Citizen consumer
West’s over-consumption a government conspiracy
A media moment – out of the endless stream of inane media appears a CBC Cross Country Checkup promo that asks: "Have we become a nation of thankless whiners?" Set aside the irony that this sentiment is being used to promote the CBC’s 36-year-old weekly collective whine, and ask two questions.
Is there a time in human history when wealthy nations or groups did not turn into thankless whiners? Is this painful Canadian descent into narcissistic negativity an unavoidable human reaction to wealth or a sinister plot to produce obedient, fearful consumers?
The decadent elites of Rome, Persia, China and various eras of European history, to name a few, are a compelling argument that human nature dooms the wealthy West to a brief orgy of consumption followed by a decadent decline with intermittent sackings by the barbarians (see Internet hackers).
This time it will be different if the West succeeds in exporting the consumption bug. This explosion of wealth and ennui is not confined to an elite. It involves the majority of the West’s population, and prevailing economic policy endeavours to expand this citizen-consumer culture to every corner of the earth.
We could blame human nature for the situation, but that implies that we could escape by taking on a little personal responsibility and changing our over-consumptive behaviour. Instead, we can blame outside forces beyond our control, and continue to suffer in a vicious cycle of self-loathing and nihilistic luxury.
There is, in fact, a handy (and large) conspiracy of government, business and media to create a never-ending trend of economic growth based on consumer spending. The highest levels of the world order believe they can produce this economic El Dorado by surrounding people with negative images and convincing them that the easiest path to happiness is to buy it.
To accomplish this, they needed to create an ever-present and all-powerful media that could simultaneously occupy the minds of their populations with fear and its antidote – consumerism.
History shows that war-to-peace transitions are full of revolutionary potential. The government and business leaders that took credit for winning World War II needed a way to keep their discombobulated citizens pacified and shift war production to peacetime production without massive unemployment. When the Allied strategic thinkers put their minds to easing this postwar transition, they realized that Hitler’s use of media could be as effective at fostering the consumer-citizen psyche as it was at fostering the Nazi’s warrior-citizen psyche.
The advent of television in the late ’50s added an atomic bomb to their media arsenal – its timing could not have been better. The GI bill, and its counterparts in other countries, had kept the returning veterans in school and off the streets for the first few years. Now it was time to hook them up to the endless treadmill of consumer culture where work and consumption are ends in themselves.
Television was the perfect mainline to pump the West’s veins full of the consumer culture drug. It could not only deliver a constant stream of negative images to fill our minds with fear and self-doubt, it could also embed a vision of a world where such fear can be banished by owning an endless array of products. The involvement of Western governments in the rapid expansion of television’s reach (a government-run national network anyone?) is testament to their understanding of television’s role in their little plot.
Bad news sells. The media’s strongest point fit perfectly with the conspiracy’s grand plan. Print, radio and television surround us with negative images. Even good news stories revolve around people overcoming bad circumstances. We are now fed a constant stream of violent and disturbing images designed to create self-doubt over the safety of our person and property, which in turn creates the fight or flight reflex. The self-doubt would open the mind to turning the fight reflex into a desire to gather more wealth and goods than your peers and the flight reflex into a compulsive-spending complex.
It is a beautiful symbiotic relationship. The bad news brings in more viewers to see the happy images advertisers create to sell more goods. The more goods the advertisers sell, the more they can pay the media to produce bad news.
The happy smiling family with the green lawn, frost-free refrigerator, bacteria-less kitchen floor, filmless bathroom (well, you get the picture) is free from the fear caused by killer water, killer hamburgers, home-invaders, gangs and terrorists. They always have been. They always will be. With only a little more income or debt, you can join them, and you too will leave Rosebud behind to become new, improved and fearless.
(Although an anonymous "they" refused to explain why, I have been asked, kindly, to inform you that all of the above is satire. No such conspiracy has or ever will exist. Please return to the shopping malls.) |
