The Culture of the Market

Questions to Ponder:
1. Is modern culture a ‘culture of forgetting?’
2. Is the growth of the market related to fractured social relationships?

In Paragraph 8 the author asks two questions:
3. How was the humanity that characterized the struggle against poverty transformed into a perception of others as rivals, competitors, participants in a rat-race no one chose?
4. How would we have been drawn so irresistibly to marketed goods, services and sensations, if we had continued to draw sustenance from one another?

In the first article, the author wrote:
“Since they have no memory of what went before, and little sense of their own history, they have only the faintest conception of influences that have shaped them and created the insecurities which torment them.”

5. Does the lack of a sense of history inspire more fear of other people?
6. If people understood how they were influenced/taught to fear others, would it make them fear them less?

Discussion Question:

Has the culture of the market broken our relationships with one another?

Articles:
The Guardian: Slash-and-burn economics caused the blade crimewave
The Guardian: Children of the market
The Guardian: Punishment won’t get rid of knife crime.