Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques both advertisers for manipulation and consumers for gullibility, suggesting that blaming either side is unproductive.
J. M. Coetzee's quote highlights the duality of blame in the relationship between advertisers and consumers. While advertisers often manipulate perceptions, condemning them for this can easily shift to criticizing consumers for their gullibility. This dynamic of scapegoating does not lead to resolution; rather, it distracts from understanding the complexities of consumer behavior and advertising ethics. In essence, the quote calls for a more nuanced perspective that moves beyond simplistic judgments.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in discussions about consumer rights during a marketing ethics seminar.
More from J. M. Coetzee
All quotes →Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.
The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.
One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
Similar quotes
We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can - namely, surrender our will and fulfill God's will in us.
The Church is a virgin, the bride of one Spouse, Who is Christ, and this Church does not allow herself to be violated by any error; so that, throughout the whole world there may be for us one uncorruptedness of a single chaste communion.
The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.
All failures - neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes - are failures because they are lacking in social interest
There are no greater adversaries than yin and yang, because nothing in Heaven or on Earth escapes them. But it is not yin and yang that do this, it is your heart that makes it so.
Hell is having to execute a pointless act from which nothing ever comes except the need to do it again.