Hedonism

Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism,

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Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern … Read more

Traditional hedonism…was based on

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Traditional hedonism…was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored…Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming … Read more

Critics of Consequentialism have

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Critics of Consequentialism have often assumed that hedonism (or preference-satisfaction) must be the theory of the good, that the deontic principle must be maximizing, and that the principle should be applied to individual acts. Indeed, this version is often called classical utilitarianism and attributed to Bentham and sometimes even to Mill. Rather than a classical … Read more

Never before has the

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Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience … centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. … The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious … Read more

We have been very

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We have been very effectively pacified by the pernicious ideology of a consumer society that is centered on the cult of the self – an undiluted hedonism and narcissism. That has become a very effective way to divert our attention while the country is reconfigured into a kind of neofeudalism, with a rapacious oligarchic elite … Read more