"Happiness consists of Tranquility and Enjoyment. Without tranquility, there can be no enjoyment; and where there is perfect tranquility, there is scarce anything which is not capable of amusing. Before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. Wealth and consumption are important, not only for our own enjoyment, but also because they allow us to exercise virtue and improve the well-being of others." -Adam Smith
As of the last few decades, there has been a huge shift in consciousness that has broken the population into two groups: those who are opening to awakening and those who continue to live under the matrix. As someone who is allowing the awakening process to take shape in my life, I have noticed how creativity (whether it be creating art or your entire life vision) has been diminishing in effort. A lot of us have traded away the time and effort it takes to create something moving and inspiring for conformity and conveniency. But what if I told you that this vision of conformity is being subconsciously placed in our minds constantly through propaganda within socio-economical field?
In the world of Capitalism and Consumerism, we have been influenced to be constant consumers and buyers of the environment around us rather than investing in our own reality and creative energy. Everything is about the material gain and who has the most of it nowadays. It's becoming a rarity to encounter those who take their life's passions and art seriously with the intent to inspire others through the energy that lies in their work. In this blog post, we go deeper into how the rise of Consumerism and Capitalism has negatively affected humanity's evolution. But first, we need to do a deep dive on how we got here.
The Building Blocks of Consumerism
The Consumer Revolution took place back in the 18th century which resulted in the rise of economies and wages worldwide. People, mostly the Middle Class, were given the opportunity of a lifetime to consume things that only the rich had the privilege to purchase. This is where we saw the rise of the Middle Class, the rise of wages that lead to more spending which reflects in the growth of business which leads back to higher wages. The idea of Consumerism was that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's well-being and happiness depends fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions. While it seemed as if this was huge for a nation's economy (which it was), the church wasn't too happy with this shift in economics. Vanity, the praise of material, was looked at as a sin in the eyes of the church and it was frowned upon as the shift in perception went from the soul to the material.
To make the Church even more upset, the publishing of The Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville, an economic tract that was published in 1723, proposed that contrary to centuries of religious and moral thinking, what made countries rich, safe, spirited and strong was a very unelevated and undignified activity: shopping for pleasure or "fripperies". The shopping of fripperies (hats, gloves, hair clips, etc.) provided the engine for national prosperity which allowed the government to do in practice what the church only knew how to sermonize and that was making a difference in the lives of the weak and poor. Mandeville saw that the only way to bring great prosperity and wealth to a nation was the consumption and high demand for unnecessary goods. And no matter how absurd these products may be, consumers (mostly the middle class) never had the opportunity to buy things that only the rich could buy for the longest period of time. In turn, this gave the nation the opportunity to build more workspaces, hospitals, etc while hiring more workers and apprentices.
In the eyes of Mandeville, a nation could be either "very high-minded, spiritually elevated and dirt poor" or "a slave to luxury and idle consumption while being rich". It was imposed that a nation had the choice of decadent consumption and wealth on one hand or virtuous restraint and poverty in the other. This very mindset would inspire many of the Anglophone economists and political thinkers of the 18th century. Jean Jacques Rousseau of Geneva was well aware of the division imposed by Mandeville. Rousseau was against this idea so much that he wished for a simpler life where spiritual virtue was the norm once again. He even wanted to go so far as to closing the borders of Geneva and impose a tax on luxury goods to influence a return to non-material values.
Later down the line, Adam Smith, a Scottish economist and author of The Wealth of Nations, had a more subtle and visionary analysist of consumerism. He ultimately agreed on Mandeville's argument that consumerist societies do help the poor by providing employment based around satisfying what are often rather sub-optimal purchases. While Smith was ready to monk some of the consumer choices, he was still in admiration for the consequences. He recognized that some products were unnecessary and were indeed "fripperies", he saw that those purchases actually encouraged trade, high employment and generated immense wealth and was defended because of this.
Smith also thought that consumption didn't invariably have to involve the trading of frivolous things. He had seen the expansion of the Edinburgh book trade and knew how large a market could help higher education. He understood that humans have many higher needs that require a lot of labor, intelligence and work to fulfill. However, this lied outside of capitalist enterprise according to realists such as Mandeville. Among these are education, self-understanding, beautiful cities and for rewarding social lives. The ultimate goal of capitalism, in Adam Smith's perspective, was to tackle happiness in all its complexities psychologically, not just materially.
