8.4.25

Ego and soul: a sociology of the modern west in the search of meaning John Carroll

 

The ethos of this society proclaims: if you feel bad, eat!... The consumerist reflex is melancholic, supposing that malaise takes from of feeling empty, cold, flat - in need of filling up warm, rich, vital things. Of course it need not be food, as in what made The Beatles "feel happy inside". Gorging is the path to salvation - consume and feel good! There is equally the restlessness, the mania for constant change, movement, difference - to sit still is to die... Consumerism is thus the social analogue to the psychopathology of depression, with its twin clashing symptoms of enervation and inability to sleep.