Mar Elias Evangelisation

On Consumerism (Chomsky, Chang and Varoufakis)

Please read all of the following quotes (by 3 prominent professors), it took me some considerable time to copy them, it will take you much less time to read them. So please read them, I have copied them for you:

Noam Chomsky

MIT Professor in linguistics, has written some 100 books, and take it from me: no one can win a debate against Chomsky, watch documentaries about him and you'll see how he repeatedly crushed all of the other professors who supported US political behaviour

"..intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices."

[...]

"The terms of political discourse typically have two meanings. One is the dictionary meaning, and the other is a meaning that is useful for serving power -- the doctrinal meaning.

[...]

..that we are facing a severe environmental crisis. Every issue of a science journal that you read has some alarming discoveries about the threat confronting us and the imminence of it. It's not hundreds of years away; it's decades, maybe. And yet predatory capitalism is telling us to maximise the threat, to extract every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground.

The excuse is jobs. But in modern political discourse, the word "jobs" replaces an unspeakable, obscene seven-letter word: "p-r-o-f-i-t-s." You can't say that, so you say "jobs."

[...]

In a market system, you pay no attention to what are called "externalities." If you and I make a transaction, let's say you sell me something, we each try to maximise our own benefit. That's how the system is supposed to work. We don't ask about the effect of the sale on other people. [...] they don't pay attention to systemic risk, that is, the threat that if their transaction goes bad, the whole system will collapse, like what happened with AIG (2008 collapse), for example. [...] driven by the desire to make profit. You don't pay attention to the cost to others. And in the case of the environmental crisis, one of these costs may be destroying our species. It's an externality, so therefore it's a footnote.

[...]

It was presumably understood that Mexican campesinos cannot compete with highly subsidised US agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses would not survive competition with US multinationals, which must be granted "national treatment" under the mislabeled "free-trade" agreements [NAFTA]... Not surprisingly, these measures led to a flood of desperate refugees..

As long as the population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism, then the powerful can do as they please..

[...]

..including the Middle East, where the threat of secular nationalism has often concerned British and US planners, inducing them to support radical Islamic fundamentalism to counter it.

Ha Joon Chang (Cambridge professor of economics)

"So, if you look around and think about it, the world seems to be full of moral behaviours that go against the assumptions of free-market economists. When they are confronted with these behaviours, free-market economists often dismiss them as ‘optical illusions’. If people look as if they are behaving morally, they argue, it is only because the observers do not see the hidden rewards and sanctions that they are responding to.

According to this line of reasoning, people always remain self-seekers. If they behave morally, it is not because they believe in the moral code itself but because behaving in that way maximises rewards and minimises punishments for them personally."

Yanis Varoufakis (Professor of economics, past prime-minister of Greece)

"Money have always been an important tool that helped people achieve their goals, but it wasn't goal in and of itself to the extent that it is today... money was transformed from being means into an end."

And most recently here's a letter signed by 70 intellectuals most of them professors, these include Chomsky, and the respected journalist John Pilger; asking the US to stop its sanctions against Venezuela. That's how the US imposes its "democracy".

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/24/open-letter-over-70-scholars-and-experts-condemns-us-backed-coup-attempt-venezuela