Looking back over a previous blog I abandoned in mid-2007, and cringing over the quality of most of the posts there – I came across the following angry polemic on advertising and consumer society and I’ve decided to re-post it here because, apart from its rather heavy-handed ideological zealotry, and in contrast to the other posts from that period, this one doesn’t suck all that badly. I still agree with much of what I said back in this particular post … and further; in the context of my present blog, I think the ideas in this post present a catalyst for assessing what is really important to you and aiming for that thing. Promoting that kind of re-evaluation is reason enough to publish this post here. So prepare to briefly cast off the comforting blanket of positivism you’ll usually find on this blog and enjoy this short journey into my dystopian sociological musings of five years ago:
Manufacturing Discontent
In the meaningless wilderness of modern existence, there are few evils at large in the world quite so evil as advertising. As the agent most chiefly responsible for diverting us from the otherwise fulfilled lives we could be leading, and enticing us instead with the promise that we could be happy if only we bought a better car than our neighbour, drank a cooler brand of soft drink than the losers, or had marginally whiter teeth than we currently do, advertising is the enemy of contentment and the most potent instrument of control ever devised.
But advertising hasn’t always been the mendacious, mind-control drug we know today. Advertising can trace its history to a simpler, more honest ancestor that served a far less evil purpose.
In the case of the semi-mythical American lemonade stand, if the sign announced lemonade for 25c, the customer could reasonably expect to get a cup of lemonade for 25c. The sign didn’t exist to convince us that we needed a cup of lemonade. The kid knew the lemonade would generate a desire-to-buy based on its own merits. That’s why he was selling lemonade as opposed to, say, leeches or doses of bubonic plague.
Advertising originally existed more-or-less to inform consumers about what a product did, and what it cost. Simple classifieds first emerged in seventeenth century newspapers as a fairly straightforward description of a product or service, and a price, and advertising remained in this fairly honest form for a few hundred years, but in the early 20th century something came along that changed the face of advertising forever. The two world wars happened at a time when technology was able to provide generals and politicians with a brand new weapon, which they didn’t hesitate to harness in the cause of their war-efforts.
Wartime propaganda took advertising for the first time, above and beyond the realm of the honest. Truth has (as the saying informs us) always been the first casualty of war, but never before had the means existed to twist and subvert the truth and broadcast it so effectively, and so frequently, to so many people.
Postwar advertisers did not ignore the lessons of the wartime propagandists. As keen students of the psychological games employed by the various propaganda departments of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and the rest; modern advertisers became scientists, utilising market research techniques to convert products into icons.
The advertising man of the Brave New World (at least from the 1950’s onward) had at his disposal two exciting new innovations that would provide never-before-seen opportunities for truth-twisting. One was the burgeoning consumer society; the flooding of the market-place with a never-ending catalogue of must-have items, which commenced in America and spread in short order to the rest of the capitalist world. The second great innovation was television, a technology that provided advertisers with unparalleled access to the conscious and subconscious minds of the consuming public. Technology gave the advertiser both an unending supply of new commodities to sell, and also the most powerful means yet devised to brainwash people into buying them.
It became the job of advertising to create need in the mind of the consumer. And the two-pronged approach to this was to:
- Constantly create new commodities that people could be convinced they needed, and;
- Build obsolescence into these products so it would never be too long before a replacement had to be purchased.
This whole system underscores the way of life for most people in modern societies. It provides us with our self image, a stereotype to conform to, the illusion of happiness, a reason for being, and most importantly, a reason to buckle down and continue contributing to the capitalist economic machine.
It might seem from the above analysis that I’m suggesting advertising has displaced true meaning from our lives and replaced it instead with a shallow facsimile of meaning, but imagine what our lives would be like if the system was suddenly shut down? Imagine if we all reached a point where we discovered that the commodities in our lives are adequate. That we don’t need a better kind of car, soft drink or toothbrush. Imagine if the advertisers didn’t have anyone to convince any more. If the products stopped changing every week and the adverts just disappeared. Imagine a whole generation of individuals opening their eyes for the first time, thinking for themselves and having to find something real to replace the vanished pseudo-meaning once provided by the products and the advertising.
Back when this post was written, the alternative I posited to the consumer-based lifestyle, was a kind of utopian dismantling of the system; a social revolution, which doesn’t seem very realistic to me now. These days I see a real alternative, based on the individual making a decision to distance themselves from the machine; no-longer allowing it to determine their life-direction, and aiming instead for a life more of their own devising. This is about personal revolution, rather than social revolution.
Despite my reassessment of the solution, when I read back over the above post, the main gist of it still seems pretty solid to me. Advertising does present us with life goals that are fundamentally meaningless and convinces us, en-masse, to dedicate vast amounts of our energy to the pursuit of these meaningless goals; the things we are told we need. I feel that in every life it’s worthwhile occasionally taking the time to weigh up what’s motivating us to travel in the direction we’re going – to really think about it, and try to determine if the life goals we’re currently pursuing represent what we really want. If they don’t, and we decided to stop pursuing these meaningless goals, imagine how much more energy would be freed up to dedicate to the pursuit of outcomes that actually are meaningful to us.
goethe's dream 