Although
a number of critical stances toward consumerism have become more
vocal in recent years of economincal recession, they seem to be a
fleeting result of temporary obstruction in the money flow rather
than ideological resistance against the very nature of this
phenomenon. There appears to be only a handful of people interested
in intelectual opposing the omnipresence of consumption and it may be
because of the fact that what they are standing up against may appear
to be an inherent human condition – being a product of evolution.
.
The
'problem' with evolution is that nature hasn't been a conscious
designer, it hasn't made us to be rational. It hasn't made us to be
anything, it has no goal in mind since it has no mind. Although we
may claim to be at the pinnacle of the ladder, a rather recent add-on
to the mind-boggling variety of species, we still have within our
bodies the remnants of devices used by our genetic ancestors in their
struggle for survival. All of us, whatever the age, race or
education, possess the very same thing that makes us feel like
beating the hell out of people whom we don't like and mating with
those (usually of opposite sex) whom we like. The thing is that we
don't normally do those things. We don't usually act on any feral
impulse that pops up and we owe it to socialisation, which by means
of reinforcement imbues our narrative selves with strong convictions
as to what is wrong and what is not (which doesn't seem to be as
objective as many might have hoped). The basics of that mechanism
appear to have been known to our race since the dawn of time. It may
be safe to assume that ruling by fear was invented far earlier than
„here-we-have-these-commands-we-think-are-nice-so-why-dont-you-just-obey-them-and-we'll-be-cool-ok?”
attitude. In the face of a stick big enough, few oaths hold.
Nowadays
we are facing three problems. One is old and is related to the fact
that we often find it difficult to override the primitive parts of
the brain (think of love and public performances). The other is that
the science of psychology (together with physiological aspects of
being human) has been refined ever since. Third is that the ruling
class (true rulers are usually those who have such knowledge) have
tricked us into believing they have no real power over us. We may
laugh at all the obvious cliches employed in the newest advertising
campaign of a travel's agent we don't even really care that much
about, but many of us are nonetheless convinced that going to Tunesia
is somehow better than spending your holidays in Zgierz. We may not
be fully aware of it, but we've already been infected. It may also
not be that obvious to many, but we are incomparably better off than
our parents and earlier generations in terms of medical care,
learning potential, career opportunities and many other things
commonly and collectively referred to as the standard of living. Why,
then, do we feel less happy and less fulfilled? Why do we feel
irritated when a pocket-sized device needs more than the usual few
seconds to reach out into space to advise us on a matter our
grandfathers had to investigate their entire lifetime?
The
answer is simple. Our hunger is insatiable and as such unpleasantly
irrational. Just like many other addictions.
It
wouldn't make that much of a difference if it was only about things
we really need. Newest developments in the fields of blanket weaving,
food storing or medical research may obviously be of use to all of
us. After all, a warmer blanket is a warmer blanket and a fish more
fresh is more fresh. The real issue is that all too many people would
happily sacrifice much of their food and clothing supply for a thing
they have living proofs they can live without. When judged
critically, exchanges of the „garments-for-an-IPad” sort seem to
serve the interests of IPad sellers suspiciously well. Moreover,
tablets, hybrid cars and organic food seem to have sprung up rather
recently, so they surely can't have anything to do with primitive
parts of our brains, can they? We just want them, all right?
Well,
we all know from experience that alcohol, orgasms and sucrose
pleasantly stimulate our reward systems. Some of us may be willing to
agree that if we knew we were to be sent to a desert island with
equipment limited to five things only, a Samsung Galaxy Note II™
or that Hobbit™
underpants I told you about would probably lose against matches or a
pen knife. In our everyday life, however, we don't usually go to
desert islands. With all those basic things like food or shelter
already catered for, we yearn for an opportunity to become once more
ecstatic over a thing, which, when forced to analyse (e.g. asked
right questions), we'd be prone to describe as rather unnecessary (be
it Bilbo Baggins unmentionables or not). Since we don't need
them that much after all, but feel the opposite, then it must
be the question not of our bodies, but of our psyche. Leaving aside
the philosophical debate on the nature of mind (which is, obviously,
just a brain process), we may all, I think, agree that minds are the
things that exert enormous influence on what we do, because, apart
from a few reflexes inherited from the past, what we do is heavily
affected by what we think. What we think, in turn, is shaped by what
we learn and what we learn is stored in the form of, as we call them,
ideas.
Our
true problem is that our highly evolved, brain-endowed bodies have
been herded not only into material consumption, but also, and much
more menacingly, into conceptual consumption. Or rather, they have
been led into material overconsumption by getting infected with the
idea that it is the right thing to do. That, coupled with the
reinforcing feedback from our brains, which want us to repeat
pleasant experiences as often as possible and usually with a steep
intensity curve (due to habituation), brought us to a situation where
people harm other people not only for food, but also for Nike
sneakers and gold jewelery (both rather inedible).
How
does it work?
