The year is 1918.
Edward Bernays, a young American propagandist in the war, realises the potential of the crowd psychology techniques in his work and begins shaping the field of public relations. His ideas on exploiting subconscious desires to elicit behavioural responses from the malleable masses will totally alter the face of our world.
With an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the mind, marketers, psychologists and big business (and later politicians) use it throughout the century to create mass desire for mass produced stuff. While the herd consumes, economies boom. Corporations swell. Markets expand. It’s a highly effective system, a powerful machine that keeps people in jobs and gives them shiny new stuff to play with so everyone is all smiles.
There are, however, three problems with this consumption machine.
Firstly, it’s very hard to control. It only has an on and an off button- but the off button is broken. People must consume more and more or it will completely break down, and that means creating a lot of stuff for them to buy that they don’t really need and often don’t really want either. To make them want it, it needs to be packaged up with sophisticated messages that pull at the levers that make them question the value of what they already have. Or how they look, how they feel and how smart they are, until the only way they really know is to buy symbols- brands- that speak for them.
Second, it’s not very efficient. There’s a lot of waste from all this producing and consuming and not many people seem to care where it comes from or goes, or what the real cost of this is for all of us- even when the air goes bad and sea fills with plastic.
Thirdly, it’s just a machine. It has no eyes to see the imbalance that exists. It doesn’t care that while some live in abundance, most have nothing. Or that the rich grow morbidly obese while the poor are malnourished. Or even that the lucky few get to choose from the latest wave of iTrinkets while 1 billion people cannot write their own names, so can’t get the jobs they need to buy the really shiny stuff.
The year is now 2010.
We are utterly dependent on consumerism. We are plunging forwards into social and economic crises, escalating levels of pollution, worsening climate change, drastically depleted resources and unmanageable population levels. Without a fundamental rethink we are likely to find more than just the trappings of our consumerist obsession gone, yet as Lovelock writes in The Vanishing Face of Gaia, ‘many of us still dream on and rather than waking we weave the sound of the alarm clock into our dreams’. It’s time to wake up, and give everyone else a shake right now. This is not the way forward and we have to find another way.
As the mouthpiece for commerce and the brain behind a significant amount of our cultural makeup, the communications industry has a massive role to play in actively exploring solutions to the issues we face. Let’s discuss how the tools and many skills we have learned can help us make the transition to a fully sustainable economy- whatever that may be.
For further information on Edward Bernays and the origins of consumerism, check Adam Curtis’ excellent documentary series The Century of The Self, with further comments in Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I like to point out that for the first time in history, in the developed world, the poor are actually fatter that the rich, because of the garbage they eat, or are fed (by the machine). Plenty studies out there, but this is an older piece on socio-economics vs girth: http://www.docshop.com/2007/11/20/obesity-and-poverty-examining-the-link/.
Good point Gary, I was more trying to highlight the dramatic imbalance that exists between rich and poor nations, and how our obsession with consumption is akin to us gorging, but i completely agree. This in itself is something that needs to be tackled and i know it will come up in further posts… on the subject, check Dan’s post on Brand Obesity for some interesting thinking.