Consumerism
Rip Cronk
Chapter 5
Consumerism and New Capitalism
The golden age of modern man has come and gone. The morality of entrepreneurial capitalism has given way to the greed of New Capitalism. The corporate ethic is the business ethic. You can feed the public poison if it turns a buck. Within the corporate hierarchy the salaried employee no longer has the incentives of the entrepreneurial capitalist. The consumer is no longer courted by the competition of small businesses. Small business has been crowded out by corporate capitalism to ensure less competition and greater profits. In its duplicitous plot to throttle the public, corporate policy assumes only self-interested exploitation of the market and environmental resources. The priorities are not intrinsically humanitarian or ecologically sensitive.
The economic disparity existing in our country paints a bleak picture of the future. Profit margins take precedence over altruistic concerns for human rights. For almost a decade, the controlling political hierarchies have adhered to policies that violate commonly held ideals of equal justice and peaceful coexistence. Despite constitutional guarantees to the contrary, the public is subjected to political and economic systems bent on exploiting the rights of the many to profit the few. Government policy seldom represents the masses, nor does it function on behalf of the people beyond a facade of social responsibility. Our representative government legislates the political agenda of major contributors.
To the corporate capitalist, the consumer is a target. Controlling interests commodify culture and sell it to a public weaned on media advertising. Product selection is reduced, not to what the public wants, but to what it will accept at a greater profit for the stockholder. This includes the availability and variety of commodities as well as their quality. Our choices and freedoms are limited by corporate policy. As we become acclimated to life around the television set, collectively striving for a media-produced image, our choices are made for us. Choice is reduced to brand name. We sacrifice self-knowledge for consumerism. Consumerism, like communism and fascism, is a secular religion restricting freedom of choice.
In the myth of consumerism, the individual is gratified and integrated into society by consuming. The consumer sublimates cultural fulfillment to the rewards of buying and owning products. Mass media perpetuates the myth of consumerism as a priority of New Capitalism. Consumerism exists as an incomplete and inadequate system of values aggressively promoted by corporate interests through political pressure and television advertising. The public is subjected to a parade of commodities and fabricated television spectacles designed to keep it preoccupied with the ideals and values of consumerism. As America settles into its nightly routine of television viewing, corporate profiteers are quick to substitute the lure of material luxury and consumer gratification for the fading spirit of our cultural heritage. Corporate America placates the flaccid public with dispiriting pastiche. Media advertising sells an image -- an empty shell. Instead of Swiss clockworks encased in hand carved hardwood, the consumer is offered a cheap imitation of routed particle board and computer chip technology. Who cares as long as it looks good?
Beneath its smug persona lies an insecure America striving to fill an image portrayed in the media. Self-awareness and self-worth have been distorted. We are what we wear. In New Capitalism's seduction of the television audience, the individuating personality identifies with advertising fantasies and consumer ideals. Who we are merges with roles and images portrayed in the media. Ever so subtly we are losing our ability to act independently of the justifications of consumerism. This constitutes a qualitative loss to the individuation process and a corruption of our ethical code. The addiction to television viewing and the affront on human values by mass media advertising has rendered an exploited habitual consumer with a poorly actualized personality.
The hallowed dollar is a cheap substitute for cultural values lost to greed and ambivalence in postmodern America. Economic worth has displaced traditional cultural values defining self-worth. Self-worth is gauged by buying power. The acts of buying and the prestige and empowerment of ownership reinforce self-worth within consumer society. You can see it in the haughty and demanding attitude of the consumer as he stands before the cashier.
Western society’s addiction to television viewing facilitated the transition to consumer society. As advertising deceit and academic nihilism gutted culture of its subjectively realized values, the public was easily swayed onto the path of consumerism. In the midst of a major identity crisis, will America realize the lack of morality and humanitarianism in a world based on media image and the transient satisfaction of ownership? The reduction of cultural values to consumer gratification has produced a situation in our 'enlightened' society where product availability, as opposed to survival needs, becomes ethical justification for political oppression.
New Capitalism is the enemy of the people. Behind the butchery of symbolic values by media advertising, corporate profiteers line their pockets. More than to simply ensure a profit, consumerism is the means by which big business maintains control of its buying public. Society will eventually awaken from its infatuation with consumerism to find itself stripped of tradition, controlled by an oppressive power structure and bound to the credit obligations of a defunct American dream. Consumers are only beginning to realize the political power they wield as a collective buying force. This potential has only been tested on a small scale by union pickets and grassroots economic boycotts. Neither the oppressed population nor by our ‘representative’ government seem willing to take action against the abuses of New Capitalism. Do not underestimate the power of consumer gratification to hold sway on the cultural majority even in the face of economic depression. In the future, as the public tires of the shallow gratification and empty promises of consumerism, it will turn to large scale boycotts to control the tactics of corporate policy.
Imagine: When the Beatles’ anthems of the 1960s started showing up as background music in Nike shoe commercials, they lost their value as symbols for the ideological struggles of the era. While the sneakers were temporarily graced with the aura of the famous recordings, the songs were drained of transcendent value in the process. The references to running shoes and advertising overshadow the associations with the cultural flourish of the 1960s.
Something in the essence of perceived reality is lost in the commercialization of culture. Perception loses its richness, depth and periphery. Consumerism disenfranchises subjectivity. While capitalism is linked to the origin of consciousness, consumerism and advertising duplicity have become threats to the individuation process. The affectiveness of the sociocultural symbol diminishes as its exploitation in the media siphons ineffable content to attract the consumer. As the power of the symbol is depleted by parasitic deconstruction, the sign’s tentative bond with being is broken. Advertising deceit corrupts the illusion of a timeless ideal. By falsifying the framing experiences, advertising robs the symbol of its meaning, and the ideal of its sense of truth.
Extensive exposure to the duplicity of media advertising weakens the grasp of consciousness on subjective knowledge of being. As advertising duplicity invades the ideal realm and appropriates subjective value for product enhancement, established set of conventions lose their ability to inspire metaphysical truth. This debilitation of the symbol is undermining the ontological ground of Western culture. The commercial exploitation of culture is widening the rift between word and truth. With the defamation of the sociocultural (aesthetic, psychoanalytic) symbol, the substantiating experiences of culture recede into the shadow.
