Some time in the early 1980s I remember seeing a senior conservative politician on the news talking about “UK plc.” The phrase jarred. The United Kingdom is a nation state, not a private company, and to brand it as one seemed grubby and belittling.
Thirty-odd years later, “UK plc” has become part of the ordinary lexicon. If anyone finds it objectionable, few say so. No one announced that from now on we should conceive of our country as a business, but gradually, imperceptibly, it became natural to do so.
This is how so many cultural shifts happen. Ways of thinking mutate gradually, helped by changes in vocabulary that we accept without question. So it was that “refugees” became “asylum-seekers,” not primarily framed as people in need but as people wanting something from us.
Another such shift was the increased use of the word “consumer” in the second part of the 20th century. Google’s Ngram viewer, which trawls a huge corpus of English-language texts, finds the word two-thirds more prevalent in 1980 than 1960.
Ragdoll_Proletariat on February 18th, 2018 at 14:34 UTC »
I work for welfare and in the office we're supposed to call someone who claims benefits a "customer". I lost a lot of faith in the welfare system when I noticed that in the office it's referred to as "the business" rather than "the service" or "the organisation".
ed00000r on February 18th, 2018 at 14:19 UTC »
Watch The Century Of The Self, it’s on YouTube. Quite good documentary about the beginning of consumism and the manipulation of the masses: https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s
_winterofdiscontent_ on February 18th, 2018 at 13:37 UTC »
Haha. This has been my rant now for quite a while: We accept conditioning and don't really think about why we do what we do, whether we even want the end result, where the idea actually came from, and most of all is it in our best interest even in the short run let alone the long run. Answer: We are clueless.
One of my favorites at the moment is the newest form of road rage up here in my sleepy part of the world (Finland). Some drivers cannot bear for someone to drive in front of them. They will chase down every vehicle ahead of them just to be at the front of the line. I'm not talking about rush hour or even when there are more than two vehicles on the road. I can be literally the only other car on that side of the road and they will cross double yellow lines to be ahead of me and still drive exactly the same speed.