A philosophy or social tendency characterized by blind conformity to materialistic values, conventional thinking, and commercial interests at the expense of individuality or truth.
From the character Babbitt plus the suffix -ism, indicating a system of beliefs or social practice. Emerged as literary criticism in the 1920s and became a serious sociological term.
Babbittism describes what sociologists call 'mass conformity'—it's fascinating that Lewis captured this phenomenon so completely that his fictional term predicted real patterns we now study scientifically in books about consumer culture and groupthink.
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