i am canada
so i dont worry

How do you think that consumerism is affecting this generation, future generations, and the environment?

If you think about it it's a game with the individual's dreams and wishes to keep the status quo alive. Commercials tell you to buy things you never actually wanted, just to create a situation of increase, artificially. You think you're free to make a decision on your personal consumption? No because you can only chose between things offered so basically, other people "predefine" your choice. Consumerism is the right word to describe society's strongest dependence.

If a commercial convinces you to buy something you didn't want before, then that's good advertising. The notion that we as consumers are powerless to make independent decisions is hyperbole. We are influenced by just about everything around us: advertising, celebrities, friends, laws, etc., but it's the individual consumer who makes the final decision on whether to exchange money for the product.

Nobody is deciding for us.

Well, at least you can decide if you buy it or not but you won't be able to refuse certain things for a long time, e.g. mobile phones. Commercials convinced society of mobile phones being essential for the individual's life. I didn't ask industry to produce mobile phones for me, industry asked me to need it. Now you can't be an employee without mobile phone these days and I'd claim that employment is the central aspect in the individual's life. So the individual is dependent on the ideas of the creative heads of the companies.

You as a single person can't produce things for yourself and you can't tell industry to produce certain things for you, that's why companies produce things you might have wanted (or not), starting from the masses. So basically, you decide between things you actually don't want. But you might want it as a result of a "convincing commercial" (and the commercial might be better than the product itself).

In my eyes, the company has made the decision when spending enough money for a good creative head - including good product design and good commercials. Those are products that will dominate the market, meaning dominate your "decision".

Cell phones serve a practical purpose: to make communication easier. People don't buy things just because companies want us to buy them. Give consumers a little more credit. Plenty of products fail because they suck.

The things we buy are things we want. We make the decision to buy things. We are influenced by advertising and what's cool and whatnot, but those forces hardly make any decision for us.

Yes, our decision is limited to what's available to buy...but that limitation is inherent in that decision. It sounds like you're arguing that our decisions on what to buy are made for us because we cannot decide to buy things that don't exist. Would you go so far as to say that we will never truly make our own decisions about what to buy until we reach a point when we can buy anything that we can possibly conceive?

Cell phones serve a practical purpose: to make communication easier. People don't buy things just because companies want us to buy them.

They suck because they're probably badly advertised. You can sell everything if you do it right.

But how can a company know what things you personally desire? It's not always something that everyone else wants. That's why you have to be content with what you get.

Absolutely. But that's not on behalf of the masses, anyway. It's just good for our theoretical understanding.

While they do serve a practical purpose, it is all dependant on what you want. Who needs cell phones? If it was necessary to get one to work at a company, some people may not get them. There are house phones that they are content with. Yet, many jobs require you to be able to be called at any time. So if you want to get a decent job, you need a cell phone.

They can sell pretty much anything, but we consumers are the one's who decide to buy it or not.

The company makes a product that they think consumers will like, then they advertise that product in a way that they think is attractive to consumers. Then consumers decide to buy the product or not. Our options are limited to products that exist (obviously), but that doesn't mean we're forced to buy certain products.

Necessities are different. Things like food, water, shelter, and probably gasoline. We need those things.

I don't know what you're saying here.

If your job requires you to get a cell phone, they might buy it for you. Employees are given BlackBerrys all the time.

And they're required because they serve some essential function for the employee.

We live in a captalist state (even though i am in England, it is basically the same we just have nicer voices) so what do you expect, would you prefer to live in a place when your phones are bugged and you cannot say what you want.

It is the society that we live in, however way you look at it we are more dependant on things, they are what define us, it is how we have lived and it is how we will always live

...would you prefer to live in a place when your phones are bugged and you cannot say what you want....

... I'm not sure about England, but I am pretty sure the phones are bugged here, in the US.

Not just the phones. Heck, even private companies can track you these days, through the whereabouts of your debit card.

I know this because I've seen it in action, btw. It is perfectly possible, a bit like tracking an IP address on the internet.

