Ponder: "investing products with transcendence"

"Ad executive Douglas Atkin notes that a transformation has taken place in what's expected of the typical ad executive at a major corporation: rather than being responsible for design, packaging, and promotion, the brand manager is now asked to 'create and maintain a whole meaning-system for people through which they get identity and an understanding of the world.' Advertising is asked to induce devotion by investing products with transcendence.  So Atkin asked himself, What makes people exhibit cult-like devotion?  He thus undertook a study of cults precisely in order to figure out how brands could induce 'loyalty beyond reason.' When he heard people rhapsodize about sneakers of paper plates in terms that he described as 'evangelical,'  he realized that people join brands for the same reason they join cults and religions: to make meaning...The goal of such marketing, this (very secular) documentary concludes, is 'to fill the empty places where non-commercial institutions like schools and churches might have once done the job.' They amount to 'an invitation to a longed-for lifestyle."

James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom.

Ponder: "the carnival shill approach to the church"

“I’ve always disliked and mistrusted this carnival shill approach to the church—and yet heaven knows we see it often enough.  Does it really work?  I don’t think so, but more than that I think it’s all wrong.  Because for one thing it’s so unworthy.  I don’t mean by this that it’s too informal, too much in the marketplace, too “popular;” I do mean, quite simply, that it’s cheap.

Obviously, when you talk about such things as God, religion, the church, man’s soul, to a great many different people, you much necessarily do so in a great many different ways and on a great many different levels.  But none of these levels can be—or at least none of them should be—in any sense flashy or false or vulgar, because if they are—no matter what the apparent justification—you run the very serious risk of making God, religion, the church, and man’s soul seem just a little bit of the same.  It’s all very well to suggest that this really doesn’t matter so much, that what does matter is that, as a result, the people come in, but I think that’s a great mistake.  I know they come in—and often in considerable numbers—in response to such techniques.  That’s not surprising. 

Ponder: "a world where you get what is coming to you"

"The good news is that Americans don't settle for poor government performance.  The bad news is that they may not see their own inconsistent demands--ever-lower taxes, ever-better services--as part of the problem.
It will take sacrifice, preferably shared, to solve the country's long-term deficit and many other structural problems.  Leaders who constantly tell their constituents, in effect, "ask what your country can do for you" are not preparing them for that.
The current political usage of "deserve,"  in short, is about validating grievances, not settling priorities among them.  The word, meant in that way, probably would not have escaped the lips of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
That memorably mordant sociology professor worked for presidents of both parties in the '60s and '70s and got elected senator of New York as a Democrat in 1976--despite his belief that, as he once put it, "for most persons, it would be exceedingly painful to live in a world where you get what is coming to you."
Charles Lane, The Politics that We Deserve."  The Washington Post 16 Jan 2016, A23.

Ponder: Little opportunity for thinking and learning

“The practice of medicine today is radically different from that of 20 to 30 years ago.  Shorter hospital stays require protocol-driven procedural care ‘with little opportunity for thinking and learning,’ according to a JAMA editorial accompanying the review.  Added pressure comes from online ratings of doctor performance, and direct-to-consumer advertising cases ‘patients to demand medications for conditions they sometimes do not even have,’ the editorial said.

There is also a huge disconnect between medical school and what happens in the first years of residency, Mata said.  New doctors are ‘spending 40 to 50 percent of their time on the computer’ doing secretarial work,’ he said.  Very little time is spent at the bedside. ‘It’s not rewarding.’”

Lena H. Sun.  “New Doctors at Increased Risk for Depression.”  The Washington Post 9 Dec. 2015, A3

For Reflection: "Mass Consumerism Reshapes People."

The ideology and practice of mass consumerism reshapes people—their fundamental visions of who and what they are—not into active citizens but acquisitive consumers.  Society itself is transformed not into a rich network of various sorts of communities and social institutions that together comprise a civil society that promotes human flourishing, but rather a national mega-supermarket of endless products and services where shoppers (having been “empowered” by their incomes) seek human fulfillment through mass consumption.  In such redefined human and societal realities, things like community life, civic participation and political engagement become extraneous, almost meaningless.  They are reduced to places where the rules of the market, wealth distribution and product safety and determined.  In the end there is no such thing as a common wealth, a public square, a common good.  All that exists are income-earning workers, commodity producers, service suppliers, markets, regulation and sites for satiating consumption.”  Christian Smith, et. al., Lost in Transition (2011), 217.