Can you hear Pavlov's bell striking in the distance?

We don't like to admit it, of course we don't. We've got a fair reason not to.

The feeling that we're controlled by anyone but ourselves isn't comforting.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to shake that feeling for some time now. Are my thoughts my own? I used to think so but I can't be sure anymore. After an unfortunate experience involving Krispy Kremes (a long strange story likely more suited to the epic style of Roman poetry than a blog post) I've watched my habits with some alarm.

The consumerist society we live in plays us like fiddles, you may have just never noticed before.

As if from afar I can see my bad habits controlling me. Ask yourself this - when you go to a cinema, do you buy junk food? Yes? Then ask yourself this - did you actually have a desire for that junk food? The actual food itself? Or is it just a habit - a motion you go through every time you go to see that big screen?

Can you hear Pavlov's bell striking in the distance?

Consumerist society has already won. The world is no longer tailored to your actual needs, nor your actual desires, but instead to those that the corporations and the entities favour, to the ones that can help them reach the highest level of profit. The economic policies that society places upon you, from birth, is that of consumption, where we literally reach a point where we equate one's own happiness with material possessions. Such things shouldn't happen - consumerism shouldn't be able to rob us.

The fact that they rob us through a conditioned response rather than forcefully taking from our wallets makes no difference.

Such is the hidden state of society where having been unknowingly subjugated from birth we have never been able to see the elephant in the room. To us the elephant has been there as long as the room itself, and who are you to question where the elephant begins and the wall ends?

Conspicuous consumption
In The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen wrote of something he called conspicuous consumption, a term he used to describe the excessive spending on goods and services that are of no greater purpose than attaining or maintaining social status. One of his examples were the use of silver utensils at meals, even though utensils made of cheaper material worked just as well or, in some cases, better. This has continued in much the same way over a hundred years later, where cars which serve no greater purpose than getting from A to B have become examples of social status and wealth, costing tens of thousands of dollars more than an equivalent counterpart that performs the exact same job. Conspicuous consumption has been crafted by the expectations and assumptions of society rather than the needs or desires of the individuals the society is comprised of.

Consumerist society has an incentive to cheat us.

Consumerist society doesn't want to pass on to you the cost benefits of the latest upgrade in technology - if they can keep you paying the same price as before, they will. You can see this in the telecommunications industry, where the cost to the user of sending an SMS is hundreds of times the actual cost, and the price is retained at that artificial level to boost their profit margins. These same trends will continue, with the benefit stolen from consumers, until there is a massive refactoring of society as a whole.

That's it for my rant tonight, though I do need to make a bit of an addendum about the Internet and Consumerism =]

Humbly refusing the placebos of society,
Smerity