Consumerist Culture
- Cheriyan Alexander
1. Two months ago, I came across an advertisement put out by a posh shopping mall for bargain shoppers. In a band at the top of the ad were the words “Shop till you drop”. I couldn’t help noticing what an apt and ironic summing up this was of the media-driven mania of mindless consumption that characterizes our lives in these dawning years of the ‘globalised’ 21st Century.
The Make-Believe Merchants
2. Never before in human history have people all over the world bought and consumed such a bewilderingly diverse array of things on such a vast scale. And the surprising thing is that most of the merchandise is absolutely unessential to human health and happiness. Just a hundred years ago, our ancestors would have found it hard to believe that artificially coloured, flavoured and sweetened water would be sold in billions of plastic bottles and aluminium cans as a thirst-quenching drink. Imagine their shock if they had been told that this drink has absolutely no nutritive value, but rather has a damaging effect on the digestive system and the bones. And yet, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are sold even in the remotest nook and corner of the world today. These sellers of coloured, sweetened water are giant multinational corporations with revenues measured in billions of dollars, bigger than the combined GNP of nearly a score of the world’s poorest countries. There are parallel success stories that can be told of the purveyors of cigarettes and liquor, hamburgers and fried chicken, cosmetics and fashion wear – a seemingly never ending list.
3. Equally unprecedented in the world’s history is the size of the machinery of persuasion that has been set up in order to generate demand for this profusion of consumables. Without a doubt, global advertising today is the biggest and most sophisticated thought-control project ever undertaken. Some statistics reveal the true extent of this phenomenon. Global advertising expenditures, according to Benjamin Barber (in his book Jihad versus Mc World 1995) rose “seven-fold from 1950 to 1990 from a modest $ 39 bn to $ 256 bn.” Barber adds that per capita global spending went up from $ 15 in 1950 to nearly $ 50 in 1996. One single company, the hamburger giant McDonald, spends more than 1.4 bn dollars each year on advertising. All these figures are huge indeed and getting bigger all the time.
4. It is obvious then that unimaginably vast amounts of money and enormous resources are being spent world-wide in an all-out effort to persuade people to become buying machines incapable of figuring out how much of all that stuff they really need. Shopping has become more than a need. For increasing numbers of people today, it has become the chief form of entertainment, an obsessive compulsion they have little control over, and very often an end in itself. In a recent survey conducted in the United States it was discovered that most Americans spend roughly half their leisure time watching television. And the other half? No marks for guessing. At the shopping malls, of course. The connection between the two activities is self-evident. Television commercials provide the theory, which can then be acted upon in the shopping malls.
5. Until a decade or two ago, we Indians were relatively unaffected by all this. Not any longer. Trendy, brightly lit shopping centers overflowing with all kinds of goods and baubles have sprouted up all over the country, even in the smaller towns. The key word now is “choice.” At last, say thrilled shoppers, we are beginning to get the kind of choice that people in the West have enjoyed for a long time. Nevertheless, the fascination with choice can be carried to ridiculous lengths. A young man, after his first visit to the United States, once described to me-his eyes popping out in admiration and wonder – that “in America they have 83 different flavours of ice-cream to choose from.” He was longing for something like that to happen in India. It looks as if his dream has come true today. At least for the upper middle classes in India, the high-consumption life-styles of their First World counterparts is now well within reach. And they take to it like ducks to water. Luxury houses bursting at the seams with every imaginable material blessing are no longer rarities.
For everyone whose definitions of the good life are premised upon the abundance of material possessions, the times have never been better.
The Tragic Comedy of “Development”
6. The deep irony then is that while pockets of private prosperity are growing, there is an inexorable impoverishment of the resources that belong to the public realm. There is thus an amazing variety of sleek new car models to choose from, but the roads in our cities are in pretty bad shape and getting worse. Fashionable luxury resorts for the affluent are coming up everywhere, but lung spaces for public use – parks and playgrounds – are shrinking. It is much the same story with many other services in the public domain including transportation, health care, libraries and education. The trend is to push even the most essential services into the private realm so that some company or other can make a profit on them. In the process, the poor are being pushed into becoming consumers of increasingly expensive goods and utilities.
