Take a look around and at yourself as you read this. You are decked in and surrounded by symbols of consumer society. It’s not just your clothes that give it away, but your watch, jewelry, mobile, MP3 player, bag; the furniture and the fittings; all are brands designed to speak for you. Wasn’t it ever thus?
Well, no. We consume to sustain life, but over the last 30 years we have become turbo consumers. Many people recoil at being told that, like me, they live their life like glorified soldier ants in an army whose purpose is to reproduce a social system over which they have no say. They genuinely feel they follow no fashion and live a free life. But in the immortal words of Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “if you’re so anti-fashion — why not wear flares?” It’s not just what we choose that reveals our consuming compulsion, it’s the thousands of things we don’t. We consume to buy identity, gain respect and recognition, and secure status. Shopping is the predominant way in which we know ourselves and each other, and it is at the point of ruling out other ways of being, knowing and living.
This is because of the consumer industrial complex of designers, advertisers, psychologists and retail consultants who create an endless stream of new wants and turn them into needs. The market competes like a shark; it has no morality but feeds incessantly on us to get us to buy more because sales and profits must go up and up. It means we end up with 120 mobiles for every 100 people and 70 million credit cards in circulation.
It is not just the environment that is in peril, or even our own happiness as we exhaust ourselves working harder for our Prada. Remember, the point is to leave us unfulfilled so that we quickly go back for more. The most dangerous consequence is the eradication of alternative ways of being. Today, the dream of the good life is found by flicking through the weekend color supplements; in new kitchens and cars as we feel compelled to keep up on the consumer treadmill for fear of being defined as abnormal; as failed consumers. We vote every day with our feet for our own good life. It cannot be the good society because there is only consumer society.
The market extends into more aspects of our lives in its search for profit. At the weekends there is increasingly nowhere to take the family but the shops and other paid-for experiences. We end up in a vicious negative feedback loop; we shop literally for retail therapy, to make us fleetingly feel better because we live such narrow monocultured lives. But the very act of finding compensation for a truly free life through consumption further closes down the space for real alternatives. And so it goes on.
Frighteningly, we are just at the tip of the iceberg of the consumerization of our world. The search engines we use every day are amassing huge amounts of information on what we like and value so that they can send us the pop-up adverts we are most likely to respond to. Scientists are working on food ingredients that tell our brains we are still hungry and neurologists are working out how to trigger the “buy” button in our brain.
Who will challenge this creeping monoculture? Not the main political parties in the UK. They offer only minute variations of the same pro-consumption product; for Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats read Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda. They even behave like retailers, testing policies to see what works best and adjusting them accordingly as they compete for market share. Meanwhile, retailers appropriate what’s left of the language and culture of democracy. In the UK, Walkers crisps held the biggest election of the year for its new flavors; Costa Coffee claims “the people have voted” and that seven out of 10 prefer its brand over Starbucks.
Totalitarianism, a society where alternatives are ruled out, was meant to arrive in the jackboots of the communist left or the fascist right. It now arrives with a smile on its face as it seduces us into yet another purchase. The jackboots are in this season’s color and style. We are watched, recorded and ordered not by our political beliefs but by our shopping desires. The gulag is replaced by Gucci.
Are we at the point of no return? Is the space for other ways of being human so marginalized that an alternative post-consumer society becomes impossible? No! Millions of people are deciding to shop ethically and shop less. About 25 percent of 29 to 59-year-olds have downsized by 40 percent of their income, swapping money for time, drudgery for creativity and the freedom to choose in the shops for the freedom to choose a different life.
But they are leaderless. No mainstream party will speak about the dire need to curtail growth and ensure that limited resources are fairly redistributed. Quite the reverse. As the expenses scandal related to the ministers of parliament is revealed, too many of the representatives of the people are now only interested in changing their home, not the world. Like every other consumer they represent only themselves and their own private dreams.
A life of turbo consumption cannot be the pinnacle of human development. Do we want a consumer society or a democracy? We cannot have both. There is still time to choose — just. Shoppers of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your chain stores.
Neal Lawson is chair of the pressure group Compass. His book All Consuming has just been published.
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