American: being unable to secure the economic stability that comes with homeownership, they have become transients in their own society and can no longer claim ownership to it. Furthermore financial institutions’ perennial drive to turn profit returns into more profit returns, value itself into more value, means also a drive to turn our credit balances into investment instruments made available to financial gamblers festering in stocks markets world-wide. For both Gyges and America a political economy of excess has turned into a crisis of identity. Whereas Gyges loses his humanity by manipulating the ring of power, Americans see their freedom to shape their destiny considerably restrained. Through his invisibility Gyges merges with things, his individuality disappearing in the materiality of the objects of the world. Through excessive material consumption, the objects of our world seemed to have ceased to reflect our authentic, autonomous life-projects.
Like Gyges we have operated in a simulated, imaginary world that conveys a sense of personal accomplishment but actually betray our soul‘s deepest aspirations for the Good. When he turns the ring, Gyges in effect recreates the world as one shaped by desire: the world becomes pure enjoyment for him. The more society concretely becomes a locus of enslavement for his subjects, the more Gyges happily finds himself at the center of his world. In our society of spectacular consumption, we have reduced social prestige to our ability to consume the greatest amount of the most fashionable commodities, for things’ symbolic content structures the imaginary realm that confers meaning and social legitimacy in our world. Things are upheld as the gods whose logos cannot fail to merge with the self