Idealized visions of status and personal wealth: America's soul searching

Sometimes, this means learning about the broader emotional and cultural dimensions of the psychological after-effects debtor individuals must live with. Many no longer want to be victims of marketing culture's pervasive psychological outreach. The commercial delusion that halting the march of time could be achieved by acquiring products purported to counter-act nature's work now strikes many Americans as faintly absurd.

Has the retail market's communalization of choice actually reduced the reality of achieving individuality through buying power? For many, the erosion of commercial elitism though mass marketing has distorted measures of personal self esteem. If everyone can own a Gucci t-shirt, what makes yours so much more special? Has America's excessive range of shopping options actually limited freedom of choice completely?

In the meantime, in spite of the effects Wall Street's downturn are likely to have on her sales this Fall, increased regulation against corporate gluttony encourages revised personal perspective enormously. At last, America has begun to do some deep soul searching about the true social and economic consequences of its idealized vision of status and personal wealth.

At the end of the day, if the current scrutiny of Wall Street's senior corporate chieftains' trustworthiness continues, personal and professional ethics will rejoin the menu of desired human characteristics in the business world. And although America's current consumer debtors are unlikely to benefit from this moral revision of capitalism's modus operandi in the short term, we may at least begin to hope for the emergence of more appropriately honest corporate and political executive role models in the not too distant future.