I ran into a ridiculous article on John Mayer and his materialist obsessions and found it so bizarre that I had to know more about this guy. I have paid no attention to Mayer before now but after digging around a bit I discovered that he is, quite literally, the living embodiment of what one sociologist calls "The iron cage of commodity fetishism." (Combining the insights of both Max Weber and Marx).
It's also interesting that one of his great passions is timepieces (time is money, don't you know?)
Here is the problem in a nutshell: "I remember looking at it [a timepiece], and it was my friend," he said. "It was one of the biggest things I ever owned in my life, if you were to amortize it in terms of where you were in your life and what it meant to me."
Ah, yes, my friend the inanimate Thing. Amortized life? Who in the hell thinks like this?
Probe a bit further and you find a guy buying all sorts of insane objects at insane prices and who takes vaults of guitars on a tour that features 15 songs per night.
What's his deal? Mayer is, generally speaking, one of those people who have taken the American ethos of materialism and pushed it so far that it becomes a perversion (perversion is grounded in the Latin for 'wrong turn') that transforms life into an anomic prison sentence, despite, on the surface, as being a life of total freedom based in liberation from monetary restraints.
But, paradoxically, any social scientist would tell you that real freedom is only obtained by living according to normative limitations. Chase after the infinite and, by definition, you are destined to fail. The infinite is unattainable. Mayer's kind of freedom and material obsessions leads to servitude to something other than real life.
Anybody who turns the dead into the living is the one who also treats the living like the dead. The thing is my friend and my friend is my tool (technically, this is called fetishism). People who have gone this far off the deep end are those that mediate relations with money and transform the people around them into exploitable objects.
So, if you're a big fan of John Mayer, admire his lifestyle and success, and want to achieve all that he has, you know what kind of pervert you are and what kind of social disease you are contaminated with.
It's also interesting that one of his great passions is timepieces (time is money, don't you know?)
Here is the problem in a nutshell: "I remember looking at it [a timepiece], and it was my friend," he said. "It was one of the biggest things I ever owned in my life, if you were to amortize it in terms of where you were in your life and what it meant to me."
Ah, yes, my friend the inanimate Thing. Amortized life? Who in the hell thinks like this?
Probe a bit further and you find a guy buying all sorts of insane objects at insane prices and who takes vaults of guitars on a tour that features 15 songs per night.
What's his deal? Mayer is, generally speaking, one of those people who have taken the American ethos of materialism and pushed it so far that it becomes a perversion (perversion is grounded in the Latin for 'wrong turn') that transforms life into an anomic prison sentence, despite, on the surface, as being a life of total freedom based in liberation from monetary restraints.
But, paradoxically, any social scientist would tell you that real freedom is only obtained by living according to normative limitations. Chase after the infinite and, by definition, you are destined to fail. The infinite is unattainable. Mayer's kind of freedom and material obsessions leads to servitude to something other than real life.
Anybody who turns the dead into the living is the one who also treats the living like the dead. The thing is my friend and my friend is my tool (technically, this is called fetishism). People who have gone this far off the deep end are those that mediate relations with money and transform the people around them into exploitable objects.
So, if you're a big fan of John Mayer, admire his lifestyle and success, and want to achieve all that he has, you know what kind of pervert you are and what kind of social disease you are contaminated with.