En busca del sentido perdido. De la religión y la utopía al paraíso del consumo

Abstract

This paper tries to show how two of the great individual and social legitimation tales (in the realm of western culture, and existing for centuries), Christian religion (in its different forms) and utopian thought (with its political correlates, the so called “socialist realism” or “communism”), have zlost relevance as well as their quality of ethical referent, Weltanschauung, or behaviour pattern. They have also stopped influencing great masses of people.

Man cannot do without the category of the sacred, nor the hope about social progress. Both are represented by religion and utopia. Hence, capitalism (with the collaboration of advertising) has displayed consumption as a “substitution theology” of both categories. All this implies an attack on reason and a return to the irrational, very far away from the Enlightenment.