nightcats's Journal: Seed of Decline: The Gospel of Consumption

Orion Magazine features a piece on the rise of consumer society in the context of a distortion of the meaning and use of labor-saving devices. It explains a great deal of what we're dealing with today in both our workplaces and our communities:

Today "work and more work" is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but "higher productivity"--and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.