December 28, 2006
Waste: A Sexual Critique of Consumerism
...consumerism is what happens when a smart ape evolved for obsessive sexual self-promotion suddenly attains the technological inventiveness and social organization to transform the raw material of nature into a network of sexual signals and status displays. It transmutes a world made of quarks into a world of tiny, unconscious courtship acts. Every thing becomes a product, every product becomes a signal, and every signal becomes sexual. Yet most sexual signals go unrecognized, unappreciated, and unreciprocated. The result is that fascinating phenomenon we call modern civilization, with its glory and progress, to be sure, but also with its colossal waste and incalculable alienation.
Consumerism’s trouble is not that it is tainted by sexuality, or that material acquisition is some Freudian sublimation of sexual conquest. On the contrary, the problem is that human sexuality is tainted and mediated by consumerism.
more http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/waste.htm by Geoffrey F. Miller
(Published as: Miller, G. F. (1999). Waste is good. Prospect, Feb., pp. 18-23.)
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