 So what do I mean when I say we consumerized everything? I kind of mean that everything became similar to the exercise of choosing the Cheerios or the cocoa puffs on the shelf. Do you want the Mitt Romney or the Barack Obama or a little more modern version? Do you want the Donald Trump or the Hillary Clinton? Candidates are offered to us through advertisements mostly and a whole bunch of other things. And it's it's very much like choosing the Cheerios the cocoa puffs, but this has happened to every sector of our lives. So are you going to aim for Stanford or Harvard? Are you a Mercedes driver or more of a Ford driver? Are you a New York Yankees fan or a San Francisco Giants fan? Are you a girl or are you a boy? We know we got those aisles covered for you. Actually, we've got those aisles colored for you. Do you shop at Chanel and haute couture or are you much more of a fast-fashioned person and you like H&M? Beatles or stones? More up-to-date, Taylor or Kanye. Something that probably affects you, you have in your pocket or on your desk, an iPhone or an Android phone. The 20th century was pretty much the century when consumers in ate the world. So what I just went through seemed maybe light and quick, but it's been a really deep, significant change in everything about our lives. So I'd like to take another spin at it. It's really affected how we see ourselves, this notion of rugged individualism, ideals of beauty. We buy brands so that we can fit in, so that we are part of certain crowds. We buy things so that we can be happy, but we don't really have a sense of what is enough. We're consumers. We're also taught that there's the other out there and we don't necessarily feel safe because we hear in the news all the time that there's lots of violence, lots of killings. Also, our role is as a consumer of democracy, we don't really have that many civic responsibilities beyond voting. It's easy to sell us nationalism. We can see ourselves as the best civilization there ever was. In some sense, we're reduced as consumers. We have a kind of learned helplessness. We forget that we might have agency that we might be able to do things. This also changes how we see our homes. So we're busy trying to keep up with the Joneses, buy the latest stuff, get some status symbols. Things are designed for planned obsolescence so that we will feel like our things out of date, out of tune. Our homes, which used to actually be homes, are now financial instruments and very seriously, these are our retirement accounts. And we change our home, we customize it to suit our preferences, our sort of playful whims at great risk. Because we are then making the home less saleable on the market, we are damaging our retirement account. I also mean how we see this other home, the earth. We think of the earth as infinite and there are limitless frontiers out there. Somewhere along the line, the commons that we used to live on and take care of became natural resources. And things got made elsewhere, invisibly to us. They just showed up. And what happened at the other end of the manufacturing process was a little concerned to us until recently. Consumerization also affects what we think we should do, our goals, our aims. We have been sold the American dream. We also have national goals. Our personal life goals are the stages of life, the ways that we're going to go through them. We buy cards on Valentine's Day and talk about Santa Claus at Christmas time because of companies that sold those things to us. We worship scale and efficiency. Our role models are marketed to us. And they're done, all these things are done through propaganda, through spin, through different kinds of marketing that shape the social narrative, this implied contract that we have. That's not just what we should aim for, the goals we have, but what we even imagine is possible to do. And this is what I mean by the learned helplessness. It's almost as if we don't see our own power, our own magic. So we think, well, I'll just be a good consumer. If I indulge, I should snack on this thing or buy this thing right now. And if I have enough stuff, stuff will just make me happy. I'll buy my way to happiness and into the right social circles. Or that science will fix it. That I don't really have to worry about the earth and fixing it or about my body and being healthier or whatever else because science will figure that out. And I can kind of offload my concerns to them. So this notion that voting is enough to have a democracy, that if a country has a well counted vote where everybody voted, that's good enough for democracy. This is not actually citizenship or what I would think of as democracy. And notions that there are good guys and there are bad guys and of course we're always among the good guys. And we can demonize other populations. All of this is about how we frame the world, how we see what's even possible. And finally, what we value. We value money and stuff and assets and power and status as opposed to the intangibles like relationships and so forth. Now, this has been a pretty much a downer presentation. But I want to tell you that we're in a process right now of rebalancing this. That we've been out of whack for a long, long time and we're in a process of going back and rebalancing it. This, my name is Jerry McCulsky. Thank you very much for watching this Rexcast. There are more materials at the links on this page. I appreciate your attention.