Posted by backseatdriver on August 28, 2009, at 14:21:56
In reply to Re: Do you care how your T spends money?, posted by emilyp on August 27, 2009, at 16:13:57
I think the big problems for me are, in order, irresponsible consumption (which means one thing to me and possibly, even inevitably, something else to others), and ostentation, defined as the purchase and display of big-ticket high-end consumer goods (this is the lexus-in-the-parking-lot thing).
Ostentation is a subclass of irresponsible consumption in my book. bell hooks writes eloquently about this in "Class Matters" but my less elegant take on it is that ostentatious consumption adds to the general level of envy and is socially divisive for that reason. To that, I'd also add the existential critique (a la the novelist Walker Percy) that consumer goods are advertised as objects whose purchase will make you feel like Somebody, and this is misleading, because it is only other people who can assuage the pain of feeling like Nobody and Anybody (endemic to our society).
BSD
poster:backseatdriver
thread:913629
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090730/msgs/914541.html