Guest Post by Paul Rosenberg
Do custom-embroidered powder room towels actually make your life better?
If you think so, and if you’re not of the very few who care about towels as an art form, you’re getting your kicks from other people being impressed by you. You’re buying the approval of others… and you’re all being foolish together.
Quality food makes your life better. A reliable car makes your life better. Good medicine makes your life better. Olive spoons do not.
Sadly, much of the Western world, and America especially, has become addicted to status symbols. This has been going on for generations now. When I was a boy people joked about “keeping up with the Joneses,” but the joke was funny only because it was true.
This is an addiction. Yes, it is a cultured addiction – you can barely escape the promotion of it in the modern world – but it’s an addiction nonetheless.
How This Happened
This is what I’ve been told by men considerably older than myself:
World War I was a major turning point for American business. A large number of businessmen got rich at that time, selling all sorts of war materials to the Allies: uniforms, shovels, saddles, guns, ammunition, even horses.
Many people will not remember this, but the US didn’t enter the war until 1917; it had begun in 1914. But American businessmen were enjoying record sales the whole time.
After the war ended in late 1918, things began winding down (winding down a war takes time). They didn’t return to normal quickly, because of a horrendous flu epidemic in 1918 through 1920, which killed millions and not just the very young or old. Still, the plague eventually wound down, leaving businessmen to cope with seriously declining numbers.
It was at that point, my older friends informed me, that big business decided they had to do something about this and get people to buy more stuff than they’d been buying previously: to squeeze more consumption from the same people. And they embarked upon this course with vigor.
Perhaps no public statement on this subject was clearer than one from Paul Mazur, a senior partner at Lehman Brothers, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 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 had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
As is evident from the America of our time, this worked. A huge percentage of things people buy will be sold for pennies on the dollar at their eventual estate sales. They are bought in the hope of imparting some kind of self-esteem, status, or envy, not because they actually improve life.
Now, while I’m picking on things like embroidered towels and olive spoons, we must also acknowledge that a very few people will care about such things for art’s sake… and that’s fine… it is not foolish. But let’s also be honest and admit that such people are few and far between.
Scientific Manipulation
In fairness to American and Western populations, we should add that this change was accomplished with scientific manipulation, which was arising at just this time. One of the major drivers of this was a man named Edward Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He made a lot of money teaching giant corporations to manipulate the public. Here are two quotes from him:
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.”
“Physical loneliness is a real terror to the gregarious animal, and that association with the herd causes a feeling of security. In man this fear of loneliness creates a desire for identification with the herd in matters of opinion.”
There was a concentrated effort to manipulate the minds of millions, to frighten them and to herd them on behalf of the political and financial classes. This was problem enough in the days when people received their news from newspapers, but it was supercharged by television.
So…
Those of us of the West have lived all our lives inside a web of manufactured discontent. We are told to elect political candidates because their opponent is horrible and because things are bad. We are told that we must buy new houses or vacations or a hundred other things, because other people have them and we’ll look bad in comparison. Or that the boy or girl we’re interested in won’t agree to marry us unless we look a certain way, buy a certain ring, or drive a certain type of car. And so on, in hundreds of variations.
All of this is based on the assumption that we are in a deficit position – that the advertised product will somehow fill our deficit.
The fake world – as shown on TV and Facebook – features an endless struggle for empty acquisition and status symbols.
It is foolish to slave away in the service of giant corporations. If we wish to be sensible, we should labor for things that actually make our lives better. And if something is manipulatively advertised, we shouldn’t buy it.
Live for you, not for them.
Thumbs up.
Well. that was direct and short written. I was hoping for a nice long read on this saturday morning about how the herd is sucked into the vacuum of I must have this new gizmo at any cost. It will make me feel so much better till the next gizmo is invented… Fidget spinners anyone??
cheers
Consumerism isn’t the problem…The problem is an America being swarmed under by third worlders, and a system that provides vast amounts of credit to people who are not creditworthy, then charges extortionate interest on the balance. In an increasingly low IQ , short term oriented population, this is poison…
Most of the stuff people have is yard sale not estate sale quality but if you’ve got the ‘good stuff’ it won’t go for pennies on the dollar.
I never let my father forget the time in 1965 he failed to take my advice and buy the AC Cobra in the Ford dealer showroom. It was $5995 as I recall. A bit more than what he paid for the Olds Cutlass convertible he ultimately bought but, as I reminded him years later, which vehicle was the more valuable today.
That’s the nature of the problem. The Cobra was expensive and not practical so my father might have had to make do with a used Ford Falcon for his everyday car to afford the Cobra but after a few years the wisdom of buying quality becomes obvious
OK TPBers, take this idea and run with it. 4 ply toilet tissue. Market this on the home shopping channels on cable tv and make a crapload of moola. Llpoh, Lipoh…..? Throw in a wait there’s more…4 ply tissue holder specially labeled. Us poor dirt people will have to double our two ply for the same effect.
The honeydippers will love that idea.
Consumerism meant something before it became stale. The 1950’s were likely the height of it. I can’t think of anything better than buying your new tract home in the 1950s, new ’57 Chevy in the garage, pliant, barbiturate addicted wife making you a high ball in the kitchen while you smoke your pipe….those were the days.
I am disgusted at the recent trend in weddings of setting up a web page registry where they request specific gift items. So you think you are entitled to all this crap? You seemed to get along just fine before. In such a case, I refuse to give anything on principle.
Do custom-embroidered powder room towels actually make your life better?
No.
Another customized AR, another suppressor, new optics, a few more rounds of ammo, another training class, a bit bigger garden, or another fruit tree?
OH YEAH!