The Cult Of Consumerism
The ancient philosopher Confucius was asked what he would do if given the opportunity to rule the state and he said he would rectify the language. If he were asked this question today he might say to control the media. You don’t need soldiers on street corners to control populations, you can control them in their own heads and their own imaginations. On the one hand it is very depressing because how do you get out of the trap, there is no way to compete with media stories told thousands times a day through advertising, through programming, through the newspaper, through the Internet, through video games to forward the “American Dream”. Capitalism has to do this and unless it does the whole thing will fall apart. Capitalism is in essence like a house of cards that has to be constantly held together and every single day taught the story is, because it is unnatural. The actual equation is maintained by a tremendous amount of time spent in convincing the American people the value of this society. And it is being held down by t
his incredible and relentless propaganda system. Just under the surface are solutions that are much more compassionate, much more connected and humane, much more caring for the outcome of the planet and concern for other people yet these are submerged in a carefully constructed indoctrination program. The message being conveyed is simply that the way to happiness is through the consumption of things. In fact buying something in the market place will make you happy. That is the message of nearly every single ad. The advertising message as a whole is that it is far better to buy then not to buy and that you will be happier as a result of buying rather than not buying. That in itself has been a major force for global change over the last fifty years.
In the nineteen twenties business leaders were forced with a dilemma. Overproduction of goods had exceeded demand. Production between eighteen sixty and nineteen twenty had increased 12 to 14 times while the population only increased by a factor of three. There were several ways of solving the problem; one idea was to reduce working hours and raise wages so that production and consumption would reach an equilibrium. This would have lead to more leisure time for workers and a higher standard of living. The problem with this is it could have a slight decrease in profits and corporations are mandated by law to ma
ximize profits on the part of their shareholders.
ximize profits on the part of their shareholders.
According to business leaders there was another problem. John Edgerton, President of the National Association of Manufacturers warned that a shorter work week might undermine the work ethic and potentially ferment radicalism. If people had time to think they might also have time to rethink their current position in life. The emphasis should be on, as Edgerton believed, more work and better work instead of upon leisure. It seems like a harmless enough statement but what businessmen were advocating was revolutionary. Production would no more be about satisfying human needs it would be an end in itself. Rather than a democracy of ideas or mass participation the United States would become a democracy of material goods. The citizen would be replaced by the consumer.
The problem of Capitalism is the problem of consumption. After the basic needs have been met there is no real need of consumption. You have to convince people t
hat their identities are based upon the consumption of objects for which there is no material need. That is the problem that comes from the expansion of the market. If you look at advertising it has a very interesting history. Right up until the nineteen twenty advertising spoke about the products themselves. It spoke of how they were made, what that product did, how well it lasted, it was simply a discourse about objects. However around 1920 that concept changed and from that period on advertisement began talking about the relationship of goods to our needs rather than the goods themselves.
hat their identities are based upon the consumption of objects for which there is no material need. That is the problem that comes from the expansion of the market. If you look at advertising it has a very interesting history. Right up until the nineteen twenty advertising spoke about the products themselves. It spoke of how they were made, what that product did, how well it lasted, it was simply a discourse about objects. However around 1920 that concept changed and from that period on advertisement began talking about the relationship of goods to our needs rather than the goods themselves.
At the center of the new strategy was Edward Bernays the American Nephew to Sigmund Freud. Bernays would concern himself with propaganda on behalf of corporations. Rather than focus on the intrinsic worth of a particular product Bernays suggested a new strategy where products became linked with the unconscious desires of the public and in this manner there would be no limits to either production or consumption.
Bernays is considered the father of Public Relations particularly in the United States. Bernays “contribution” was to take the propaganda technique that had been developed for military, psychological warfare and national security type issues during World War I and apply them in a systematic way to commercial issues. One of his best known efforts was to encourage women to smoke. Bernays would stage beauty pageants and photo ops in which smoking by women was portrayed as woman’s liberation, a way to be free and empowered. The market in Bernays mind had a clear desire to be free, to be stronger, to be more self empowered so women clearly wanted these things. Along comes Bernays and the tobacco industry and says here is how to have it. Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses.
Edward L Bernays is regarded by some to be the father of public relations. Bernays was a nephew to Sigmund Freud. Bernays pioneered the use of Psychology and other Social Sciences to design public persuasion campaigns. He published several scholarly works still used in Universities worldwide today. In his book “Propaganda” Bernays wrote,“If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regimen masses to our will without their knowing about it.”
Bernays literally wrote the book on propaganda. His clients include Proctor and Gamble, CBS Television, The United Fruit Company, The American Tobacco Company, General Electric, Dodge Motors and he also spearheaded a campaign to Fluoridate the water supply in America. Bernays was hired by a number of Presidents to engage in propaganda campaigns as well as the US Army. Another quote from his book “Propaganda”
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in Democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power government. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we never heard of.”
