The consumer society and its antilove essence. E. Pushkarev
Google Translate Automated Translation - Original Text
Question from the Internet
The principle underlying capitalist society and the principle of love are incompatible.
E. Fromm
Love is so distorted, profaned and vulgarized in fallen human life that it has become almost impossible to pronounce the words of love, new words must be found.
N. Berdyaev
One of the names for modern capitalism is "consumer society".
They also wrote about the consumer society and its anti-loving essence:
F. Engels believed that the moral and ethical norms of bourgeois society so disfigure the person that she loses the ability to love ...
"Superstitions and the truth of love." 19th century philosopher M.O. Menshikov
"On the destructive influence of the" consumer society "on sexual love." E. Fromm
"New European idea of love." Doctor of Philosophy V.M. Rosin
"Modern love". (1950) P.A. Sorokin
And also:
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard examined the essence of consumer society in a work of the same name in the late 60s. Since then, this model of capitalism in the West has reached "new heights", but since Russia with some delay returned to the capitalist path of development, its analytical studies are relevant for us today.
The key concept of social structure - happiness - Baudrillard considers as an absolutized principle of a consumer society. Endowing happiness with quantitative characteristics measured through the attributes of social differentiation, he sees it as the basis of modern democracy, the meaning of which boils down to the equality of all people before the signs of success, prosperity, etc. In other words, the consumer value of goods is absolute and does not depend on a particular person ... In modern civilization, there is no rational consumer who independently makes his choice. The individual choice, dictated by real needs, is illusory - it is dictated by the very structure of the consumer society, which attaches importance not to objects, but to abstract values identical to signs alienated from them. Needs are produced together with goods that satisfy them. The choice of a product is based on the desire for social difference, and since the support of such differences is a vital condition for the existence of modern civilization, the need always remains unsatisfied. Social security, "happiness" become imperatives of a consumer society, which does not encourage passivity and frugality, since they are followed by a loss of consumer ability.
Psychotherapist A. Kurpatov
The consumer society turns a person into a biological being for the processing of ever-increasing and improving products and services, and the boundaries of the norm have long been passed. In psychology, they even invented a new direction - NLP on the scientific imposition (vparivanie) of products and services and called the "method of successful sales." In politics, this is also called political technologies. When the consumer society was still in its infancy, the principle worked: with good advertising, even a dead rat could be sold. Now more sophisticated and glamorous scientific methods are in operation to deceive the critical functions of consciousness and impose on the average person, on a subconscious level, whatever the advertiser wants.
We're not talking about marijuana smokers, cocaine addicts, bourbon addicts, smokers or caffeine addicts. We use these substances for a variety of reasons, including to cope with love (whether we want it and don't have it, have it but don't want it, or try to cope with its loss). Many people use substances, especially alcohol, to enhance the quality of their social experience. Young ravers and partygoers use methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as ecstasy, which gives them a sense of belonging and friendship with those who dance next to the glow sticks in their hands. In part, ecstasy does this because it stimulates the release of oxytocin and dopamine.
L. Young, B. Alexander “The Chemistry of Love. A scientific view of love, sex and attraction " The book is in our library "Love, family, sex and about ..."
There is a useful product potatoes. Cooks process it for a long time with additives of no less useful products, as a result, chips are obtained, which are called junk food, forbidden for children. After that, the children willingly overcome all these prohibitions.
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reports that a team of experts led by Eric Stice has found that huge amounts of milk shakes consumed by children are extremely harmful . They contain a loading dose of sugar and fat. One serving of a milkshake contains the daily calorie intake for an adult, and also three times the daily fat intake. It turned out that the child's body reacts to such drinks as drugs. The huge doses of sugar present in them stimulate the pleasure center. This mixture is a direct path to obesity.
And obesity is a separate story altogether. According to a report by the Overseas Development Institute, from 1980 to 2008, the number of obese citizens tripled, reaching the billion mark. Dr. Ravi Retnakaran: "Our evidence suggests that metabolic patients, like non-metabolic patients who are overweight, are in the same risk group and are more likely to die from cardiovascular disease." Scientists from the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto found that being overweight invariably led to the occurrence of certain cardiovascular diseases when followed for more than 10 years.
The list of junk food, drinks and services is constantly expanding, becoming more and more attractive.
Hygiene is an important branch of medicine, but as a result of its immoderate imposition, a whole group of diseases “diseases of excessive hygiene” has appeared. Doctors as an integral part of the consumer society, what's the difference from what to treat: lack of hygiene or its excess, as long as they get paid.
