[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cO9X4NMb4&hl=en]
A recent Orion article is the best little primer on the origin of consumer culture I’ve read. “The Gospel of Consumption” highlights the key individuals, groups, documents, and events that shaped the culture we live in today.
The protagonists in this article – manufacturers and conservatives – sought to change the underlying assumptions about what constitutes the good life in order to create a more business friendly environment. In their self-serving view, the good life meant consuming as much as possible (so that they could keep their factories busy) within a free market society (so that they could unburden themselves of any responsibility to citizens and country). They used a tidal wave of commercial advertising, brilliant public relations, and relentless political propaganda to do this.
A classic example is the 1939 World’s Fair, which the video above promoted. This massive public relations effort helped define the good life in seductive terms that served manufacturers and articulated the cornerstone of conservative economic thinking. As the article says, it laid the ideological groundwork for postwar consumer society.
What strikes me about the fair are the lengths the promoters went to physically manifest this vision. The fair was something you could walk through, touch, and experience directly with your friends and family. It engaged all the senses. It expressed an ideology that was consistent with American values yet interpreted them in a new way that cast business as the hero in an narrative about liberation. It’s a vision packaged with the care and skill of a P&G marketer. The completeness and scale of the effort persuades by itself. It’s a testament to the determination and long-term thinking of the business elite of the time. There is much to learn here, but I’d be careful to borrow their strategy wholesale.
A key architect of this spectacle was Edward Bernays, one of the fathers of public relations, and not coincidentally, Sigmund Freud’s nephew.
It took business interests less than 50 years to change the mind of a nation. They have been spectacularly successful. So lopsided is their victory that it comes at the expense of almost everything else – our environment, our health, our happiness, our freedom, and in increasing numbers, our livelihoods.
This Babbitopia we live in has got to be one most soulless dreams come true in history. More than that, it’s vision so potent that it could destroy the earth’s ability to support human life. Nevertheless, our society is nowhere near coming to terms with it’s destructiveness. It’s the elephant in the room no one even knows is there. But that’s natural. It’s at the root of our problems. Symptoms are so much easier to identify with. Save the Whales.
What might be new in the Orion account is that it tells of a viable and saner alternative available at the birth of consumer culture – almost brought to you by Kellogg! Seriously, the founder of the famous cereal company was a social visionary. He offered employees high hourly wages and short work weeks (30 hours). His goal was to hire more people in the company town of Battle Creek who’d have more time for the pursuit of happiness. This seemed to work for everybody. Happy employees were more productive. Employees loved it because they could spend more time on things they loved. This helped create a successful company, and an environment where the citizens of Battle Creek had the time to cultivate mind, body, family, and community.
Unfortunately for employees, the company was sold after WWII. The new owners tried to abolish Kellogg’s visionary policies by offering incentives. The changes were widely resisted, though management was determined and eventually won out. However, they couldn’t claim complete victory until the mid-eighties when the last of the holdout departments succumbed to the 40 hour work week.
What encourages me about this story is that a happy, sustainable society is not bad for business, as the Kellogg example shows demonstrated 50 years ago. And that if consumer culture was consciously created, then something more wholesome can be created in its place to serve us and the planet better. It won’t be easy, but as this history demonstrates, it’s definitely possible to change the mind of a nation.
And it might be easier to do now now that each of us can be a TV station, a newspaper, and an community organizer in our spare time at no cost – thanks to the Internet. Being able to easily create and broadcast media and organize ourselves means that we can deliberately create culture. We can change the underlying assumptions about what the good life means and organize ourselves accordingly. This is not only possible right now, it’s absolutely necessary right now.
