Of A Happy Alternative, By Richard Heinberg

The Brief, Tragic Reign Of Consumerism—And The Birth Of A Happy Alternative, By Richard Heinberg

You and I consume; we are consumers. The global economy is set up to enable us to do what we innately want to do—buy, use, discard, and buy some more. If we do our job well, the economy thrives; if for some reason we fail at our task, the economy falters. The model of economic existence just described is reinforced in the business pages of every newspaper, and in the daily reportage of nearly every broadcast and web-based financial news service, and it has a familiar name: consumerism. Consumerism also has a history, but not a long one. True, humans—like all other animals—are consumers in the most basic sense, in that we must eat to live. Further, we have been making weapons, ornaments, clothing, utensils, toys, and musical instruments for thousands of years, and commerce has likewise been with us for untold millennia. What’s new is the project of organizing an entire society around the necessity for ever-increasing rates of personal consumption.

Celebrating Spiritual Death On Black Friday, By Coleen Rowley

Celebrating Spiritual Death On Black Friday, By Coleen Rowley

In fact, as we face individual and national bankruptcy, the malls have become for many Americans more a place to merely wander and lust than to actually buy. Large segments of the population have lost their jobs, health insurance and homes, and are so deeply in debt that when they surrender to the advertising-bred consumerist urge, they can only window shop, their credit cards rejected if they attempt to buy much of the stuff on display.

The Onion: Nation Down to Last 100 Grown-Ups; Mature Adults Could Be Gone Within 50 Years

The Onion: Nation Down to Last 100 Grown-Ups; Mature Adults Could Be Gone Within 50 Years

According to alarming new figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation’s population of mature adults has been pushed to the brink of extinction, with only 104 grown-ups remaining in the country today.

The endangered demographic, which is projected to die out completely by 2060, is reportedly distinguished from other groups by numerous unique traits, including foresight, rationality, understanding of how to obtain and pay for a mortgage, personal responsibility, and the ability to enter a store without immediately purchasing whatever items they see and desire.