Hi all MD survivors...
Although I like to debate on politics, I would refrain from doing so in a mailing
list as long as it is offtopic. Of course everyone has his/her own opinions,
usually strongly felt, and you will have debate if you cause it by making any
political statement. But there are other places in cyberspace for purely
political discussion. With that, I welcome political issues when they are
relevant to the subject of interest of the group where they are raised.
So, speaking of Quality...
Apart from the message that david posted by mistake, his points are related to
Quality, and I liked the post. I think there are two main points that are related
to the consumerism-quality interplay.
First, consumerism is about making people buy as many things as possible, and to
make people pay as much as possible for them. Since the western way has been good
enough at satisfying people's basic needs, consumerism needs to create new needs
to sell more. On one hand, it has been providing new useful things via
technology, thus increasing the overall quality of life. On the other hand, it
has undoubtedly made large use of any means to let people think they needed
things they didn't need, and to let people think that some products had more
value than they really had. Foremost among all these means is advertising,
especially via TV. To make people buy things, advertisers have certainly used
some of the people's pre-existing attitudes and inclinations, but they also
empowered them. Although everyone wants to be sexy, wealthy, cool, media are
ultimately sending the message that you are a valuable person only as long as you
are sexy, wealthy, young, thin, and so on. Of course people need not believe what
the media say, but this is what advertising necessarily says: if you think of it,
that's just in its nature. The most powerful weapon to make people need something
is convincing them that their lives will have no value if they don't have that
thing - instill in them the *fear* of not having that thing. Consumerism is
interested in people seeing quality in things, not in themselves, their culture,
their beliefs, their morality: just the things; or in some personal
characteristic that can be improved via buyable things (eg, looks). All the rest
is, at least, irrelevant to ad makers. If you add to this that TV and related
media are the basic source from which people nowadays get the idea of what life
is, having long and far overtool books, school, and other less profit-driven
sources, I think here you have a serious issue about quality today.
As a second point, big companies flourishing in the market too often exhibit a
clearly identifiable immoral behavior. I *don't* think this is inherent to
capitalism, or at least, I'm not sure; honestly. Anyway, you have the facts. You
have the damages to the environment, done either directly (polluting factories,
uncontrolled use of the planet's non-replaceable resources) and indirectly: if
buying and using some product causes some damage (e.g., current car engines, both
polluting and oil-consuming), big companies that want to keep selling these
products are sometimes powerful enough to convince people to go on buying and
using the dangerous product. The same holds for products that cause damage to
health, like cigarettes. It's not that companies own the world and will not let
the truth through. But still, you will have someone speak on TV about the danger
of this or that *and* some dozens of explicit and implicit advertisings that
depict use of this product as something usual, necessary, cool, sexy, ... non
problematic. I think this causes an attitude that you can easily detect in the
average smoker: knowing something is bad and at the same time shrug his/her
shoulders and say, "but, that's the way it is".
Some of the posts that defended capitalism and free market just made just a side
note on environmental damage. That's ok, you don't need to believe that the evil
is in capitalism. But there *is* evil somewhere, and definitely something as
dramatic as to bring low quality in all the levels of the MOQ at once. I think
you can easily find how the word "pollution" applies to each of the levels.
In perspective, about the two quality issues above, the worst is probably the
second. Having people waste their money (hence part of their lifetimes) is
immoral, and even if people are inclined to waste their money because humans are
humans, empowering this attitude and making money on it is still immoral. Perhaps
even more immoral is to have people destroy the environment, or close their eyes
and ears before the destruction of the environment. Even if they are inclined to
do so, making it easier for them is *highly* immoral. In both cases: purposedly
manipulating the notion of quality of people, as consumerism is doing, is
immoral; whether this is inherent to consumerism or just an evil course
consumerism has taken and that can be changed it is still immoral, and, I think,
right on topic for this forum.
Just let's not make this a fight between left and right... After all I too agree
with Nunzio, I am perfectly sure everyone has his/her own reasons to be on one
side and hate the other, and from a higher perspective you would see we are all
partly right and partly wrong in our own ways. I'm sure there's no Hitlers nor
Stalins nor Belzebubs posting on this forum too.
Be well all
AS
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