Weaponizing Consumerism
To grasp the understand of how Capitalism, the American Government and corporations expanded upon the idea of Consumerism, they had to embed it deep into the minds of citizens at a young age. In 1902, an attempt to promote education to the common person, John D. Rockefeller donated $1 million (well over $36 million today due to inflation) to help establish the General Education Board. Although the start of the education system is attributed to Horace Mann, his model was inspired by his travels to Prussia, now known as modern-day Germany.
Following the defeat to Napoleon in 1806, Prussia blamed citizens' excessive free will for the lost. To solve this issue, Philosopher Johan Fitch argued that education should aim at destroying free will so that after students left school, they shall be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting against their school masters would've wished. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than on generation will be able to control its students securely without the need of armies or law enforcement.
Fast forward to the General Education Board in the U.S., the American school system was designed to remove free will and replace it with the desire to consume and the obedience to work. Frederick Taylor Gates, Rockefeller's trusted advisor, stated:
"In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."
In 1913, Simon Patton, the Chair of Wharton School of Business summarized the new morality of consumption stating:
"I tell my students to spend all they have and borrow more and spend that... It is no evidence of loose morality when a stenographer, earning $8-10 a week, appears dressed in clothing that takes nearly all of her earnings to buy but, quite the contrary, a sign of her growing moral development. It showed her employer that she was ambitious. A well-blessed working girl... is the backbone of many a happy home that is prospering under the influence that she is exerting over the household."
In 1919, nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays was most popularly known as the father of propaganda stated in Propaganda Book:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. As God did in the beginning, it is they who pull the wires that control the public mind. Business cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable."
To continue consumer demand, Alfred P Sloan, CEO of General Motors, designed Planned Obsolescence which is a strategy of deliberately ensuring that the current version of a given product will become out of date or useless within a known time period. This proactive measure guarantees that consumers will seek replacements in the future uplifting demand. Sloan also tiered the cars based on incomes to consistently have consumers wanting the next "better" version as a sign of wealth to the masses.
Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers further expanded Sloan's concept when writing in the Harvard Business review of 1927:
"We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
Months before the Great Depression, 31st President Herbert Hoover gave a speech to young, aspiring advertisers stating:
"You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress."
Throughout the 1930s, the National Association of Manufactures in the U.S. assembled a team of advertisers, marketers and psychologists to counteract government attempts to manage the economy during the Depression. Their strategy was to launch a relentless ad campaign that equated consumerism with the American way. Public discourse relabeled Americans to "consumers" and were reminded at every opportunity of their duty to contribute to the economy by purchasing factory-made products. Even radio soap operas became specifically written with the sole intention of what the show could advertise in terms of merchandise signaling that at the end of your suffering was just one purchase away.
Following WWII, as the U.S. saw remarkable economic growth and rampant material pursuits, economist, Victor Laeu, would epitomize the nation status quo stating:
"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that seek our spiritual satisfaction in consumption... We need things consumed, burnt up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."
Consumerism and the Propaganda Machine
To get to the point where we're at today in terms of the immense number of advertisements and propaganda, we have to go deeper into the impact that Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, and his collaborations with government and corporations has had on influencing the masses towards consumerism and public relations.
Although propaganda has been a powerful force throughout history, it's first widespread and systematic use in the modern era occurred during WW1. Woodrow Wilson ultimately opposed entering WW1 and in 1916, he was up for re-election under the slogan: "He kept us out of war" and even stating, "The U.S. must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls". However, with Germany's violation to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare and their attempts to form an alliance with Mexico, the U.S. was forced to declare war which prompted a psychological campaign against its own nation.
While some military officials called for strict censorship of the anti-war press, George Creel, a journalist and former commissioner of the Denver police department, proposed a different approach: a comprehensive propaganda campaign shifting American values and patriotism and pursuit of Wilson's vision of a new world order and as a hero of democracy. Wilson appointed Creel to head the newly established Committee on Public Information. Creel assembled a team of distinguished professionals including celebrated illustrators, acclaimed professors, Pulitzer prize-winning novelists and renowned commentator, Walter Lippmann.
The CPI quickly began to control the portrayal of America and Globel Media ensuring only images of the U.S. as peacemakers and liberators of democracy. Hollywood was also weaponized using celebrities as voices of war and as a way to block all German-made films both foreign and domestic. U.S. newspaper published over 20,000 columns weekly demonizing the German military and promoting expanding presidential powers in foreign relations all while encouraging Americans to support censorship to ensure a speedy victory.
Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 making it a crime to obtain and/or share information that could harm National Security and aid foreign nations determining that any written materials violating the act or otherwise urging treason were non-mailable matter with postmasters ultimately denying 74 newspapers mailing privileges. With the Sedition Act of 1918, these restrictions were expanded imposing fines of up to $10,000 and a 20 year prison sentence for Speech deemed disloyal to the government or war efforts. This helped result in nearly 5 million Americans serving in the war ultimately resulting in Germany to cease military operations in the Western front with the armus of 1918.
Enter Bernays
As Wilson embarked to France to sign the Treaty of Versailles signaling the true end of the war, he invited along with him George Creel and a volunteer of the CPI that had particularly gained Wilson's interests, Edward Bernays. As the Treaty of Versailles may have ended the war, it set the stage for a new kind of battle, a war not designed with weapons but manufactured with desire, one that turned American ideals into its own pills of sedation fueling an economic machine that would forever reshape the nation's identity.
Sigman Freud, Edward Bernays' uncle, gifted him The Introduction of Psychoanalysis, a book that introduced Bernays to the concept of unconscious motivations. For his belief that consent could be engineered to control and regiment the masses according to their will without the masses knowing about it. Realizing unconscious forces, not rational thought, were driving human behavior far beyond what economists considered the rational consumer.
Before Bernays, advertising was a simple, logical process. Americans purchased efficient, reasonably priced products as the culture was one of ownership and frugality, so companies didn't see the need to invest in advertising ultimately leading industrialists to quickly become concerned they would need to shut down factories as Americans' material needs were quickly becoming satiated. Bernays began to create spontaneous events, or what he'd like to call the "creation of circumstances", to begin to sell desire. Bernays used a tactic using seemingly independent organizations to promote his client's interests. He explained: "If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway."
Examples:
Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary -> promoting dixie cups
Radio Institute of the Audible Arts -> advancing interest of Ivory soap
The Temperature Research Foundation -> highlighting the benefits of refrigeration benefiting General Electric
Middle America Information Bureau -> spinning events in Central America in favor of United Fruits' goals
These organizations, though appearing to serve the public good, were in reality PR fronts designed to promote his clients.
Bernays also regularly leaned on the public's perception of doctors stating:
"You can get practically any idea accepted. If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows or doesn't know." -Edward Bernays on David Letterman.
The Beech-Nut packing company which produced meats such as ham, sausage and bacon started to notice that its sales were drastically dropping and hired Bernays to turn the tide.
"We carried out a letter to 5,000 physicians, obviously all of them concurred that a heavy breakfast was better for the health of the American people than a light one. That was publicized in newspapers throughout the country had headlines saying 4,500 physicians urge heavy breakfast in order to improve health of American people. Many of them stated that bacon and eggs could be embodied with the breakfast and, as a result, the sale of bacon went up." -Edward Bernays
Bernays was also hired by The Aluminum Company of America as they were facing lawsuits of dumping toxic waste into the rivers. Using health experts, primarily dentists, the campaign sold America the dental benefits of fluoride in consumable water. Today, about 75% of the nation's water source contains fluoride and the Aluminum Company of America was relieved of all of its lawsuits.
Advertisers soon began using Bernay's tactics of exploiting subconscious desire completely altering self-perception moral virtue ultimately replacing it with the endless lust of material goods.
Examples:
Car advertisements ignored gas mileage and reliability and instead presented the car as a symbol of sexual virility or freedom from the slavery of work and family life.
Coca-Cola was no longer a tasty soda but treated as the gateway to the ideal life.
The portrayal of desire also led to the use of predatory psychoanalytic advertisements known as "whisper copy" which preyed upon the viewers deep irrational insecurities by conjuring paranoid images of what others might actually be thinking or even saying, specifically targeting women.
Example: A 1919 survey found that 70% of women didn't feel the need for deodorant. However, throughout the 20s and 30s, body odor was portrayed as the reason you couldn't find a man.
One of the most influential figures of this time was Ernest Dichter often called the "Freud of Madison Avenue" or "Mr. Mass Motivations". After fleeing Europe to escape the Nazis, Dichter brought his psychoanalytic techniques to advertising using psychodrama, anthropology, as well as in-depth interviews to uncover consumer's hidden desires.