Every phone is bugged, I'm pretty sure. There is almost no way to escape detection unless you live under a rock in the middle of the deep Amazon Rainforest (assuming it's not cut down while you are still alive)... without getting caught. Even things as miniscule as a Shoprite card, the health insurance companies can track what you eat and raise your insurance because of it. Every little thing can be tracked.

The phones themselves are not bugged. I can say as much, having ripped mine apart and checked all the circuit that was visible. What's bugged is that, even though the government tells you that the communications are not tapped, each and every phone company keeps a record of who you have talked to, for how long, etc.
They might also tap you, but that's hard to say, knowing that no-one would willingly admit that.

P.S: If you don't like being tracked, you'd better get used to it. It has its uses; a bit like the Hobbes social contract model, it's a trade-off between privacy and security.

pretty soon everyone's going to have RFID chips implanted in their wrists. the government should be afraid of their people, no the other way around, but unfortunately that's the way it is these days. governments have too much power.

Pretty soon? Considering that they've just cracked the cipher that allows the data privacy of them? You wish.

Plus, RFIDs only have a limited range. Personally, I'd be a lot more scared of CCTV cameras in streets than RFIDs, but then again, I don't care too much about my privacy.

ok, not RFID chips, but some other tracking technology.

why wouldn't the government want more control over people?

Don't they listen in for words like bomb and have a constant database?

If you think about it it's a game with the individual's dreams and wishes to keep the status quo alive. Commercials tell you to buy things you never actually wanted, just to create a situation of increase, artificially. You think you're free to make a decision on your personal consumption? No because you can only chose between things offered so basically, other people "predefine" your choice. Consumerism is the right word to describe society's strongest dependence.

Yes, you ARE free to make your own decisions

In the view of the Monotheistic religions, as expounded by Aquinas and Descartes, Free Will involves the power of the will to choose or not. That is, we are free insofar as we can choose among alternatives as being either Good or evil.

In other words, you can choose "Good," or not. And, if not; if you do not choose what is presented to you as "good," you have, by default, chosen evil. There is only one "good" option, and you can take it or leave it and that is what constitutes your free will. It is, in the words of some Mafia or Nazi types, "an offer you cannot refuse" because the other option is clearly unpalatable and will subject you to unpleasant consequences. This view makes a mockery of the essential idea of Free Will.

Clearly, in our reality, we are in the face of this very teaching from one religion, philosophy, New Age channeled source or another. Once we understand that the reality itself, the illusions of what is or is not "good" or "evil," are masks, or symbols of something deeper, we begin to realize that the two "alternatives" presented to us are clearly not equal. "The thirsty person chooses water, not oil; the hungry person, bread not tree bark; the poor person, the dry patch under the bridge, not the bench in the rain."

Some choice! By this definition, "Free Will" becomes little more than a joke, a logical inconsistency. It is also the chief mode of the Service to Self pathway - to "induce choice" by "weighting" it.

This view of free-will-that-is-not-free becomes the chief mask of those seeking to deny free will.

Any religion, philosophy or teaching that sets itself up as the "only way a man can be saved" has immediately aligned itself with the "Mafia/Nazi/STS" school of free will. You can easily see that a person who chooses to "love" or "send love and light" because it might gain salvation for them, or even because it "feels good," is really in the position of the thirsty person choosing water and not oil to drink. And further, if they think that this is the ONLY thing that they can do because the entire social and philosophical structure has been carefully designed to make it seem that this is the ONLY viable choice that is in line with God's will, they are still in the same position. But, the chief thing about it is that they BELIEVE the illusion, the lie, that this choice is to drink water and that choice is to drink oil. In fear, they don't even consider that they don't have to choose EITHER!

There are other definitions of Free Will that are interesting to speculate about. I am not going to engage in a lengthy monologue on the views of the philosophers because, even though some of them are quite fascinating and really make you think, that would be counterproductive to the issue at hand here.

The short version is that Hobbes and Tolstoy suggest that we are free insofar as we may do as we wish "without hindrance or constraint." Locke and Hume extended Hobbes's "freedom to do without restriction" to "the power to do or not as one wills." Spinoza's view was that we are free "insofar as we alone determine our behavior." We are not free when others dictate or hamper our decisions, or for reasons of illness or incapacity we cannot determine our actions.