It's like two laboratories work tirelessly: one creates and launches viruses on the network, and next to another creates antivirus programs and sells them. Previously, both were done in the same laboratory, by the same specialists, but as studies have shown, when this is done in different laboratories, the efficiency is higher.
At first, bankers invented "toxic loans", they liked it because it is profitable for bankers. They invented "toxic love" - everything is good that makes a profit.
Alessandra Baduel, who has researched women's novels, writes: "Romanticism and a happy ending in women's novels create dangerous illusions, and women lose touch with reality."
"Ladies' novels harm married couples, sexuality, numerous women who read them, fall into illusions, dream, stay in anticipation of sensual experiences and end up not accepting prosaic reality, destroying love relationships with their own hands. they turn off common sense and chase romance, "writes the famous British psychologist Susan Quilliam.
“Virtual prostitution on the Internet is in vogue. Many women, being married, go to the Internet panel at night to entice hundreds of their fans. Recently I had a reception with a man who could not understand how to relate to these .. virtual intimacy of his wife. What can I say? ...".
Associate Professor, Ph.D. Ramil Garifullin.
Letter to the Club: "Hello everyone! My story is about an unhappy love. About an unhappy one because I fell in love with a young man, communicating on the Internet. We both have families and children. We have been communicating for a year and a half, almost every day. A lot there was everything .... both joy and disappointment.
Everything has already mixed up, real life seems unreal, as if it is a period of time that we are trying to live as quickly as possible, striving and hurrying to something ... We cannot meet, since we live in different countries ... but we still found each other, despite the distance. How to be now? How to return the normal flow of time? How to learn to live real life in real life without looking at the virtual one ???? I know that we will not be together, but I cannot stop ...".
Oxi.
“Wedding as a one-time event, loyalty as an indisputable value - this is the centuries-old position of the Christian society. The modern world uses other ideas, in particular the one that love lasts for three years. This is a very market-oriented attitude, it doesn't just allow you to leave your partner after three years, it just obliges you to do it!
We are already participating in the conveyor belt of constant changes, under the pressure of society, changing cars, housing, clothes for more fashionable and prestigious ones, and recently we do this more and more often. Now our relations are also involved in this movement.
Everyday life can push you to a decision to part with a partner: in any relationship there are periods of falling in love, routine, difficulties, conflicts, and at some point it may seem that love has passed. But society offers ways not to solve these problems, but to distract from them.
At the same time, the problems are only aggravated, which, in the end, leads to a rupture and, accordingly, to the search for new partners and relationships in which all the same difficulties arise. This situation creates a situation of adultery, mutual betrayal, makes it the norm of life. It is very difficult to believe in the psychological well-being of a person who over and over again experiences a wonderful period of falling in love, but has not learned to build relationships, to resolve the difficulties that arise". Doctor of Psychological Sciences Professor Alexander Orlov
“Such great importance is attached to love as a means of solving everyday problems that a person's self-respect depends on whether he has acquired it or not. People who think they have found it are ready to burst with complacency, confident that they have irrefutable proof of their salvation, just as Calvinists considered wealth to be the visible evidence of their belonging to the elect. Those who have failed to find love do not just consider themselves to be more or less disadvantaged, but lose their self-respect, and this entails deeper and more dangerous consequences. They feel like representatives of a new caste of untouchables and admit to the therapist that they suffer from insomnia, and not necessarily because they feel especially lonely or unhappy, but because they are tormented by the oppressive belief that they have not been able to solve the great mystery of life. And meanwhile, against the background of the constant increase in the number of divorces, the persistent vulgarization of love in literature and the visual arts, and the undoubted fact that for many people sex has become as meaningless as it is accessible, this very "love" began to seem incredibly rare, if not a complete illusion. Some representatives of the "new left" came to the conclusion that love has been destroyed by the very nature of our bourgeois society, and the reforms they propose are aimed at building a "world in which there will be more opportunities for love."
“Truly, love has become such an internally contradictory phenomenon that some researchers of family life have come to the conclusion that" love "is simply the name of the way stronger family members subdue the weaker ones. Ronald Laing simply argues that love is a cover for violence".
Rollo May from the book "LOVE AND WILL"
Professor Alexander Dugin. 2013 g.
Characteristics of the consumer society according to Baudrillard:
- Personalization, or Least Marginal Difference (LMD). The functional, serving character of a person in a consumer society leads to the synthesis of individuality from signs and underlined differences. In the sphere of semantic differences, there is no room for genuine distinction based on real personality traits. Everything - from luxury and the right to free time to manifested simplification - is included in the set of purely social differences legitimized by the system itself. Even a sincere search for a lost reality, knowledge of oneself, has an effect only on the produced social difference - the main driving mechanism of a consumer society. Personalization of a person in signs sets everything down to their very types. The model of a demanding man and a caring woman is the same universal, legislatively declared ideals, which have a democratic meaning only in their property of being equally desirable for everyone.