In a study by Allen et. al. [Allen, 2008] we can clearly observe a
similar effect, namely, how certain preconceptions planted in us, no
matter how nonveridical they may be, influence our choices. In one
experiment people rated yoghurt and sandwiches labelled full fat
as tastier than those labelled
low fat. In fact both
foods were identical. What was peculiar to this study, was that it
aimed at investigating how people's beliefs about social power
affected their taste experience. Before they were given the food,
participants were asked to complete a questionnaire that assessed the
extent to which they are interested in social domination, resource
acquisition, wealth and public recognition. It was discovered that
those who didn't care much about power preferred the taste of
vegetarian sausage roll, regardless of whether they'd actually tasted
one. Those seeking social power, claimed to find the meaty
alternative tastier, even if it was the vegetarian variant they ate.
In another experiment, the participants were given a choice between
Pepsi and a no-name cola drink and again were lied to about which was
which. In this scenario the researchers' interest was about whether
people endorsed the idea that life should be exciting and full of
enjoyment – an attitude that Pepsi's spin doctors want us so much
to associate with their brand.
Again it turned out that those embracing the idea that life should be
exciting were prone to say that the soda they were told was Pepsi was
more tasty, even if they were wrong as to what it was that they were
really drinking.
What
this study seems to suggest is that differences in our thinking about
food are directly related to the way we experience it. In one of her
interviews, Naomi Klein said that what
all branding is about is fetishizing really very basic consumer goods
and putting them up on a pedestal and making them stand for things
that they just don't stand for.
This commodity fetishism,
a
term coined by Marx and applied to his critique of capitalism, has
been first observed long before Pepsi first appeared on the market.
How we perceive things ceases to have anything in common with their
physical nature. What we're experiencing is an out-of-sight
transition of shoes being a device used for making our feet feel more
comfortable to shoes being a marker of certain traits of character.
Philosophical
deliberations
Coming
back to Marx, he might not have been the first one to realise this,
nor the first one to write about such things, but his writings are
nowadays commonly considered to be the hallmark of the consumptionist
discourse.
It may
be surprising to some, that his nearly 150-year-old observations are
still so much up-to-date.
In his
Capital he writes
(...)
the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour
within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the
physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising
out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between
men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a
relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we
must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products
of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life
of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and
with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the
products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches
itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as
commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of
commodities.
It is a
rather grim realisation that, statistically speaking, only a few
dwellers of our Western world, those trained in critical thinking,
are capable of putting up a fight against that sort of magical
thinking and letting go of the irrational zeal of pursuing the hunger
of possessions. It seems all the more tragic when you realise that
putting people into that condition of apparently unquenchable desire
is what other people do for a living. Yes, there are legions of
people whose intellectual prowess is employed for the sole purpose of
making you want things. This may be why Horkheimer and Adorno decided
to speak rather of culture industry instead of mass culture, since
the latter would suggest that it is produced by masses themselves.
And
all that happiness supposedly stemming from possessing may be an
illusion, too. Experience teaches us that once you get hooked on
acquiring things, there is a chance you won't have enough. As Adorno
[1975] points out
In
so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that
the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture
industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human
beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully
projects.
And
why not? If our love for commodities was satiable, then all those
marketing people would soon be out of their jobs and, it is safe to
assume, they don't want that. What we are left with is a peculiar
arms race where marketers treat consumers with enough reverence to
think of them as inferior beings. In fact, Naomi Klein [2000] quotes
one of them, a senior ad executive in the Omnicom Group, who explains
the industry's guiding principle with more candor than most.
Consumers, he says, "are like roaches — you spray them and
spray them and they get immune after a while."
Later
she writes
So,
if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be
dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid. And
nineties marketers, being on a more advanced rung of the sponsorship
spiral, have dutifully come up with clever and intrusive new selling
techniques to do just that.
She
mentions Gordon's gin experiments with filling British movie theaters
with the scent of juniper berries, Calvin Klein campaign with
sticking "CK Be" perfume strips on the backs of
Ticketmaster concert envelopes and a practice from some Scandinavian
countries where you can get "free" long-distance calls with
ads cutting into your telephone conversations.
Long
gone seems the world where escape was possible. Nowadays the system
grinds all resistance into yet another fashion. Be it hipsters or
people with inclinations similar to Klein's parents. In the beginning
of chapter three she writes:
All
my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper van. That was
enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic
guitar.. what more could you ask? Well, actually, you could ask to go
soaring off the side of a mountain on a snowboard, feeling as if, for
one moment you are riding the clouds instead of the snow. You could
scour Southeast Asia, like the world weary twenty somethings in Alex
Garland’s novel The Beach, looking for the one corner of the globe
uncharted by the Lonely Planet to start your own private utopia. You
could, for the matter, join a new age cult and dream of alien
abduction. From the occult to raves to riots it seems that the
eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing.
And
so freedom becomes yet another commodity. But hey, does mankind
really have to wince at the status quo? Maybe what the world promises
us is not that bad after all and driving that new Opel can really
make us happier?
Is
there anything wrong with consumptionism?
