Chief rabbi: Steve Jobs' Apple lust spreads misery, despair
'iPhone, iPad, I, I, I,' says tablet-blasting Sacks
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Steve Jobs has created a consumer society that makes many of us sad because we don't have the latest iPhone, said the UK's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Speaking at an interfaith gathering attended by the Queen, Sacks compared the iPad to the tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountains.
“The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTunes, i, I, I," he said.
“When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about 'I’, you don’t do terribly well.”
The Queen is widely believed to have an iPad. We hope she didn't take his remarks too personally. Baron Sacks said that people were looking for values other than the short-term profit-centric values of consuming.
“What does a consumer ethic do? It makes you aware all the time of the things you don’t have instead of thanking God for all the things you do have," Lord Sacks said, speaking at the gathering last week.
"If in a consumer society, through all the advertising and subtly seductive approaches to it, you’ve got an iPhone but you haven’t got a fourth generation one, the consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.”
He called for people to spend more time with their families and less time drooling over touchscreen gadgets. So is the Rabbi an open-source man, or just a grumpy Windows user annoyed that he can't get his hands on the latest fondleslab? ®
COMMENTS
You should treat the opinions on the basis of the *opinion* expressed, not on the other view points they may have.
I am not religious, but I have to agree that advertising (and the psychology used behind it) is possibly the worst invention of modern times.
Not entirely accurate
Jobs' and Apple have neither started nor brought about consumerism but the company is the epitome thereof.
Many people would agree that beyond the "superior" hardware quality and their "it-just-works" UX, the vast majority of customer demand for Apple products is borne out of marketing and PR, touting their products as "magical" and "revolutionary" and instilling among some of those customers a sense of superiority over rival products.
Apple have managed to make people evangelise their brand, they've done very obviously and very successfully and that's why this chap has singled out Apple as the best example but consumerism has been around for years and attributing it to one company isn't all that fair.
I'm actually quite pleased
I don't have the latest iPhone, or any iPhone.
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