The right to waste, privileged few, says he is free to all. This civilization does not let you sleep at flowers, or chickens, or the people. In greenhouses, the flowers are subjected to continuous light, to grow faster. In the factories of eggs, chickens are also prohibited night. And people are doomed to insomnia, anxiety, panic buying and paying.
The consumption boom in the modern world gets louder than all the wars and turmoil weapon all carnivals. As an old Turkish proverb, he who drinks on account, gets drunk twice.
The Clouds partying and looking stunning, this great universal drunkenness seem to be unlimited in time or space. But consumer culture sounds much like the drum, because it is empty, and the moment of truth, when the noise stops and the party is over, the drunk wakes up, alone, accompanied by his shadow and the pieces to be pay.
The expansion of demand collides with the boundaries imposed by the same system that generates it. The system needs more open markets and wider, like lungs need air, while requiring them to walk on the floor, and walk, the prices of raw materials and human labor. The system speaks name of all, all direct their orders compelling consumer disseminated to all shopping spree, but never mind: for almost all the adventure begins and ends at the TV screen. The majority, which borrows to have things, ends up with nothing but debts to pay off debts that generate new debts, and ends up consuming fantasies that sometimes materializes offenses.
The right to waste, privileged few, says he is free to all. Tell me how much you consume and tell you how much vouchers. This civilization does not let you sleep at flowers, or chickens, or the people. In greenhouses, the flowers are subjected to continuous light, to grow faster. In the factories eggs, chickens are also prohibited night. And people are doomed to insomnia, anxiety, panic buying and paying. This way of life is not very good for people, but it is very good for the pharmaceutical industry.
U.S. consumes half of sedatives, tranquilizers and other chemical drugs that are legally sold in the world, and more than half of illegal drugs being sold illegally, which is no small feat when you consider that U.S. is barely five percent of the world population.
"People unhappy, comparing the living," said a woman in the neighborhood of Diving, in Montevideo. The pain of no longer being, who once sang the tango, has left happened to the shame of not having. A poor man is a poor man. "When you've got nothing, you think you're nothing," says a boy in the neighborhood of Villa Fiorito, Buenos Aires. And one finds, in the Dominican city of San Francisco de Macoris, "My brothers work for brands. Buying live labels, and live sweating to pay fees. " Invisible
market violence: diversity is the enemy of profitability and consistency rules. The mass production on a gigantic scale, imposes mandatory everywhere their consumption patterns. This dictatorship of the compulsory uniform is more devastating than any single party dictatorship, imposed in world, a way of life that human beings reproduce copies of the consumer as exemplary.
The consumer sample is the quiet man. This civilization, which confuses quantity with quality, confounds body fat with good food. According to the Lancet, in the last decade "severe obesity" has grown nearly 30% among the young population of more developed countries. Among American children, obesity increased by 40% in the last sixteen years, according to recent research of the Center for Health Sciences at the University of Colorado. The country that invented light meals and drinks, the diet food and fat free foods, has the largest amount of fat in the world. The consumer copy down the car only to work and watch television. Sitting at the small screen, spends four hours a day eating plastic food. Triumph
trash disguised as food: the industry is winning the palates of the world and is tearing up the traditions of the local cuisine. The habits of eating well, who come from afar, have, in some countries, thousands of years of refinement and diversity, and are a collective heritage that is somehow in the kitchens of all, not just at the table of the rich. These traditions, such cultural identity, these celebrations of life are being overwhelmed, so explosive, by the imposition of chemical knowledge and unique: the globalization of the hamburger, the dictatorship of the fast food. The plasticization of the global food, the work of McDonald's, Burger King and other factories, successfully violates the right to self-determination in the kitchen: sacred right, because the mouth is the soul of its doors.
The world cup of 98 confirmed to us, among other things, that MasterCard tones muscles, the Coca-Cola gives eternal youth and the McDonald's menu is a must in the belly of a good athlete. The vast army of McDonald's hamburgers fires the mouths of children and adults in the entire planet. The double arch that served as the flagship M during the recent conquest of the countries of Eastern Europe. The lines at the McDonald's in Moscow, opened in 1990 with great fanfare, symbolized the victory of the West has so eloquently as the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
A sign of the times: the company, which embodies the virtues of the free world, denying its employees the freedom to join a union. McDonald's viola, and a legal right enshrined in many countries where it operates. In 1997, some workers, members of the company calls it the Macfamilia tried to unionize at a restaurant Montreal in Canada: the restaurant closed. But at 98 other McDonald's employees in a small town near Vancouver, managed this achievement, worthy of the Guinness Guide.