- Mass information culture. The attitude of popular culture to traditional culture is analogous to the attitude of fashion to objects. As fashion is based on the obsolescence of objects, so the obsolescence of traditional values lies at the basis of mass culture. Thus, mass culture is initially created for short-term use; it is an environment in which signs change. Its imperative is the requirement of relevance, modernity, functional suitability for the human consumer. The development of means of communication leads to the loss of the symbolic basis in human communication. Individuality, living culture is replaced by the ritualization of meaningless signs that have no content. A certain minimum of such signs is formed, which is obligatory for every "cultured" person. Baudrillard defines this minimum as "the smallest common culture", which fulfills the role of "evidence of cultural citizenship" in the mass consciousness. The attribute of the world of consumption is kitsch - a worthless object that has no essence, but is characterized by an avalanche of distribution that has a class nature. The consumption of a kitsch object is a simulative introduction to fashion, the purchase of a distinctive feature.
The mass media reflect and consolidate the totalitarian nature of the consumer society. The essence of this totalitarianism lies in the "homogenization" of events, giving them equal rights before the perception of the consumer. The media kill the living content of the world, extracting from it only events, the content of which, in turn, is reduced to only an endless reference to each other. Based on this attitude to true reality, the media form "neoreality" that does not have the categories of truth and falsity. "Nereality", in the creation of which advertising also participates, consists of "pseudo-events", the occurrence of which is not preceded by anybody's censorship. Advertising does not call for an analysis of the reliability of its content, but requires self-confidence. In this sense, it has a prophetic character.
- The body is the most beautiful commodity.
- Leisure drama, or the inability to kill your time.
Time has a use value. It cannot be truly free, since its freedom is provided for and calculated by the structure of the consumer society. In the traditional sense, time disappears - its division into free, pleasant or poorly spent is no longer the fundamental criterion for distinguishing it. Time is homogeneous in its status as an element of production. Leisure is nothing more than recovery time. People have become "waste of money and time." In a consumer society, time cannot be killed, it cannot be spent outside the consumption system.
- Mysticism of care.
"Under the sun of care modern consumers are sunbathing." The protective, prudent and caring appearance of the consumer society is nothing more than its protective mechanism, hiding "a global system of power based on the ideology of generosity, where" good deeds "hide profits". The lack of symbolism, the objectivity of relations between people is compensated by signs of participation and benevolence. Compliance, servility, the ideology of the gift - these are systematic facts of modern society that hide the real economic mechanisms. These facts oblige the consumer to consider himself sick, inferior, in need of help from the global system of services.
- Anomie in a society of abundance.
With visible abundance, an indirect cult of violence arises as a kind of fuse that switches a person from thinking about freedom to thinking about happiness. Abundance envelops a person and inevitably puts him before a new morality, which is not a consequence of progress. In this state of affairs, a new type of violence appears, which is a compensation for abundance and a kind of proof of its instability. Other evidence is constant fatigue and depression, which are precisely the consequences of the abundance, simplification, automatism of modern life.
Every year, the needs of society are growing more and more, which leads to certain economic and social changes.
- In trade and services, the role of small shops is decreasing. Large shopping centers and supermarkets are beginning to play a major role. Shopping is becoming widespread and is becoming a popular form of leisure.
- The revolution in the field of communications (the spread of the Internet, mobile networks) leads to the formation of a new information space and the expansion of the sphere of communication. Moreover, access to this space and participation in communication are becoming paid services.
- Business produces such cultural phenomena as tastes, desires, values, norms of behavior, interests. Advertising plays an important role in this.
- Competition between producers creates competition for consumers. A person in a consumer society strives to consume in such a way that, on the one hand, he is “no worse than others”, and on the other, “does not merge with the crowd”.
- A developed lending system appears, bank cards, loyalty cards, etc.
- The structure of the value of goods and services changes significantly. Often it includes a symbolic price for a "trademark" (brand), when the goods of "well-known" firms can cost much more than similar goods from less "promoted" manufacturers.
- The pace of fashion change is accelerating. Things depreciate and age faster than they physically wear out.
- Education, above all higher education, is becoming a paid market service.
- Physical education and sports are becoming producers of shows and buyers of athletes. Access to physical education is becoming a market service.
