Profit-&-Cost vs. Values (Comment to a student in my Sociology of Popular Culture course)
Mature capitalist industrialism has become so intensely commercial, so driven by the profit motive, that its influence intrudes into every corner of our lives. And it's difficult even for us to question whether this is a good thing. (For many of us, at least.) It's "just accepted." To some extent, they bribe us into accepting it, but to some extent, they don't even have to bribe us, we're so inured to the practice. We're deluded --not just by advertising, but by a whole complex of factors-- into thinking that "cost" and "profit" are the most important principles of decision-making. (Not just business decision-making, but political, public-policy, even personal decision-making.) We get distracted from what we really want and what we really need, like health and kindness and creativity and clean air. Money is too easy to count, so its more and more widespread use degrades our ability to reason in a more complex fashion than money allows.