Insatiability industrialised

 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.