Vance Packard, a U.S. prophet indeed!

I read this book ‘The Waste Makers’ in 1970, it was first published in 1960, and I looked at the world in a different light afterwards.

So many things that are in it have come to pass. Peak oil, the world population explosion, water shortages, planned obsolescence, the way society now values people by what they earn rather than what they are as human beings, the advertisers aim to make people consume as much as possible and especially the throwaway society.

One thing that really hit home when I first read Packard’s book was the prophecy that in the future we would be mining our rubbish dumps for the material we had thrown away when the natural resources that had been squandered had started to dry up, so when I heard on the BBC World Service radio that this had indeed was being planned in the UK I felt almost sick, see the details HERE.

Packard ends his book by saying that we should not be forced to make a virtue out of wastefulness.

Sadly Vance that has happened, we have become an addicted society that seems always discontent with what it has and is always looking for something ‘better’. Whether our clothes, furniture, TV’s, cars or personal relationships, if we don’t like it, it can be dumped. So why are people so unhappy, could it be as Paul (Phil 3:19) said, that since their mind is on earthly things their destiny is destruction?