7. Advertisers and marketing professionals are working hard to see that even people who live at the subsistence level in remote rural pockets are lured and entranced into becoming passive consumers of everything from cola drinks to shampoos. All they see is a vast rural market waiting to be opened up for commercial exploitation. We are fast approaching the day when it will be easier to get a bottle of Coke rather than tender coconut or buttermilk in most of our villages. The increasing presence of plastic garbage in our rural areas is a clear warning signal.
8. It is interesting to see the connection between all this and what is being drummed up as “development,” by agencies like the World Bank, whose main objective is to make the way smooth for the unbridled expansion of the so-called “free market” economy into every corner of the globe. Enthusiasts of this vision of development are dreaming of a day when all of India will look like the United States with two cars in every garage and the reassuring glow of McDonald and Pepsi signs all along every highway. The final confirmation of our reaching the Promised Land will come on the day the sheer tonnage of the garbage we throw out–plastic cups, junked cars, refrigerators and TV sets – matches the levels of the land of the almighty dollar. When this happens we will no longer be called a “developing” country but will rejoice as the “advanced West,” our teacher and role model, finally certifies us as “developed.” It is to actualize this vision that millions of our youth are rushing to get their MBA degrees.
The Only Way Out
9. But wait a minute. How practical is this vision? It has been estimated that to make this paradigm of development a reality for all of India and China, leaving aside other “developing” nations, the resources of planet earth will prove horribly inadequate. We would need at least another three planets. It is clear then that this consumer paradise aggressively marketed by the giant global corporations will, besides paving the way for an ecological holocaust, prove to be – what an irony! – the most “unworldly” vision of all, simply because it will have run out of worlds before it is fully realized.
10. It isn’t hard to see then that any model of development based on simulating high consumption life-styles through aggressive advertising and limitless market expansion is not only unsustainable but also highly dangerous for the well-being of humanity. The price paid in ecological terms will make it the most suicidal enterprise the human race has ever embarked upon. We desperately need alternative models of development. It is not a wise thing to handover to businessmen the task of ruling the world as we have just done today. Businessmen cannot be counted upon to have the wisdom or the will to think of the welfare of all of humanity, leave alone the health of the planet. That is not part of the training of business administrators. They are mainly trained to do everything possible to maximize profits for the corporations that employ them.
11. The only way to restore sanity is for local communities, cooperatives, civil societies and democratic governments everywhere to take back the autonomy – and the initiative for their own development – which they recently traded away to the giant global business corporations. There is now a great need to re-awaken the numerous enabling spiritualities and wisdom traditions of the various people of the world. Mahatma Gandhi once said that the earth has enough for every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.
12. All human beings have a right to the basic material requirements for a life of dignity. But there comes a point beyond which it is necessary to say “enough” to the merely material. Then one should turn to the ‘commodities’ of the spirit – the arts, culture, community life – in order for life to be truly meaningful and sustainable. This is ultimately a spiritual and philosophical decision for both individuals and communities to make. Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American philosopher, observed, “superfluous wealth can buy only superfluities… Money is not required to buy even one necessity of the soul.” One can only hope that humanity can muster up enough soul-force to contain the damage caused by unrestricted consumerism, lest we really shop till we drop and nothing of value is left standing on our beloved Mother Earth.
Glossary
consumerism : the belief or practice which supports and encourages the buying of products and services. posh (informal) : fashionable and expensive ironic : a statement which conveys the opposite of what it is saying globalize : develop or operate worldwide bewildering : puzzling array : range merchandise : goods for sale. GNP : Gross National Product purveyors : manufacturers and suppliers machinery of persuasion : the attractive and convincing ways of advertising a product through different media. profusion : a great amount of something. sophisticated : highly developed and complex. trendy : very fashionable or up-to-date bauble : a small, showy trinket or decoration premised upon : based on the reasoning inexorable : impossible to stop or prevent impoverishment : scarcity lured : tempted to do something entranced : filled with wonder unbridled : uncontrolled paradigm (n) : a model holocaust : total destruction embarked upon : engaged, undertaken civil societies : groups which strive towards an exploitation–free society based on humanitarian lines. superfluous : more than is needed; unnecessary.
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