Below are 5 quotes related to Consumerism:

I chose them because they reflect the kind of apparently lunatic ravings that I have been making in this class regarding our facile sacrificing of the sacred for the sake of the expedient.

For the large part, I think such ravings have had little impact and therefore to re-enforce the notion I have given you something to think about and to realize that your professor is not the only lunatic out there.

Your small table assignment is

a) Of the five quotes below select the one that best describes our situation and be prepared to defend that selection. I have omitted the person of the quotes since I don't want that to bias you. Read the words - which quote do you think best describes the situation.

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in". In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us...And this is understandable given the workings of our system where without a job we perish, where if we don't want a job and are happy to get by we are labeled irresponsible, non-contributing leeches on society. But if we hire a fleet of bulldozers, tear up half the countryside and build some monstrous factory, casino or mall, we are called entrepreneurs, job-creators, stalwarts of the community. Maybe we should all be shut away on some planet for the insane. Then again, maybe that is where we are.

On the way from the Renaissance to our [present] days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life