TRUE FREEDOM

'Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.129.

THE MONETIZATION OF HUMAN DESIRE

'Everyone alive right now has grown up with the compensatory low-grade commercial seductions that go with the incessant monetization of human desire. These seductions have set out to undermine (in passing, not in malice) the projects of fidelity, kindness, understanding, sustained attention, self-discipline and self-knowledge, because dissatisfaction, outrage, a short attention span and emotional incontinence make sales and contentment doesn't.' 

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.167. 

WE NO LONGER POSTPONE ANY DESIRES

'According to Freud, the full and uninhibited satisfaction of all instinctual desires would create mental health and happiness. But the obvious clinical facts demonstrate that men - and women - who devote their lives to unrestricted sexual satisfaction do not attain happiness, and very often suffer from severe neurotic conflicts or symptoms. The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity. Yet Freud's idea could only have become popular in the period after the First World War because of the changes which had occurred in the spirit of capitalism, from the emphasis on saving to that on spending, from self-frustration as a means for economic success to consumption as the basis for an ever-widening market, and as the main satisfaction for the anxious, automatised individual. Not to postpone the satisfaction of any desire became the main tendency in the sphere of sex as well as in that of all material consumption.'   

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 72. 

THE ONLY SOURCE OF HUMAN SATISFACTION

'...the reasons why you have not got contentment in the things of the world is not because you have not got enough of them - that is not the reason - but the reason is, because they are not things proportionate to that immortal soul of yours that is capable of God himself.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.91. 

OUR CHRONIC DISSATISFACTION

'We are ruled by the clock. By the light bulb. By the glowing smartphone. By the insatiable feeling we are encouraged to have. The feeling of this is never enough. Our happiness is just around the corner. A single purchase, or interaction, or click, away. Waiting, glowing, like the light at the end of the tunnel that we can never quite reach.'

Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet, p.143.

WHAT ARE YOU ATTACHED TO?

'Attachment to the God of heaven manifests itself in an absence of attachment to the things of earth.' 

Darrell L Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, p.1168. 

MIDDLE-CLASS MATERIALISM

'...it was the same as with all people who are not exactly rich, but who want to resemble the rich, and for that reason only resemble each other: damasks, ebony, flowers, carpets, and bronzes, dark and gleaming - all that all people of a certain kind acquire in order to resemble people of a certain kind.' 

Leo Tolstoy, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, p.57. 

A DIFFERENT ECONOMIC IMPERATIVE

'Practicing neighborly economics means you don't go for what's cheapest and easiest. You think about which relationships and stores you want to preserve in your town and you shop there.' 

Melody Warnick, This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are, p.59. 

SEX & CONSUMERISM

'Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that woman's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror's mercury, anti-erotic for both men and women.' 

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p.144. 

EVANGELICALISM & CONSUMERISM

'The evangelical quest for a particular emotional experience in worship and the capitalistic quest for anonymous, cheap canned goods have something in common. Both are mostly concerned with what I can get for myself as as an individual consumer. 

But the economy of the Eucharist call me to a life of self-emptying worship.' 

Tish Harrison Warren, Life of the Ordinary, p.72. 

A SOCIETY BASED ON SELF-INDULGENCE

'...industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.'
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, p.209. 

THE POWER BEHIND CONSUMERISM

'Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think about some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. "We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality,. We do not just buy a car, we buy prestige." And so with all the rest.'

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p.67. 

THE CHOICES AROUND IMMIGRATION

'The people of any nation will always want the right to control their own borders and decide on the direction of their culture, and England is no exception. But that majority has its own questions to answer, too. In a nation whose population is ageing, and whose people consistently demand more and cheaper stuff, who is going to do the heavy lifting? If you want a cheap nanny and your cut-price supermarket vegetables picked in all weathers for the minimum wage, then someone has to do it. There is no doubt that large-scale immigration changes the shape, texture and potentially the identity of a nation, but so do out-of-town retail parks, coffee chains, theme pubs, second homes, gentrified cities and privatised streets. If you don't want the population movement, you don't get the easy consumer lifestyle it facilitates. Which will you choose?' 

Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.206. 

ENVIRONMENTALISM TODAY

'The weird and unintentional pincer movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-uber-alles brigade has infiltrated, ironed out and reworked environmentalism for its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral, the mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It is not about reforging a connection between over-civilised people and the world outside their windows. It is not about living close to the land or valuing work for the sake of the world. It is not about attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our civilsation has become. 

Today's environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and at the same time, with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hyper-capitalism; the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy. It is an engineering challenge; a problem-solving device for people to whom the sight of a wild Pennine hilltop brings not feelings of transcendence but thoughts about the wasted potential for renewable energy. It is about saving civilisation from the results of its own actions; a desperate attempt to prevent Gaia from hiccuping and wiping out our coffee shops and broadband connections. It is our last hope.'  

Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.78.

EARLY ENVIRONMENTALISM

'The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, that being content with a frugal and moderate use of them, we should take care of what shall remain. Let him who possesses a filed, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence; but let him endeavour to hand it down to posterity as he received it, or even better cultivated. Let him so feed on its fruits, that he neither dissipates it by luxury, nor permits it to be marred or ruined by neglect. Moreover, that this economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things which God has given us to enjoy, may flourish among us; let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.' 

John Calvin in Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.215. 

CONSUMERISM & RELATIONSHIPS

'Consumerism trains us to acquire, consume, and move on, with novelty as our guiding impulse. The sad reality, though, is that we what we do with things, we will inevitably do with people.' 

Jonathan Grant, Divine Sex, p.80. 

CONSUMERISM

'As with all idolatries, consumerism is a corruption of something good. As divine image-bearers, we are drawn to beauty. When rightly oriented, beautiful things reveal something about God's own forms and character and so point us toward the kingdom beyond.' 

Jonathan Grant, Divine Sex, p.77. 

THE MODERN ECONOMY

'...the modern market economy does not mature into forms of settled relationships. On the contrary, it is a dynamic force demanding ever greater adaptability and complexity in people's lives. On the consumption side, it is in the system's self-interest to create appetities that can never be satisfied and always stand poised to switch to the next big thing. On the production side, the same self-interest demands that economic organizations show little real loyalty to the people who are working for them. In the mdoern firm's striving for operational efficiency and effectiveness, everyone and everything must be ultimately disposable. Because of their higher salaries, retirement benefits, and health costs, employess with a long-term commitment to the organization can appear as little more than a financial drain on the bottom line. Not surprisingly, today's workers have realized that to survive, they must reciprocate with the same lack of institutional loyalty.' 

Hugh Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally, p.167. 

DISCIPLESHIP

'To be a follower of Jesus, you must renounce comfort as the ultimate value of your life.' 

Mike Ayers in Jared C Wilson, The Pastor's Justification, p.65. 

MONEY & POSSESSIONS

'We've heard countless sermons warning us about the dangers of money. But the real danger comes after you spend the money. Once you own it you need to keep it clean, keep it working, and keep up with the latest improvements. If the worries of life don't swamp us, the upkeep will.' 

Kevin DeYoung, Crazy Busy: A [Mercifully] Short Book about a [Really] Big Problem, p.30.