The consuming masses are ordered in a universal language: advertising has achieved what he wanted and could not Esperanto. Any means, anywhere, any message that the TV broadcast. In the last quarter century, advertising expenditures have doubled over the world. Thanks to them, poor children are increasingly taking Coca-Cola and less milk, and leisure time is becoming mandatory consumption. Leisure time, prisoner: very poor households have no bed, but have a television, and the TV has the floor. Bought on credit, that animal testing democratic vocation of progress: a one listens, but speaks for everyone. Rich and poor know well the virtues of late model cars, rich and poor and find out the favorable interest rate that a particular bank offers. Experts know
convert goods into magical sets against loneliness. Things have human attributes: stroke, with it, understand, help, perfume, kisses you and the car is the friend who never fails. The consumer culture has made the loneliness the most lucrative markets. The holes are filled with stuffing breast of things, or dreaming about it. And things can not only embrace, they can also be symbols of upward mobility, permits to pass through customs in the class society, keys that open the doors prohibited. The more exclusive the better, the things you choose and save you from the crowded anonymity. Advertising does not provide the product you sell, or rarely does. That's not important. Its primary function is to offset fuel frustrations and fantasies: Who do you turn this aftershave buying? Criminologist Anthony Platt
noted that street crimes are not only the result of extreme poverty. They are also the result of an individualistic ethic. Social obsession success, says Platt, a determining influence on the illegal appropriation of things. I've always heard that money does not produce happiness, but any poor viewer has every reason to believe that money makes something so similar that the difference is a matter for specialists.
According to historian Eric Hobsbawm, the twentieth century ended seven thousand years of human life centered on agriculture since the first crops came in the late Palaeolithic. The world population is urbanized, farmers become citizens. In Latin America we have huge fields and empty urban nests: the world's largest cities, and most unfair. Driven by modern agriculture export and the erosion of their land, peasants invaded the suburbs. They believe that God is everywhere, but know from experience serving in large cities. The cities promise employment, prosperity, a future for their children. In the fields, the expected life look pass, and die yawning, in cities, life happens, and flame. In overcrowded slums, the first thing newcomers discover is that the work needed and arms left over, that nothing is free and the most expensive luxury items are the air and silence. While
XIV century was born, Friar Giordano da Rivalto Florence gave a eulogy to the cities. He said the cities were growing "because people have a taste to join. " Together, they found. Now who is who? Is the hope with reality? The desire, are you with the world? And people, are you with people? If human relations are reduced to relations between things, how many people are with things?
The world tends to become a big screen television, where things look but not touch. The goods on offer invade and privatized public spaces. The bus and train operators, who until recently were meeting spaces for people, are now becoming commercial exhibition spaces.
The shopping center, or shopping mall, all the stained glass window, imposes its overwhelming presence. The crowds flock in pilgrimage to this temple of the mass consumption. Most devotees provides, in ecstasy, things that can not pay their pockets, while the minority buyer is subjected to incessant bombardment of supply and exhausting. The crowd, which goes up and down the escalators, travels the world: the mannequins dressed as Milan or Paris, the machines sound like in Chicago, and to see and hear is not necessary to pay a fare. The tourists from the inland towns or cities that still have not received these blessings of modern happiness, pose for a photo, the foot of the famous international brands, as previously rested at the foot of the statue of the hero in the square. Beatriz Solano has been observed that the inhabitants of the suburbs come to the center, the shopping center, came to the center as before. The traditional weekend drive to the center of the city, tends to be replaced by a trip to these urban centers. Washed and ironed and hair, dressed in their finery, visitors come to a party where there are guests, but can be voyeurs. Entire families undertake the journey in the space capsule that covers the consumer world, where the aesthetics of the market has designed an amazing landscape of models, brands and labels.
The culture of consumption, culture of the ephemeral, condemns the media obsolete. Everything changes fast-paced fashion, in the service of the need to sell. Things grow old in a blink, to be replaced by other things fleeting life. Now that all that remains is the uncertainty, the goods manufactured not to last, are as volatile as the capital that finances and the work that generates them. The money flies at the speed of light: I was there yesterday, today is here, tomorrow who knows, and every worker is unemployed and power. Paradoxically, shopping centers, kingdoms of transience, offer the most successful illusion of safety. They resist timeless, ageless and without roots, without night and no day and no memory, and exist outside of space, beyond the turmoil of the dangerous reality of the world.
owners worldwide use the world as if it were disposable, short-lived goods, which is exhausted as exhaust, soon after birth, the gun shoots images of television and fashion and advertising idols launches , relentlessly, to the market. But, what other world going to move? Do we all have to believe us the story that God has sold the planet to a few companies, because being in a bad mood decided to privatize the universe? The consumer society is a booby trap. Handle those simulated ignore it, but anyone with eyes in his head can see that the vast majority of people consume little bit and nothing necessarily to ensure the existence of the little nature that remains. Social injustice is not an error to be corrected, or overcome a defect: it is an essential need. There is a nature capable of feeding a shopping center the size of the planet.
Francis Bacon: Portrait of Innocent X after Velazquez 
Societat de consum / photomontage Josep Renau. 
