SUBSTITUTION
The advertising industry works by substituting psuedo actions for real actions. Buying a car equals a life of adventure. Shampooing with a spermatic looking substance makes you beautiful and alluring. A blizzard of medical commercials offer us indispensable cures for imaginary ailments, allergies, headaches, smells, states of mind. Consumer marketing is built on substitute gratifications that are shortcuts for genuine encounters, real relationships, real meaning and status -- and finally for love and wisdom.
Our most visible culture leaders urge us to take on consumerism as a path to the good life. Sports stars and entertainment figures get paid to promote products. Buy this, buy that, accumulate an armory of junk around you, so that as you whirl through the maddening din you can do it with the right look and feel.
The culture promotes and maintains our entrapment in subtle ways. It even gives commerce a life and seasonality of its own, Boards of directors decree the fashion seasons, models change, products improve, fads come and go. We are taught to throw out what we thought was so wonderful yesterday because it isn't really that good anymore. We can do better. But in this game, however well you're doing, be assured there is someone doing better than you. Look up in envy, not down in compassion.
SUBSTITUTION AS THE ROOT OF ADDICTION
Clearly we are educated from childhood to depend on substitute gratifications. It follows then that consumerism promotes a bewildering haze of addictions on every level, since addiction is in its heart also a substitution. In fact, consumerism trains us to become addicts. You take a drug to get a certain effect: happiness, energy, peace, a sense of self worth. The addictive substance substitutes for the genuine experience. Over time the high wears off -- just like the shine of the new product fades -- and you slip into craving, withdrawal, dependency, isolation, all of them relevant to both substance addiction and consumerist behavior. Our products are marketed and packaged in such a way as to promote dependency. They are available, reliable, associated with attractive secondary reinforcers. It's all we know. It's what we've been trained to from infancy. Instead of finding love we'll have the right diapers. You seek romance. Better go to the super-store to buy the right hair color.
ACCELERATION
Behind consumerist substitution is a quickening pulse of change. Capital moves faster, productivity increases per hour worked. Inventories are maintained on a "just in time" basis. Speed is intrinsic to modern culture. There's quick turn-around time, fast hand/eye coordination. People change jobs, homes and mates faster than ever. Your bank balance is recalculated at the speed of light. Travel and communication accelerate. We're taught to like it. We have to adjust to speed. We have to want more of it. To slow down is to shop less frequently. Now we can shop at home twenty-four hors a day on the Internet. We see the craving for acceleration in the fast cutting in TV and films, in video games, in sound bites on the news, in post-modern art.
In business life, expansion, the multiplication of projects, and even of the problems they bring, may be even more enticing than the higher wages and profits. Activity feeds on itself. It's an adrenalin high, an upper.
We need momentum. Failure is stagnation; success is momentum. The "career" itself is an exercise in momentum, as the word derivation shows. We go careening about. The accelerating pace of life may be generating an addiction to feverish activity itself. Here the activity becomes a substitution for real meaningful action, a high that covers up, at least temporarily, pervasive feelings of emptiness and powerlessness.
Addiction to acceleration and workaholic behavior touch. More than greed or power, acceleration leads us, entices us, draws us on. The greed and power are just means to an end, ways of keeping up.
The acceleration also effects the rate at which people meet and stimulate and part from each other. Thousands of pheromones a day pass between us. Great crowds hug up against us. Thousands of eyes meet and avert. The stimulating signals for natural sociability are touched off in large polities simply by the physical proximity of others in public spaces, crowded work places, sometimes in faceless crowds. They're touched off but they can't complete themselves, because we're whirled off in a new direction too quickly.
SUCCESSOMANIA
The very drive for success, with its core accelerative tendencies, may itself be built upon a manic compensation. The career path takes us over. We go careening headlong down it, the average work week approaching 48 hours. I call this widespread illness successomania. Successomania really does have the clinical manifestations of mania: acceleration, grandiosity and poor judgement. In our time successomania can be considered an addiction to acceleration itself, which is an addiction to the brain's own uppers. But at the same time that it is fueled by acceleration, successomania has to rein in the accelerative tendency in order to skirt poor judgement. The fun of acceleration has to be subordinated to the bottom line. If not for this fiduciary restraint, the corporate young Turks might leave profits behind altogether and give over entirely to the accelerative spin, as many already do. Projects would multiply. Deals would abound. Resources would be squandered, losses covered up, politicians bought at an even faster rate.
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Copyright 1999 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 08/23/99 (rge)