Goods don’t make us very happ
y, goods are not central to satisfaction, what makes us happy are non-material things. Things that make us happy are things connected to sociability. That is not to say that possessions have nothing to do with happiness, poor people without access to food, clean drinking water and shelter are not happy. It is not that material things are not connected to happiness they are to some degree but once you get past a certain level of comfort material things simply do not provide us happiness. At the same time there is this giant propaganda machine of advertising constantly telling us the way to happiness is through objects, the way to happiness is through consumption, the way to happiness is through personal connections, through autonomy, through the things done in relaxation time. When you ask people what makes them happy they will rarely say objects. So what the advertisement industry did was to connect their product with those things a person really wants. Advertisement took images of sexuality, health, sociability, of meaning, of family, of intimacy and linked those those desires to images that associate their product with essentially happiness.
The American way of life could be characterized by a myth that would seem to make political activism unnecessary. In the new democracy of material goods there were an infinite number of possessions that could be purchased by rich and poor alike, there was no need to change institutions because the system was already perfect. It was called the American Dream and happiness was just one possession away, the one dimensional man that buys to fulfill that dream.
The anxiety about buying things and the investment in the American Dream has to do with being able to work hard and pull yourself up by the boot strap. There are rich and there are poor but the American Dream makes the claim that there is a level playing field between the classes. But in reality the American Dream is at odds with how social mobility works. Social mobility is much more based on class then the resources available into which you are born. Part of those are material resources bu
t much more 
we are dealing with cultural resources. There are class structures that keep people mostly in their places. There are slight exceptions to this movement from one rung to the next . The level of social mobility is remarkably low in the society. The American Dream is punctuated by very visible examples in the media showing people that were once poor but are now rich. If those people are rich, if those people have made it and the vast majority of the people did not and the major thing that separates them is hard work then the reason the vast majority of the people are where they are because that is where they deserve to be because they didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t intelligent enough.
America never had mass prosperity it was just the period between 1946 and 1980 where it looked like the prosperity was getting better and better and that came out of the tremendous earnings from war time industry, a huge backlog from World War II and the GI Bill that came in and developed a whole new professional class. The prosperity went on until around 1980 and since then there have been cut backs in community services, cut backs in educational opportunity and greater ineq
uality. Since 2000 and 2008 the inequality between the very rich and the very poor has been greater than it has been at any period since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Throughout history the rich have always argued that the poor are authors of their own fate. They are stupid, they are disreputable, they are hopeless but the truth is they are poor because they are paid less than the value of what they produce. Poverty is needed if you are going to
have wealth. The only way a rich slave holder or a Roman Senator or a antebellum plantation owner in the south who can live in this fabulously luxurious mode is by having slaves that work from the crack of dawn until down into the night. That is expropriation, that is creating the poverty of the worker the serf or the slave so that the slave holder of the feudal lord or the plutocrat or capitalist can accumulate wealth.
The idea that human happiness is connected to the immense accumulation of commodities is the idea that is driving the development in China, India and increasingly in Africa. We are starting to see the result of what that means for the planet. The United States repr
esents five percent of the world population that is striving for the wealth and prosperity and promise of the “American Dream,’” but when the rest of the world’s population is brought into the equation then the competition for goods and the energy it takes to produce those additional goods moves earth ever closer to the exhaustion of the physical planet.
Fascism was an alternative to Capitalism. Mussolini Benito Mussolini denounced contemporary “super-capitalism” as a failure because of its alleged decadence, support for unlimited consumerism and intention to create the “standardization of humankind”.
The current rate of
consumption has resulted in real dangers. The Mayans and the inhabitants of Easter Island exhausted their resources and causing collapse of the social system. Today what is at stake is the collapse of the Eco-structure that supports life on this planet. Already populations are social unrest, wars, famine, and nearly every major problem facing mankind as a whole is directly related to over consumption. We have in essentially enslaved ourselves but we have had considerable help in doing so.
Analysis
I found this essay quite useful to get my head round consumerism, they touch on many topics, some of which we have already gone over in class which made it a bit easier to understand. They mentioned Edward Bernays who is the granddaddy of advertising. He linked products with peoples unconscious desires in advertising so people instantly could relate to the product and thought of it as an essential. This form of advertising can be seen as morally wrong, we are tricked into buying products we don't need in effect, whilst wasting the planets resources on consumerist rubish at the same time. Advertising is in a way a form of panopticism, controlling and manipulating the publics spending habbits. Our society is all about looking good, we are constantly gazed upon on a daily basis and judged for our material possesions. I am wanting to produce propaganda which opposes his methods. I will want to create anti consumerism propaganda which should make people question why they spend and what its worth I am thinking of using the work buy consume die slogan as this is quite appropriate then I might have some information to go along side it.
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