h with love and understanding....

A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor
cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not
true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured
objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by
methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the
motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played
upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one
hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to
the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of
manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and
mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and
more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and
selling.

Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness,
break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices
through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and
acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable
in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue
for such productions, which is advertising.

You will say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A
people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and
sated with inferior objects. The whole _art of life_ is identified with
our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses
and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current
style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of
stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the
cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true
appreciations--in clothing, house-building and furnishing--following the
heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.

We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the
real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows
that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily
spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his
name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter
inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming
an incentive of the many.

There are men who would die to make