When we consider "being able to do what we choose without hindrance or restraint," and defining Free Will in this way, we have to then consider not only whether our free will conflicts with the free will of others, but also whether our free will itself may be less free because of unconscious psychological or physiological forces. And, if the issues of government mind-control programs and hyperdimensional beings enter the equation, whether we may be under the absolute control of external forces must also be taken into account. In the first case we may choose to rob and steal because of extreme poverty, a broken home, and an ineffective educational system. In the latter case, we may choose to "go postal" because some fiendish government programmer's toast got burned that morning or because some Lurking Lizard Being thought Susy Smart was getting too close to the truth, and she needed to be eliminated on her morning trip to buy stamps.

So we begin to think that we are not so free after all. Because, in very real terms, all of us are under the influence of external forces or programming of one sort or another.

If we are free in this way, the issue of "free will," in third density terms, becomes meaningless. This is a very shallow interpretation because it means that freedom is defined as whether a person can do what he chooses, not to the choosing itself; it refers to the freedom of the action, not to the choice of action, because all of your choices are "programmed." Yet, whatever the individual decides to do, even if programmed to do it, it is considered that he has "free will" if he CAN do it!

What a cheap shot!

These concerns highlight the issue of the many forces that may restrain or compel behavior against one's will, which, if one was AWARE of them, one might or might not choose otherwise. The point is: We are not free if our potential or actual choices are restricted. Locke makes an example of a man locked into a room in which he prefers to stay. The man desires to stay in the room, is able to do so, and is thus free by Hobbes's definition, but the man does not have the power to leave the room and is thus not free according to Locke!

It is in exactly this sense that most people are deceived by the Service to Self gang to believe that they have free will. The room in which they are locked is the illusion that their beliefs and objectives are the full reality of God/Creation, and their choice to remain in the room is essentially acquiescence to beliefs imposed on them from the outside.

Most of humanity spends endless lifetimes locked in this room. But, the fact is, after a period of time, the confinement of the room and the sameness of the experiences become objectionable because, all the while the prisoner is lulled into inactivity, something may be growing inside him - some urge to see what is outside the room. But, until this inclination is fully developed, he may make no effort to even check the door. And, once he does check the door and discovers that it is locked, he may not yet have sufficient drive to do anything more than return to his position and continue to wait for something to happen. After a bit longer, the drive grows, and this, with the realization that he IS locked in may drive him to discover how to get out. But this process can take many lifetimes, and to attempt to open the door of the prison in which another is held when they are not ready to come out because they are not STRONG enough, will only frighten them, will only deprive them of the building force that is inside them that could, given time to develop, sustain the effort to emerge from the room on their own.

In such terms, whether or not a person has the power to do as he wills remains a fundamentally empirical question. He may think he has complete freedom to do or not as he wills, yet, his will, his choices which are based on his awareness, may be determined subconsciously or physically by things of which he is NOT aware. In this sense, any choice or act that is based upon lack of awareness, must lead us to discover the source of the lack of awareness as the causative factor, not the choice of the chooser.
In other words, if a person is "programmed," whether via government experiments, alien abductors, religions created and imposed by hyperdimensional beings, then WHO is ultimately responsible?

Is it the "programmers," or is it the person who has effectively chosen to be unaware?

Yes, the individual may be unaware because of fear of reprisals by God, demons, or his alien or government handlers. He may be afraid for his body or his soul or the body and soul of someone he loves. But these fears are beliefs that constitute the locked room in which he has chosen to remain not realizing that his own choice is the lock!

If the person is unaware, not because of fear, but simply because he is "asleep" is he then responsible for his lack of awareness?

According to the Cassiopaeans, Yes. It is his choice. He has chosen it for a reason at some level, and he is entitled to it. He has chosen his environment, he has chosen his grade and his lessons. Maybe "chosen" in the conscious sense is an inappropriate term. It is more like he is there because that is where he "fits." He is a "consciousness unit," and he is learning. Only when he reaches a certain level will he begin to "wake up." Only when something has "grown" in him. Will.