Introduction The So-called Consumer Society
“The more I consume, the better I feel”: this is the main idea – often criticized – behind consumerism, portraying increases in consumption as an economic benefit for companies.
It means achieving happiness through the uncontrolled purchasing of products, without any awareness of the consequences, this may have on natural resources and the balance of the environment.
The term “consumer society” can be phrased more specifically as the “industrial and commercial society of coerced consumption”. It is a society that endlessly creates “needs”, mostly artificially, to consume. Purchases are both the reasons to consume and ends in themselves. By being taken in by the temptations and lures generated by marketing, biting on the hook, exposed to the excitement generated by ad campaigns, consumer/users are rather fragile and vulnerable, lacking any real way to defend themselves.
It is not surprising that the use of gadgetry, mismanagement, waste, all the unnecessary products, luxury products, fashion and the vast swaths of “similar but different” products remain the engines of the so-called consumer society.
Consumption, with money as its king, makes it possible to distinguish oneself. In this system, economic agents believe themselves to be reasonable and to respond to a Cartesian logic. They assume that they have all the relevant information to make their choices. Modernization and new products must be organized quickly in order to expand ...