SB3 | Chomskian Abstract by Cornelia Parker (2007)

'...it's doing exactly what Adam Smith said was the job of business, it's to delude and oppress the public'

'...they want uninformed consumers to make irrational choices'

'...and on top of that they want to fabricate consumers, create wants'

'...you just have to decode an awful lot of mythology before you can even talk about these questions...'

'the fact that consumption is the goal of life, was manufactured, and consciously...

..if you go back to the business literature of the 1920s, and ever since...it was recognised that we must focus people on the superficial things in life like fashionable consumption, and if we don't do that they're going to get involved in the political system, and we don't want that...'

'nowadays elections in the U.S. are ran the same way that commodities are sold, and by the same institutions'

'Consumerism is to a large extent created by a conscious effort, and that means it's fragile'

'there's nothing natural, or nothing in human nature that forces people to work 20 hours a day, to accumulate as many commodities as they can stuff into their house. That's an imposed lifestyle...'


'there is a culture of fear that goes way back into American history...a constant theme in the popular culture has been that we're on the verge of destruction, somebody is about to destroy us, and at the last minute a superhero comes or a super-weapon is invented by great technologists and it saves us...'

'...a sub-theme is that the enemy that's going to destroy us is someone we're destroying. So it's the Native population, or it's the black slaves, or later it's the Chinese...'


'Germany in the 1920s was the peak of Western civilisation, the absolute peak. In the sciences, the arts, was regarded as a model for democracy by American political scientists, everything..literature...and within three years, it was turned into a country of savage barbarians who carried out the worst crimes in history...we are always right at the edge'