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Lethal Consumption: Death-Denying Materialism

648 Words3 Pages

Reading Comprehension Writing Assignment I
Ramya Prajwala Tatikonda
Trine University

What is the author’s main claim?
The author’s main claim in the article Lethal consumption: Death-denying materialism is how terror management theory help us to understand human kind’s insatiable desire for money and conspicuous consumption of goods and services and how this is a masked mechanism of death denial.
What are the reasons the author gives for his/her main claim?
Conspicuous consumption is a direct result of the uniquely human awareness of mortality and the pursuit of self-worth and death transcendence that this awareness engenders. The author says that the underlying motive for accumulating money is to prolong life and achieve immortality. Money has always been used to buy and sell spiritual absolution and has been first and foremost a sacred value, and only secondarily a secure medium of exchange.
In the last century, the pursuit of money has become the primary immortality ideology for the average American; but now people are unencumbered by a sense of responsibility to the community and unrestricted by moral edicts against massive wealth. It has come to the point where not consuming goods has …show more content…

Gold, once an ignored material, became much valuable as it got associated with life giving powers and the sun. Becker (1975) observed that “the great economist Keynes noted that the special attraction of gold… was due to its symbolic identification with the sun….” (p. 78) or that which gives life. The author discusses the Egyptian practice of wearing a golden amulet to prolong life to support the claim of using materials as means to achieve immortality. He also mentions the similar practices in India to further present the point that the value of gold has primarily increased due to presumed capability to increase

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