In the 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard noted that rows of children lined the halls of Dichter's NY mansion where they were watching TV while resident psychologists crouching behind special screens secretly filming and studying their every action so they could inform advertisers how to manipulate their unconscious minds. Dichter called such groups his "living laboratory". One such session even led to the invention of the Barbie doll where psychologists noted that "young girls wanted someone sexy looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like, long legs, big breasts, glamorous." To Packard, Dichter's mansion was a sinister factory that implanted self-destructive desires in consumers. But unfortunately, Packard's book only made Dichter more famous and well respected amongst the world of business. Dichter believed he saw himself as the general on the battlefield for free enterprise.
Edward Bernays also believed in strict, ethical code where the needs of society should always come before those of any individual stating: "the duty of the higher strata is to inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion."
During the 1950s, The United Fruit Company held 42% ownership of Guatemalan land and 65% of all imports from the U.S. It not only owned all of Guatemala's banana production and monopolized banana exports, it also owned the country's telephone and telegraph system, and almost all of its railroad track. The Democratic election of Jacobo Arbenz with his plans of land reform and distrust of all U.S. Government threatened the company's operations. The United Fruit Company then hired Bernays where he portrayed the Guatemalan government as a communist threat leveraging the U.S. Cold War anxieties. His efforts combined with strategic media manipulation as his company literally controlled all news out of Guatemala played a critical role in convincing the U.S. government to back a coupe that ultimately overthrew Arbenz in 1954. The operation which was in reality a corporate-driven intervention that had devastating effects on Guatemala contributing to years of civil unrest and suffering but ultimately allowed The United Fruit Company to remain in power.
Social Media Fueling Consumerism
Social media platforms rely on surveillance advertising also known as "online behavioral advertising" to collect vast amounts of personal data which they then share with advertisers. They capture more than your name, address, etc and are more invasive than you think. They capture your network details, connection type and speed, your IP address with TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in particular being able to access information on other devices attached to your network and even how you interact with those other devices. They track the keystrokes on your keyboard with Facebook even tracking the type of mouse you use and the way in which you tap it. They monitor your interests in specific people, pages, accounts and hashtags. Observing the frequency and duration of your interactions all in attempt to tailor advertisements to be solution to your newly founded concerns.
With nearly 50% of people shopping on Instagram weekly, social media platforms also track extensive transaction details both on their interfaces and through third-party sites including credit or debit card info, shopping details and authentication details.
Even if you're not actively using the platform, they're still gathering immense detail and the other sites that you visit then share the info back towards those social media platforms. These sites share how often you visited, what brands and styles you viewed and even how much you considered spending. This allowed social media sites to then specifically target you with ads for those products.
Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former FTC commissioner, stated: "Behavioral advertising generates profits by turning users into products, their activity into assets, their communities into targets and social media platforms into weapons of mass manipulation." He referenced the 2019 lawsuit against Facebook where the FTC imposed a historic fine of $5B after the company violated a 2012 FTC order by deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. They stated: "To maximize the probability of inducing profitable user engagement, Facebook has a strong incentive to (a) increase the total time a user engages with the platform and (b) curate an environment that goads users into monetizable actions. To accomplish both these objectives, Facebook and other companies with a similar business model have developed an unquenchable thirst for more and more data. This data goes far beyond information that users believe they are providing, such as their alma mater, their friends and entertainers they like. Facebook can develop a detailed, intimate portrait of each user that is constantly being updated in real time, including our viewing behavior, our reactions to certain types of content, and our activities across the digital sphere where Facebook's technology is embedded. The company can make more profit if it can manipulate us into constant engagement and specific actions aligned with its monetization goals. As long as advertisers are willing to pay a high price for users to consume specific content, companies like Facebook have an incentive to curate content in ways that affect our psychological state and real-time preferences.
This profit driven focus becomes more evident when we consider that the average American spends over 2 1/2 hours on social media and 3 hours watching TV daily encountering 2 million ads a year.
Social Media platforms tap into the same neural pathways that make slot machines and cocaine so addicting. Using intermittent variable rewards to deliver unpredictable dopamine spikes, this tactic keeps viewers more engaged fostering an endless sense the next rewarding moment is just one more scroll away.
