[lbo-talk] Re: lefties, fullfilment

[Mark S]

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>Tom Walker wrote:
>
>>Has it occurred to anyone that the putative Calvinist leftist's "lust for 
>>suffering" may simply be a form of conspicuous consumption (or in this 
>>case conspicuous unconsumption) that performs or is intended to perform 
>>the same status function that much consumption of wealth performs, once we 
>>move a way from literalist interpretations of utility?
>
>It's occurred to me, but you put it better.

Futurist Watts Wacker was onto this a while ago.  He has a number of 
thoughts on the issue (below).  Unlike Wacker, I can't imagine mimetic 
desire disappearing.  Some men will work 70-hour weeks to get their hands on 
one desirable thing or another...

M.

Quotes from "The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next."

Generation X has powerful subsidiary values.  Its very uncertainty about its 
economic future is helping to turn the fear of downward mobility into the 
virtue of downward nobility, and the rise of downward nobility – the desire 
not for many things but a few good things – will drive consumerism in the 
years immediately ahead. ...

As the marketplace drives toward a supersaturation of products, scarcity 
disappears, and with it status orientation.  As mass culture breaks up into, 
in effect, hundreds of millions of individual realities, there can be no 
shared assumptions of what is enviable to own.

… “privilege” implies conspicuous consumption when it is inconspicuous 
consumption, stealth wealth, and downward nobility that are helping to drive 
the dynamic of the marketplace today.

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