Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and the selling of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in commodities...We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate. (in Durning 1991 p. 153)
So economic growth is justified not simply on the basis that it will provide employment (after all a host of alternative non-productive activities could also provide that) but because it will give us access to more things that will make us happy. This rationale for the existing system of ever-increasing production is told by advertising in the most compelling form possible. In fact it is this story, that human satisfaction is intimately connected to the provisions of the market, to economic growth, that is the major motivating force for social change as we start the 21st century.
The question that we need to pose at this stage (that is almost never asked) is, "Is it true?." Does happiness come from material things? Do we get happier as a society as we get richer, as our standard of living increases, as we have more access to the immense collection of objects? Obviously these are complex issues, but the general answer to these questions is "no." (see Leiss et al 1990 Chapter 10 for a fuller discussion of these issues.)
In a series of surveys conducted in the United States starting in 1945 (labeled "the happiness surveys") researchers sought to examine the link between material wealth and subjective happiness, and concluded that, when examined both cross-culturally as well as historically in one society, there is a very weak correlation. Why should this be so?
To reject or criticize advertising as false and manipulative misses the point. Ad executive Jerry Goodis puts it this way: "Advertising doesn't mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming." (in Nelson 1983) It taps into our real emotions and repackages them back to us connected to the world of things. What advertising really reflects in that sense is the dreamlife of the culture. Even saying this however simplifies a deeper process because advertisers do more than mirror our dreamlife they help to create it. They translate our desires (for love, for family, for friendship, for adventure, for sex) into our dreams. Advertising is like a fantasy factory, taking our desire for human social contact and reconceiving it, reconceptualizing it, connecting it with the world of commodities and then translating into a form that can be communicated.
The great irony is that as advertising does this it draws us further away from what really has the capacity to satisfy us (meaningful human contact and relationships) to what does not (material things). In that sense advertising reduces our capacity to become happy by pushing us, cajoling us, to carry on in the direction of things. If we really wanted to create a world that reflected our desires then the consumer culture would not be it. It would look very different a society that stressed and built the institutions that would foster social relationships, rather than endless material accumulation.
Advertising's role in channeling us in these fruitless directions is profound. In one sense, its function is analagous to the drug pusher on the street corner. As we try and break our addiction to things it is there, constantly offering us another "hit." By persistently pushing the idea of the good life being connected to products, and by colonizing every nook and cranny of the culture where alternative ideas could be raised, advertising is an important part of the creation of what Tibor Scitovsky (1976) calls "the joyless economy." The great political challenge that emerges from this analysis is how to connect our real desires to a truly human world, rather than the dead world of the "immense collection of commodities."
"There is no such thing as 'society'"
A culture dominated by commercial messages that tells individuals that the way to happiness is through consuming objects bought in the marketplace gives a very particular answer to the question of "what is society?" what is it that binds us together in some kind of collective way, what concerns or interests do we share? In fact, Margaret Thatcher, the former conservative British Prime Minister, gave the most succinct answer to this question from the viewpoint of the market. In perhaps her most (in)famous quote she announced: "There is no such thing as 'society'. There are just individuals and their families." According to Mrs. Thatcher, there is nothing solid we can call society no group values, no collective interests society is just a bunch of individuals acting on their own.
Indeed this is precisely how advertising talks to us. It addresses us not as members of society talking about collective issues, but as individuals. It talks about our individual needs and desires. It does not talk about those things we have to negotiate collectively, such as poverty, healthcare, housing and the homeless, the environment, etc..
The market appeals to the worst in us (greed, selfishness) and discourages what is the best about us (compassion, caring, and generosity).
Again this should not surprise us. In those societies where the marketplace dominates then what will be stressed is what the marketplace can deliver -- and advertising is the main voice of the marketplace -- so discussions of collective issues are pushed to the margins of the culture. They are not there in the center of the main system of communication that exists in the society.
The End of the World as We Know It
The consumer vision that is pushed by advertising and which is conquering the world is based fundamentally, as I argued before, on a notion of economic growth. Growth requires resources (both raw materials and energy) and there is a broad consensus among environmental scholars that the earth cannot sustain past levels of expansion based upon resource- intensive modes of economic activity, especially as more and more nations struggle to join the feeding trough.
I am reminded here of the work of Antonio Gramsci who coined the famous phrase, "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." "Pessimism of the intellect" means recognizing the reality of our present circumstances, analyzing the vast forces arrayed against us, but insisting on the possibilities and the moral desirability of social change that is "the optimism of the will," believing in human values that will be the inspiration for us to struggle for our survival
I do not want to be too Pollyanish about the possibilities of social change. It is not just collective values that need to be struggled for, but collective values that recognize individual rights and individual creativity. There are many repressive collective movements already in existence from our own home-grown Christian fundamentalists to the Islamic zealots of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The task is not easy. It means balancing and integrating different views of the world. As Ehrenreich writes:
Can we envision a society which values not "collectivity" with its dreary implications of conformity but what I can only think to call conviviality, which could, potentially, be built right into the social infrastructure with opportunities, at all levels for rewarding, democratic participation? Can we envision a society that does not dismiss individualism, but truly values individual creative expression including dissidence, debate, nonconformity, artistic experimentation, and in the larger sense, adventure. the project remains what it has always been: to replace the consumer culture with a genuinely human culture. (Ehrenreich 1990 p.47)
This is an abridged version of the full article, by ©Professor Sut Jhally, Department of Communication University of Massachusetts at Amherst Amherst, MA 01003. For the full version, go here.
NVDL: I am more and more convinced that what is lacking in society is 'a sense of community'. The disconnect, the schisms that now exist between people are growing on a daily basis. It's defining trait is loneliness and isolation. Community is now defined as subsets of family, and friends and lovers, while we can call them friends and lovers. It is a temporary, feel good construct characterised by the chaos of the individual, with none of the care or considerations or benefits of belonging to a larger group.
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