Hedonism as an active mechanism of a consumer society.
Today, the problem of hedonism attracts the attention of the most important minds of our time. Thus, the British sociologist Z. Bauman believes that the growth of hedonistic and selfish sentiments is significant for our time. One of the American ideologists P.J. Buchanan emphasizes hedonistic morality among the causes of the demographic crisis, the collapse of the institution of family and marriage. Following the imperative “live for yourself and enjoy life”, striving for maximum comfort, priority of career at the expense of family, liberation of a woman (understood by radical feminists as a rejection of the traditional role of wife, mother and housewife), selfishness and the cult of pleasure - all this leads to the destruction of family and marriage. “What power,” Buchanan asks, “can resist the song of the sirens of hedonistic culture, a song so seductive and inviting, a song that is repeated by almost everyone who turns to young people - Hollywood, MTV, soap operas, TV shows, glossy magazines, popular music, novels for women and other bestsellers? " This question remains unanswered.
In the context of postmodern culture, the topic of hedonism, pleasure and temptation becomes especially relevant. Postmodern society has chosen pleasure as its imperative, and seduction as its strategy. Let us return once again to the reflections of J. Baudrillard about the needs of modern society: “Now they no longer say:“ You have a soul, it must be saved ”, but:
"You have a gender, you have to put it to good use."
"You have an unconscious, you need" it "to speak",
"You have a body, you should enjoy it",
"You have libido, you need to spend it", etc.
Sexual relationships in love as a source of personal growth. T. Vlasova
Pleasure in women's autobiographies: script change and sexuality redefinition. A. Temkina
According to these data, approximately 30% of people have increased sex drive. 60% do not have a particular passion for constant intercourse. And only 10% of adults were attributed by experts to those whose level of sexual desires corresponds to the average statistical indicators.
A wave of hedonism swept through modern culture and changed its appearance. The result of these changes was the emergence of a new type of person with increased attention to himself and his body, taking care of his own well-being. The personality of such a person is deformed: depth, inner content is lost. This is followed by a spiritual crisis, a person's loss of a sense of citizenship, individualism, egocentrism and indifference to the common good, concern only with their own private interests. A person's hedonistic aspirations turn into emptiness, and then he spends all his strength and energy on the search for new, yet unexplored pleasures.
... where gay and lesbianism got the green light, the white population stopped growing.
D. political science Alex Battler "On Love, Family and State." The book is in our library
Since 2006, the Pedophile Party Charity, Freedom and Diversity (PNVD) has been operating in Holland. Its main requirements are to lower the age barrier for sexual intercourse under 12 and legalize child pornography.
In culture, the influence of hedonism affects, first of all, in a decrease in the level of spiritual values, in the adaptation of works of art to the expectation and demand of consumers, in an attitude towards entertainment. The cult of hedonism and sensual pleasures is a characteristic feature of modern mass culture. Modern media have played a decisive role in making hedonism the leading value orientation of young people.
Polyamory does not recognize the exclusivity of relationships: it is open to multiple partnerships.
And at the other extreme of amorous - erotic relationships:
In the US and Europe, there are already more than five million asexual people who voluntarily refuse to have sex. The "sexless" movement is also becoming popular when wives quite deliberately refuse to have sex with their husbands for years.
Created and actively developing - the Russian community of Asexuals. Their slogan is "Asexuals are the people of the future."
As a consequence: "It turns out that America is the only country in the world where love is a national issue. It seems that a huge number of Americans of both sexes are in a state of confusion about love," says Raul de Roussy de Seims.
In order not to end on a pessimistic note, one can recall the incipient economic crisis, which will certainly lead to a change in the economic model. And the consumer society will be replaced by something else, more civilized.
E. Pushkarev Chairman of the Internet Club "ENLIGHTED LOVE"
Roman Perin "SEXual relations in a degrading society"
Wilhelm Reich "Sexual Revolution"
Arsenia Sobolevskiy "Revolution of love or degeneration?"
Konstantin Borovoy "Prostitution in Russia"
Nina Upton "Love and the French"
and others
The essence of love. E. Pushkarev.
Briefly about love. E. Pushkarev
Man and woman: compatibility, love. E. Pushkarev
Man and woman: relationships. E. Pushkarev
Man and woman: leadership in love and marriage. E Pushkarev
Psychology of love. E. Pushkarev
Love test: "love scale" by Z. Rubin.
The religion of love. R. Precht
Fucked up and hypersexual. R. Precht
War of the sexes. A. Sobolevsky
Psychological health is a prerequisite for love. E. Pushkarev
