"America's Emotional and Moral MalaiseThe explanation of Bush’s hold on the United States developed in The Business of Emotions over the past few years, can be summarized thus:
1. Without authentic emotions, the vital connection between thinking and feeling is lost and the ability to act, morally and politically, for oneself and for others, is compromised.
Authentic emotions in the United States are being commercialized out of existence.
Americans are alienated from their feelings by the emotional labour they perform at work, in what is now a predominantly service economy.
Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.
This is hardly a problem unique to the United States, but the commercialization of emotions is most developed there.
Other countries at least have the counterweight of some historical ballast to keep them in check. The United States, rooted in the topsoil of history, built among the graveyards of the civilization it supplanted, has no such corrective.
The more commercialized the emotions, the weaker the resistance to depravity."
via wood s lot yet again.