Cornell professor, Brian Wansink, did a study where participants with a bottomless soup bowl consumed 73% more calories than those with a regular bowl demonstrating how unlimited stimuli can lead to excessive consumption.
However, this pursuit of endless dopamine has severe consequences completely altering our neural pathways. Dr. Anna Lembke, American Psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction medicine dual diagnosis clinic, highlights: "We go into a dopamine deficit state. That's the way the brain restores homeostasis: if there's a huge deviation upward, then there's going to be a deviation downward."
The results showed that active and passive social media use were significantly and positively associated with users' enjoyment, whereas passive social media use significantly increased depression. Both enjoyment and depression were significantly and positively associated with users' impulse buying. Materialism positively moderated the relationship between enjoyment and impulsive consumption, while self-control significantly reduced the effect of depression on impulse buying. -National Library of Medicine
Dr. Phillip Ozimek from the Faculty of Psychology at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany recruited 1,230 people for their online survey. In order to participate, respondents had to use at least one social media channel at least once a week. On average, the participants stated that they spend just over 2 hours a day on social media. The research team used six different questionnaires to determine the extent to which the participants had a materialistic attitude and tended to compare themselves with others, whether they used social media more actively passively, whether they were addicted to social media, how stressed and how stressed and how satisfied they were with their lives.
"The data showed that a stronger materialistic approach goes hand in hand with a tendency to compare oneself with others," points out Phillip Ozimek. This comparison is very easy to make on social media, primarily through passive use, i.e. by looking at the content posted by other users. Materialism and passive use were also linked to addictive use for social media. "By this we mean, for example, that users are constantly thinking about the respective channels and fear that they are missing out on something if they are not online."
Currently 80% of American shoppers base their purchases off their friend's social media posts. A Forbes advisor survey found that 42% of people went into credit card debt or excessed their budget after seeing similar vacations online. 23% selected that they spent between $1500 and $2000 to do so. Fewer than 6% of respondents overspent by less than $500.
Statista Research revealed that 78% of marketers plan to increase their advertising budget towards social media influencers to a total of $7.1B by the end of 2024. As 74% of consumers have purchased a product after an influencer recommended it.
Let the Stats Speak
Today, there are more TVs than people in the average American household where adults on average spend roughly 3 hours a day watching TV being exposed to over 2 million ads annually. Meanwhile, to establish brand name preference, over $17 billion is spent yearly on ads solely targeting children with the average child seeing around 40,000 ads a year.
The average American spends $754 a year on impulse social media purchases with 81% of customers buying decisions being influenced by their friends post on social media.
Within the last 50 years, the medium wage when adjusted for inflation has increased by 18 cents while the average price for homes are up 1600%, food is up 736%, a new car is up 709% and college up by 179%. The average American spends roughly $524,000 in taxes throughout ones life.
Today, more than 53% of Americans have gone into debt using retail therapy as a way to cope with their emotions.
Financial terms that were the most misunderstood by students were "Stocks and Bonds" (53%), "401k and retirement" (45%) and "taxes" (28%). The top three things high school students wanted to know about managing their finances were how to become wealthy (43%), how to save money (40%) and how to avoid debt (37%).
Conclusion
It's become apparent in my research that the state of the world we live and with the powers that control it have an agenda of their own and that we are merely pawns within it. What I've learned is blatant manipulation of the masses to seize control of the minds of people to buy into a system that works for a small minority of people. This system has influenced the masses to attach to the idea of conformity rather than sovereignty of one's own subconscious mind and decisions. It can be tough to do so if there is constant propaganda everywhere we turn. Some of us are willingly giving away to this system without an afterthought while others desire to break off and be the master of their own realities.
Propaganda and subliminal messaging are something we shouldn't condone as a society especially used for means of power and control. To use the masses to uplift certain individuals and eliminate "competition" is a different type of warfare we find ourselves in. For individuals to distract you from your true power and potential is a sin in its own right. We, as constant creators, shouldn't condone these tactics whatsoever and limit the abilities of the people. We can truly create a socio-economic system of our own that influences a flow of value that effects all people and that all people can benefit from while keeping their integrity.
So, while consumerism may not be what Adam Smith envisioned today, the hope of the future is that we may not forever need to be making money off of silly and vain consumer appetites but that we may also learn to generate enormous profits from helping people as consumers AND producers in the truly important and ambitious aspects of our lives.
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