A satirical ad in the Summer 1997 edition of Adbusters: Journal Of The Mental Environment sums up what's so terribly wrong with the American economic mind: a one page close-up of the face of a morose youth is overlaid with the words, "Feeling empty? Don't worry. Consumption will fill the void." In other words, no matter what troubles you, shopping will make you feel better. In fact, it will contribute to the GNP, making it down right patriotic to consume. And in our commercially saturated media environment, the inducements to buy are engaging and relentless.
This cultural rapture with arresting advertisements and glossy temples of consumption has pushed us to the point where we have confused our right to make choices about democratic governance with our freedom to choose amongst a mind-boggling array of material goods. As we madly shop and the GNP increases and the economy continues to grow, messages of poverty, environmental decline and social anomie make a disturbing counterpoint. This neoclassical notion of continuous economic growth is clearly unsustainable. And increasingly there are humane and intelligent voices that emerge from this marketing wilderness, pointing us in the direction of alternative sustainable economic practices. (See list of recommended books.)
As exponential pressures on finite ecosystems increase, so does the need for swift and proactive change that will turn us away from the notion of growth as continuous quantitative increases, to the saner concept of development as qualitative change. However, proactive change to a sustainable economy seems a stretch when you scan the economic pages of any mainstream newspaper or economic journal. Consequently, we have to ask what will move average Americans to embrace sustainable economic practices in their daily lives? After all, most of us have been nurtured on myths that sing the praises of limitless growth, expansion, progress and rugged individualism. Many of us are caught up in a Huxleyian brand of denial about the planetary havoc our mindless consumption wreaks and are in danger of proving Neil Postman right as we all amuse ourselves to death. Manufactured myths dance across electronic screens, billboards, clothing and print media. Corporate public relations campaigns and advertisers' dollars constrain public discourse. The globalization of commerce and corporate media makes it impossible to prove accountability, while alternative voices are largely silenced.
If we are going to make a proactive change to sustainable economic mind, we must vigilantly decode this seamless cocoon of advertising, propaganda and public relations hype. While many lament the loss of natural beauty and increased congestion and rush in their lives, when asked about the justice of a corporate CEO making millions a year in salary and stock options while others can't afford to eat, the response often is a variation on, "He [sic] worked hard; he must have earned it." Indeed.
In the introduction to their book, Signs Of Life In The Usa: Readings On Popular Culture For Writers, Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon remark on the tenacity of embedded myths, '…human beings operate within value systems whose political invisibility is guaranteed by the system. No mythology, that is to say, begins by saying, "This is just a political construct or interpretation." Every myth begins, "This is the truth." It is very difficult to imagine, from within the myth, any alternatives.' Advertising skillfully, insidiously focuses on our dream worlds. How often do we ask ourselves whether those dreamworlds have been colonized by psychologically savvy and creatively gifted ad-hounds and spin meisters? We all want to be liked, esteemed, seen as special and worthy; we want to be loved and appreciated, so we are exploitable. We have come to think it is quintessentially American to shop 'til you drop. We rarely take the time to tease out the various myths that fuel these compulsions of ours.
Jack Solomon, in his essay, "Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising" writes, "Advertisers may give shape to consumer fantasies, but they need raw material to work with, the subconscious dreams and desires of the marketplace. As long as these desires remain unconscious, advertisers will be able to exploit them. But by bringing the fantasies to the surface, you can free yourself from advertising's often hypnotic grasp." Patricia J. Williams addresses this problem as well in her essay, "The Fiction of Truth in Advertising, excerpted from her book, The Alchemy Of Race And Rights (1991), "Calculating a remedy for this new-age consumptive pandering is problematic. If people like&emdash;and buy&emdash;the enigmatic emptiness used to push products, then describing a harm becomes elusive. But it is elusive precisely because the imagery and vocabulary of advertising have shifted the focus from need to disguise. With this shift has come&emdash;either manipulated or galloping gladly behind&emdash;a greater public appetite for illusion and disguise. And in the wake of that has come an enormous shift of national industry, national resources, and national consciousness."
Paul Hawken explains how transnational corporations distract us with smoke and mirrors in his book, The Ecology Of Commerce: A Declaration Of Sustainability, "It would be easier to see the relationship between large-scale economic activity and environmental degradation if it weren't for the excellent job that corporations do of making us feel at ease with their bigness through advertising images&emdash;beautifully photographed scenes of small towns, local community activities, and families. We're all connected and in this together, the ads assure us" (p. 101).
