Consumer: A person who is capable of choosing a president but incapable of choosing a bicycle without help from a government agency.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes the irony of consumers being empowered to make significant choices, like voting, yet needing assistance for everyday decisions.
Herbert Stein's quote highlights a paradox in modern society where individuals are thought to have the freedom and capability to make substantial decisions, such as choosing political leaders, but are often confused or overwhelmed when it comes to making simpler, more personal choices. It reflects on the complexities and dependencies that have emerged in consumer culture, suggesting that while we may possess the right to choose, the actual ability to make informed choices on everyday matters is diminished, often requiring external guidance.
In practice
During a discussion about voter apathy, I found this quote by Herbert Stein to illustrate the irony of choice.
People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.
The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.
The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.
She asked where he lived. Second to the right,' said Peter, 'and then straight on till morning.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.
It was both odd and unjust, a real example of pitiful arbitrariness of existance, that you were born into a particular time & held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.
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