Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 7:36PM | in World Development The Selfish Society
Phil Hogan reviews The Selfish Society by Sue Gerhardt:
"We are rich in material comforts at the price of having become self-centred, self-interested, self-absorbed and self-regarding. Self-contained, too – though also not in a good way, says Gerhardt, as late capitalism succeeded in rotting our emotional links with community, neighbourhood, family and outer world and forced us into making free-market, gimlet-eyed competitors of ourselves. Our relations with one another – in which our forebears found, if not happiness, at least a proper sense of belonging – are shot. Where "selfishness" might once have evoked someone using up the last of the milk, now those proliferating "self" prefixes have eaten away at the moral fabric we used to snuggle under together."
See: http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/18/selfish-society-sue-gerhardt
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"We are rich in material comforts at the price of having become self-centred, self-interested, self-absorbed and self-regarding. Self-contained, too – though also not in a good way, says Gerhardt, as late capitalism succeeded in rotting our emotional links with community, neighbourhood, family and outer world and forced us into making free-market, gimlet-eyed competitors of ourselves. Our relations with one another – in which our forebears found, if not happiness, at least a proper sense of belonging – are shot. Where "selfishness" might once have evoked someone using up the last of the milk, now those proliferating "self" prefixes have eaten away at the moral fabric we used to snuggle under together."
See: http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/18/selfish-society-sue-gerhardt
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Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 7:36PM | in World Development 
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