Academic literature on the topic 'Materialistic Attitudes'

This chapter examines whether there are any aspects of communism that are missed and how people feel about democracy. While almost everyone said they preferred democracy to communism, people felt more secure about things such as their job, housing, and basic necessities under communism. Many of these aspects were affected by the centrally planned system used by communists. This chapter will discuss the differences between a centrally planned system and a capitalist system and how attitudes and behaviors of both governments and individuals can be affected by them. Additionally, there were some components of democracy people did not like. Many said democracy and capitalism made people too individualistic and materialistic. Even with these perceived shortcomings, people still felt democracy was a better political system.

Physics I 6 addresses the question of the number of principles and motivates the need for an underlying principle in addition to the contrary ones argued for in chapter 5. Physics I 6 ends in aporia about whether there are two or three principles, an aporia which is resolved with Aristotle’s own account in I 7. This chapter focuses on two issues. First, it explores how Aristotle’s arguments for contrary and underlying principles give rise to the aporia. Second, it discusses Aristotle’s puzzling attitude towards, and use of, materialist views in I 6 and, more generally, in book I. Though Aristotle brings out deep tensions between his own hylomorphic conception and materialism, he also seems to downplay them for the purposes of arguing for an underlying principle. I suggest that this is a result of trying to motivate a hylomorphic conception of natural substance from within a more familiar materialist framework.

In this chapter we analyze data from our original nationwide survey in Ecuador and find that respondents do not express concern for the environment in accordance with predictions of post-materialist norms. In fact, our evidence indicates that the poor who live off the land—those on the front lines of experiencing environmental degradation as a result of oil and mineral extraction—have even stronger perceptions of the importance of environmental problems. This chapter offers the core argument from which succeeding chapters part. After operationalizing our hypotheses and discussing our statistical findings, we utilize extensive interviews with leaders to further illustrate how vulnerability and extraction affect environmental attitudes.

In this introductory chapter we discuss the assumption of post-materialism championed by Inglehart (1990, 1995): the idea that some groups, such as middle-class urban dwellers, are ideologically or politically predisposed toward environmentalism. We then consider an alternative, vulnerability politics, wherein peoples’ interest in protecting the environment may instead be conditioned by how directly vulnerable they are to the fragility of that environment. The national government’s failures to implement multicultural rights in Ecuadorian indigenous communities, combined with the failures of indigenous communities themselves to unify, open the way for polycentric pluralism to represent indigenous and other environmental interests. This chapter defines these terms and lays out its challenge to the post-materialist argument by showing that strong environmental attitudes can occur precisely where Inglehart says they should not, such as in poor rural areas rather than in affluent urban ones. We situate our study and explain that understanding environmentalism in Ecuador’s Amazon is a matter of realizing that non-Western cultural values, individual political struggles, and material vulnerabilities condition people’s attitudes. More specifically, concern for the environment may be linked to rational self-interest and political identities, rather than being entirely conditioned by the structural cause of material well-being. Once we have established the importance of rational environmentalism by individuals, we then evaluate attitudes in subsequent chapters through this lens.