Well, there is the spreading, unspoken rule that only things that can
be easily capitalised are of value. Children should not be interested
in dancing or art for there is only a slight chance that being
artists will make them happy, namely give them enough funds to build
a home or go to Bahamas for their honey moon. In his The Latest
Attack on Metaphysics [1937, in
1975] Horkheimer wrote that
a
man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces
society as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections,
stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that
nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so
low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which
acknowledges man only as a biological concept, reflects man’s lot
in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of
a species. In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers
no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title
must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in
documents to be presented on demand.
Despite a recent
shift in our viewing of the so called soft skills, we, as a society,
are paying less and less attention to them. Being good at resolving
conflicts or being creative seem nowadays much more sought after in
corporate think-tanks than in everyday life situations.
In
the chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment [2007] on Culture Industry
Adorno argues that culture industry, fixated on marketability,
entirely gets rid off purposelessness that used to be central to
art's autonomy. But it's not only about art. It can be taken to mean
something much more general and pertain to all the things that
marketers want us to believe will make us happy. What really happens,
he says is that contemporarily
everything
has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it
is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its
essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which
they mistake for the merit of works of art— becomes its only use
value, the only quality they enjoy
This
also implies that we are not the ones who decide how to achieve
happiness, at least not directly. But being seen as succesful, which
has always contributed to how we felt about ourselves, might have
likely always been connected with conformity, which is nothing more
than going for a rotten compromise between the world and staying
faithful to oneself. What is different now, however, is that the
utopias that we are currently being fed are, as Bauman would have
said, u-vias.
It
seem that many previous epochs along with scenarios woven by
appropriate Zeitgeists promised a happy ending, a time when all would
be fair and square. Be it Christian heaven or modernist technological
paradise, we all could have hoped for a quiet asylum to rest. Now the
pursuit seems endless. There will never be the ultimate IPad or a
yacht of infinite luxury so why should we stop?
In
a rather recent study, published in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology,
Carter
and Gilovich [2010]
some ideas concerning why exactly consumerist culture is unsatisfying
are explored. The reasons are many, but to name only a few we feel
more satisfied with the so called experiential purchases than
material ones (the situation is reverse when the purchase goes wrong,
but that's another story). Material objects are, which seems a
reasonable assumption, much easier to compare unfavourably than
examples of, say, going to two different concerts. A maximising
strategy, employed by many in their decision making processes, also
appears to spoil the fun of acquirins new things. It is because
we live in a world of endless choices and maximising takes a long
time, so people often end up irritated and unsatisfied even when they
chose the best possible option.
That reasearch seems also to suggest that we
automatically re-evaluate material purchases after we've made them.
In comparison decisions about experiential purchases, once made, are
not revisited and so we have less opportunity for disappointment.
There is also the new option effect which is about the fact that
right
after we buy something, they bring out a new, improved model, or
introduce better options.
And again we are left regretting. Numbers five and six are called The
reduced price effect
and A
cheaper rival and
are all to familiar to explicate.
But
there is still a greater danger lurking ahead. Those psychological
aftermaths of engaging into consumerist hype, may, at least
theoretically, be amended by spreading self-awareness. The bigger
problem is that the economical system that gave rise to consumerism
is based on the assumption that effectiveness whith which those
precious commodities are being produced will rise infinitely.
Infinite growth sounds all fine until you realise that so far we have
colonised only one planet that has, be not surprised, limited
resources.
The
graph above demonstrates data from
from the "lower" estimates at census.gov,
the U.S. Census Bureau and does not require extraordinarily vivid
imagination, to realise where it is going. Not only there are more
and more people in the world, but those people consume more and more.
I
am no economist, nor a Greenpeace zealot, but when I first read about
the issue of sustainaiblity it made me feel like becoming a
politician and doing something about it. I changed my mind when I
realised that what statistics show may indeed suggest that some of
our leaders are mad, but also point to the fact that we are the, now
almost proverbial, 99%. I dread to think what may happen when this
system collapses, and numbers say that collapse it will. With all
those zombie-like consumers around, peak oil, financial crisis,
draining of other resources and resulting political upheavals we
certainly can say that these are interesting times. Incidentally
wishing that onto other people is reported to be an old Chinese
curse, one of three curses precisely, each with increasing severity,
with the dreadliest being „May your wishes be granted”. In times
when worldwide culture industry, just like Hollywood before, became a
dream factory prodding people into believing that their lives will be
much better once they purchase another state-of-the-art
whatever-it-is, granting consumers' wishes sounds like
the-end-of-the-world scenario.
Literature:
Adorno,
Theodor W., and Anson G. Rabinbach. "Culture industry
reconsidered."New
German Critique (1975):
12-19.
Allen,
Michael W., Richa Gupta, and Arnauld Monnier. "The interactive
effect of cultural symbols and human values on taste
evaluation."Journal
of Consumer Research 35.2
(2008): 294-398.
Klein,
Naomi. "No logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies." New
York (2000).
Horkheimer,
Max. Critical
theory: Selected essays.
Vol. 1. Continuum, 1975.
Horkheimer,
Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic
of enlightenment.
Stanford University Press, 2007.
Carter,
Travis J., and Thomas Gilovich. "The relative relativity of
material and experiential purchases." Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 98.1
(2010): 146.