Consumption and Its Consequences Quotes

“By ‘consumer society’, I mean one in which commodities are increasingly used to express the core values of that society but also become the principal form through which people come to see, recognise and understand those values.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences

“from the beginnings of history, we have used the critique of consumption to confirm ourselves as essentially good and moral beings. Once upon a more religious time it was common to translate this into an actual asceticism, and I still think it gives us reason to lash out against a consumption we can’t seem to control even in ourselves.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences

“If you want to know what the English really think about consumption, ignore what they say, but look at what they do.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences

“The idea was that consumption was a symbolic system we use but we don’t understand, in the same way that we speak language clearly without being able to give a lesson in grammar.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences

“Actually I am even less inclined to go in that direction. It’s just another example of the same problem. This word ‘nature’, when used to imply outside of culture, is a mythic idyll. People who live close to the environment don’t try to live in harmony with nature, quite the opposite. A few generations ago we had far fewer means to resist nature, and the result was a very low life expectancy, much of which was spent wracked by disease. Death is natural, disease is natural; most nature programmes consist of one animal eating another one alive. We have known since Darwin that the morality underpinning evolution is survival of the fittest. The whole point of humanity as any kind of moral order is the struggle to overcome nature. So, for me, nature and morality are the very antithesis of each other.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences

“I suspect the problem comes from the very word ‘consumption’. Originally, to consume something means to use it up, in effect to destroy stuff. We think of a fire consuming a house. Two centuries ago consumption was associated with the dread of tuberculosis, a wasting disease.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences

“The point I am making is that most of that extra consumption you fear will destroy the planet is not actually going to come from what you can claim to be surplus consumption, the hair gel and the jacuzzis. It will come from the provision of basic services that no one can call over-consumption. And we need to confront those, since they are a lot harder to curb.”
― Daniel Miller, Consumption and Its Consequences