Tag: Selected Quotes

“Because so much traveling is a quest for authenticity through difference, it quickly becomes yet another locus for competitive consumption . . . When it comes to exotic travel, hell is other Westerners . . . This competition for tourist spots—call it ‘competitive displacement’—has exactly the same structure as hip consumerism. This time, though, the prestigious property being sought is not the cool, but the exotic . . . As more visitors pile into the area, it becomes more ‘touristy,’ less exotic, which ruins it for the people who got there first . . . Thanks to their unceasing efforts at scouring the earth in search of ever more exotic locales, countercultural rebels have functioned for decades as the ‘shock troops’ of mass tourism”

Nation of Rebels, pp. 270-271

“As an injunction to be true to oneself, to place the cultivation of the self at the forefront of all concerns, authenticity has become the overriding moral imperative of modern life” ().

Nation of Rebels, p. 270

“From Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha to Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan, the countercultural rebels desperately longed for a way to opt out of Western civilization . . . The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching became the twin bibles of the emerging movement. The result was an enormous projection of countercultural longing and fantasy onto the non-Western world.”

Nation of Rebels, p. 255

“Since 1970, the average number of items for sale in North American supermarkets has increased from 8,000 to 30,000.”

Nation of Rebels, p. 245

“The new product [free-range chicken] quickly caught on. The name evokes images of the open prairie, with chickens roaming about on the horizon, the wind ruffling their feathers. It is an image that could make sense only to someone who has never actually seen or touched a live chicken . . . . The idea of ‘free range’ is simply a projection of our own desires onto our food. No matter what we do, chickens will never be the rugged individualists that we would like them to be.”

Nation of Rebels, pp. 234-235

“The most plausible explanation for the fact that everyone’s eating Yukon Gold potatoes is that they are really good potatoes and people like them. If the overall result is homogeneity, how can we complain? After all, in order to avoid this outcome, someone would have to get stuck eating potatoes that they don’t like.”

Nation of Rebels, p. 232

“There are often significant benefits associated with acting like everybody else. Expressing your individuality by wearing a funny tie to work is not the same thing as expressing your individuality by using file formats on your computer that are incompatible with those of your co-workers.”

Nation of Rebels, p. 230

“Consumers are extremely savvy, and are fully aware that there are no relevant differences between brands across a vast range of products.”

Nation of Rebels, p. 212

“The assumption that advertising is able to increase the sales of goods has just not been proved, and corporations themselves make little effort to track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In fact, the most reliable studies don’t show that sales follow ads, but just the opposite; ads follow sales”

Nation of Rebels, p. 207