Alienation And Ethics On Consumption

This dissertation focuses on problem of consumption. With the rise of western consumerism, most subjects of modern social science began to pay more attention to problem of consumption than before, therefore, more and more books on this problem are being published. However, there are visible directions in research of this problem, which is either external analysis academically, thinking consumerism as neutral problem, such as sociology, or extensive praise, thinking consumerism as boundless beneficence to promoting economical increase, such as economics, or new exploration on advancing technical problem of consumption, so as to help the sustaining increase of consumerism, such as marketing, or as agent provocateur of consumerism, so as to research psychology of consumers, and to find out psychological weakness in human nature, such as consumption psychology. In a word, these researches all limit the understanding of consumption problem among the relationships of some single element in society, but they are not involved in the influence of nature on society, and evaluation on function and mechanism of consumption from the visual angle of all kinds of human existence crisis, especially resource crisis and environment crisis. On the contrary, I analyze consumerism from the attention on existence crisis faced by contemporary human beings, so as to awaken the consciousness of contemporary human beings to pay attention to protect our environment, save resources, and make us human beings have the chance to live on the earth generation by generation.In fact, consumption in contemporary society is alienated consumption. Alienation on consumption represents not only on consumption alienating from its own essence, and human being himself, but also on consumption's control to human beings. Concretely, consumption alienating from its own essence is consumption deviates from our need and things' use value, and then alienated consumption can achieve the change from satisfaction of pursuing needs to satisfaction of pursuing wants, in the same time, it achieve the change from pursuing use value to pursuing symbol value. So the process of consumption actualizes the change from the attenuation of consumable goods' external value to the attenuation of their internal value, which is the origin of alienated consumption viewpoint on values.In my opinion, what consumption in contemporary society wants is not use value, but symbol value. The basic function of symbol value is showing dissimilarity and showing similarity. In other words, symbol value is consumable's symbolic sense. Symbol means success, status and social degree. It's a kind of corroboration for consumers' self value. That is, symbol is a social code, which can show us someone's status from his consumption. Hence, consumption established on symbolic sense is in fact a kind of exaggerated consumption, which sees waste as its essential character. If you want to have the good fame as a consumer, you must carry out the consumption on unnecessaries, which can not do anything but waste. Unless to compare with beggars, or you can not win the good name if you only consume necessaries. The character of symbol consumption is pursuing fad and noted brand. Fad is a mundane god, which is now embraced by consumers. So we can say that fad is a kind of collective worship at witchcraft. Fad is a value standard to scale prodigal consumption in consumptive society, and it is made from advertisement. I think advertisement is the machine to make fad, therefore, fad is not a proof to justify whether a consumable goods is useful or not, but ahope to induce consumers to consume according to fad trend. Fad is short-lived and mutable. It is just by these characters that fad can entice consumers to pursue new consumption mode and objects, throw away things which still have use value, and then engender prodigal waste.Consumerists not only change consumption activity into culture activity, but also change consumerism into main culture in the society, so that consumerism owns an ideological function. Bes...