Indeed, we are bombarded on a daily basis with several thousand advertising messages. We can choose to ignore them, but their pervasiveness is indisputable. In fact, ad-meisters are counting on slipping into our consciousness through the back door, safe from critical questioning and rational thought. Very few people when queried will respond that they take advertising seriously or that it effects their behavior or beliefs. And increasingly, the line between product advertisement, infomercial, news report, and political campaign are blurred. For some to say that all this has no effect upon the way we live our economic lives and relate to the environment is to reveal the depths of our denial and the apathetic lack of desire to critique and question. But there is a certain level of dis-ease in people nonetheless that needs to be channeled into constructive discussions about visual and media literacy, as well as economic alternatives. There is a growing sense of the discrepancy between media articulated reality, and the details of people's daily lives. Paul Hawken addresses the tension created by this gap by citing, "… a type of despair that people feel when they experience the gulf between the grotesqueness of the world and the business-as-usual tenor surrounding it. At the level of the family, the gap between what a child feels and knows is right and reasonable, and what Mom and/or Dad tells the child is right, can lead to schizophrenia. A similar dysfunctionality can affect an entire society that knows the state of the world is one way, yet is told over and over again that the world is something else. That disparity finds its most powerful and pervasive form in advertisements" (p. 131).
In The Hunger For More: Searching For Values In An Age Of Greed (1989), Laurence Shames takes a historical approach to American consumerism, making a connection between our frontier history and our ever-expanding desire for more goods and services. We need to unravel and decode all the ad messages that play upon this myth, what Shames refers to as "the habit of more". And in so doing we will challenge the conventional definition of "growth". He writes, " The concept of growth has been applied almost exclusively to things that can be measured, counted, weighed. And the hunger for those things that are immeasurable but fine&emdash;the sorts of accomplishment that cannot be undone by circumstance or a shift in social fashion, the kind of serenity that cannot be shattered by tomorrow's headline&emdash;has gone largely unfulfilled, and even unacknowledged." With the eclipse of the geographic frontier over 100 years ago (itself an illusion since this continent enjoyed fully sustainable human habitation at the time of its "discovery") Shames declares that the economy has become our frontier. But the frontier mythology implies limitlessness. And, of course, we live in a finite world defined by the limits of carrying capacity.
A spin off from the myth of limitless frontier is the cult of plenty fueled by a packaged culture where the consumer reigns. In The Total Package: The Evolution And Secret Meanings Of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, And Tubes (1995), Thomas Hine illustrates how we have finally succeeded in packaging almost everything, including ourselves. Time starved and over-stimulated, we recreate ourselves with achievements and resumes. Anxious parents jockey for their toddlers' admission into prestigious pre-schools, starting the packaging process so early, others lament the disappearance of childhood. We package political candidates as well as products, reulting in an expendable world where almost everything can be used and thrown away. Hines writes, "This cultural and personal packaging both fascinates and infuriates. There is something liberating in its promise of aggressive self-creation, and something terrifying in its implication that everything must be subject to the ruthless discipline of the marketplace. People are at once passive consumers of their culture and aggressive packagers of themselves, which can be a stressful and lonely combination." And how! We need to stop the mindlessness with which we consume and begin to analyze the packages, thereby returning the contents to a more truthful context. With this process comes the necessary reconsideration of what it means to "want" something, and who has engineered that "want, as opposed to truly "needing" it.
As well, we need to guard against what Noam Chomsky has called the "manufacturing of consent." When political powers use techniques of propaganda and public relations to convince an uncertain public to rally around a particular political action, democratic processes have been abrogated. In many cases, this manufacturing of consent has sent us off to war with the illusion of public solidarity. Combating this type of demagoguery highlights the necessity for vigilance and media literate questioning of these unscrupulous practices.
Ann Marie Seaward Barry in her book, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, And Manipulation In Visual Communication (1997), explains how the Gulf War provides, "a variety of examples of how images can be particularly effective in emotionally moving mass audiences through visual stories, and in functioning as political rhetoric to manipulate public sentiment and influence foreign policy." She cites how in 1990 the stories of two supposed female Kuwaiti refugees were used to ignite public sentiment in favor of American military intervention in Kuwait. One story told before a congressional caucus hearing in 1990 employed the image of invading Iraqi soldiers tearing new born Kuwaiti babies away from their incubators, leaving them to die. Another, told as part of testimonial during a United Nations debate about the use of force in driving Iraq out of Kuwait, outlined other atrocities, giving detailed firsthand accounts of the horrors inflicted upon Kuwaitis by Iraqi soldiers. What was revealed through subsequent news stories, John R. MacArthur in the New York Times, Morgan Strong in TV Guide, ABC's 20/20, and CBS's 60 Minutes, was that the New York Public Relations firm of Hill and Knowlton had been hired by an organization called "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" funded primarily by the Emir of Kuwait to generate support for American military intervention. The stories told by these two "anonymous female refugees" had been carefully scripted to inspire American indignation. In fact, one of these women was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador and the other was the wife of Kuwait's minister of planning and a Kuwaiti TV personality. Seward Barry concludes, "Although none of this suggests that Iraqis committed no atrocities, what it does suggest is that much of the support for the Gulf War was the result of a well-orchestrated, well-funded, and highly successful public relations effort paid for by a foreign government."
If we let these myths and disinformation campaigns continue unchallenged, we risk the disappearance of our world into the economic alchemists' crucible, sacrificing all for the sake of gold. And like King Midas, we will starve amidst our artificial splendor. We need ecological literacy to renew within us all the primacy of our connection to the biotic world, and we desperately need a media literate analysis and critique of the buried mythologies that drive our destructive consumption. To question and to change is to begin to practice sustainable economic mind.