/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14265814]

Any books about why consumerism is actually a good thing? I'm tired of seeing the same default ''smart'' midwit opinions about ''muh authenticity'' repackaged and bandied about.

[Anonymous No.14265826]

>>14265814
Why would consumerism be a good thing?
You could write a book about it being good. But it would be a shitty book, since consumerism is not a good thing.

The same for promiscuity. Plenty of books supporting that shit. But they are shitty ones.

[Anonymous No.14265858]

>>14265826
Consumption is a reflection of production, and buying useless things drives the economy. Increased productivity raises the standard of living.

[Anonymous No.14266783]

>>14265858
you could also argue that anyone smart will see through the facade anyway and be free to pursue actually worthy goals and dumb people will be dumb anyway, so at least they can improve the economy while being dumb

[Anonymous No.14266853]

>>14265814
The search for authenticity is actually one of the main pillars of consumerism, in which one finds self-actualization and self-differentiation through consumption. Watch the documentary The Century of Self, you might like it, and it would give you a lot to think about.

[Anonymous No.14266889]

>>14265858
Read Steven Pinker. He speaks to the godless materialist heathens such as yourself.

[Anonymous No.14267160]

>contributes to destruction of environment
>leads to people basing their identities and self worth on external objects
>has only made people physically comfortable, not emotionally healthy

you're looking for arguments cause you're retarded and know your position is indefensible outside of short sighted growth and population metrics

[Anonymous No.14267235]

>>14265814

Exchange of goods for consumption enables parties to survive. That's all.

Consumerism on the mass scale that we know of today, well, I can hardly think of any good arguments for. Perhaps something along the lines of demand for garbage produced by third world sweat shops provides the "opportunity" of disenfranchised youth in those countries an alternative to being child sex slaves. So it's either choose between working in conditions much like that of 19th century US workers' conditions or getting absolutely JUST'd by a thick cock. The silver lining is there depending on how far you're willing to go to justify a non-utopian outcome.

[Anonymous No.14267277]

>>14265858
So you're just a neoliberal idiot.

[Anonymous No.14267298]

>>14265814
Why does consumerism need defending? It's not like anything is going to replace it within our lifetimes.

[Anonymous No.14267301]

>>14265814
OP's a faggot. Post literature on why consumerism is obviously bad.

[Anonymous No.14267303]

>>14266889
Read Cowen. It's not about the material

[Anonymous No.14267334]

Marx, I guess? Insofar as creating needs for ourselves is what makes us free (a sentiment coming, at root from Rousseau and the rest of the Liberal tradition). It's just that it also makes us unfree.

[Anonymous No.14268911]

>>14267160
>contributes to destruction of environment
That's been the price for our high living standard.
>>14267277
Economic growth being the keystone to improving the standard of living is simple fact. I know this, you know this. How do I know you know? Because if you were behind the veil of ignorance, you wouldn't choose to be born in the 19th century.

[Anonymous No.14268932]

>>14265858
>standard of living
How do you measure this? You're dangerously close to the ridiculous reasoning of "Increasing consumerism is good because it increases consumerism".

[Anonymous No.14268933]

>>14265858
is this your brain on econ

[Anonymous No.14268935]

>>14268911
>Rawls
cringe

[Anonymous No.14268936]

>>14268911
>veil of ignorance
lol

[Anonymous No.14268954]

>>14268932
Life expectancy, access to education, quality of healthcare, poverty rate, leisure time etc. When I say Germany has a higher living standard than Uganda, instinctively you should know the kind of things I'm talking about.
>>14268935
>>14268936
Just a tool in this case, I don't care about Rawls otherwise. The point still remains: if you didn't know which percentile you'd be born into, it would be madness to pick say 1892, while if you picked 1993 you could be reasonably sure your life wouldn't be nasty, brutish, and short.

[Anonymous No.14268986]

>>14268954
We would have much more leisure time if we produced and consumed less. We might well be healthier for it. The production of pickle rick dildos is not necessary to provide for the production of heart monitors or school textbooks. The aim of production is consumption, yes, but production can be driven by more than consumerist impulses - one consumes medicine to become better, but that doesn't make them a consumer of medicine. If anything, consumerism is just a testament to how poorly we organize our limited resources. Every pickle rick dildo produced is oil we can't use to fuel ambulances or plastic we can't use to make cheap laptops for high schools, every worker in the factory that produces them is a worker not being turned to manufacturing beds for old-aged care homes. It's good for China that we ask them to produce useless crap, but we could be turning our own resources to much more useful production.

Imagine if economic growth was driven by building houses rather than by consuming funko pops. You would solve the real problem of home ownership being a farcical dream for many people while getting hundreds of thousands of people out of unemployment and into productive work. Run out of necessary houses? Time to refurbish the old ones to be more environmentally friendly. Run out of all that? Well, good thing there's an old aged care crisis. There are so many opportunities to drive economic growth through productive work that a consumption-lead approach is unnecessary. Even if our concern isn't for westerners but for people in the developed world, the workers in the chinese funko pop factory can (relatively) easily be moved over to the window factory instead.