seeking happiness.
Furthermore Gyges’ identification of pleasure with the absolute good reflects a commitment not to confront a latent experience of guilt that underlies his betrayal of society’s normal ethical conventions. That desire almost completely governs his way of life reflects a gap in his spirit, for his favored strategy for evading his immorality is a constant recreation of his world as a world in which his moral lapses represent the norm. Likewise our historical obsession with consumer wealth reflects our individual, recurrent, losing struggle to realize in us the ideal of the perfect consumer, a baroque commodity-subject. Such an aspiration represents a desire to escape the feeling that life reduces to nothingness without the brilliance provided by commodities, for, as already noted, in consumer society happiness, prestige, mobility are associated with one’s ability to adorn one’s life with the symbolic content of things. And since one’s ability to pursue commodities depends on one’s access to borrowed credit, there subsists a latent feeling that ultimately commodities embody our creditors’ mastery over our lives through their power to lend. Ultimately the autonomy sought by our consumerist idealism remains unreachable, so that such a delusional quest actually turns into a social narrative of personal failure since what one pursues as the basic purpose of one’s life ultimately is out of reach. A sense of guilt then becomes our lore as a result of both of that sense of personal lack and our conscious realization that our rush to accumulate things only sublimates a repressed reality to the effect that our constant pursuit of credit and commodities hide the spiritual emptiness of a life defined by the logic