It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that advertising and consumerism shape how we perceive reality through mass media.
Christopher Lasch argues that the mass media does not merely inform us but rather distorts reality by aligning it with the interests of consumerism. As advertising dominates, it influences our perceptions and societal values, often obscuring the truth and prioritizing desires over genuine understanding.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about how advertising influences social norms during a marketing class.
Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities β for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail
For me the present is merged in eternity. I may not sacrifice the latter for the present.
Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable .. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
There are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thousand voices. But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something that is neither this nor that.
Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.
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