The Will to Consume: Schopenhauer and Consumer Society |
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Authors: | Ryan Gunderson |
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Affiliation: | Department of Sociology and Gerontology, Miami University, USA |
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Abstract: | Consumer society has negated Freud's thesis presented in Civilization and its Discontents. The hindrance of desire affirmation is no longer the foundation of discontent. The inverse is now true. A seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured and administered with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer society's members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, disappointment and boredom. I demonstrate that the attempt to flee the sufferings of estranged labour through consumption has pushed consumer society into a new web of suffering brought on by a continual development of manufactured desires, creating a minor yet perpetual pain that is best understood in the light of a sociologized and historicized Schopenhauerian philosophy. |
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Keywords: | critical theory sociology of consumption consumerism marketing pessimism Max Horkheimer Erich Fromm |
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