Consumer Culture in America: Spectacle, Deception, Simulation, and Illusion in the Marketplace

An invasive new American value system is taking over, characterized by the embrace of leisure, the worship of the commodity, the adoration of the celebrity, the enshrinement of material success, and the veneration of wealth. Caldwell reveals how we are herded to assure the perpetual expansion of the economic sphere and exposes the effects on American life.
In Consumer Culture in America, Wilber W. Caldwell observes that we are seduced, lured into a sparkling web so enticing that we perceive no reason to struggle. This book explores the enormous power of the marketplace that is reflected so vividly by the countless agents of our popular culture as it pulls everything into its all-encompassing orbit. Oblivious to the runaway, self-perpetuating power that seeks to controls us, we are lost in a maze of materialist illusions created by a system that possesses only limited perspectives and sensitivities in the realms of social justice, war, human exploitation, and the fragility of the natural world. Our politicians may pay lip service to these issues, but at the end of the day, they are only puppets, chosen and controlled by a system that understands the value of creating illusions, including the illusion that these issues are being addressed.
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