Consumerism -- The World's Fastest Growing Religion ¹  1

George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four ²  1

BUY, BUY, BUY ³. 2

The Size of Corporations ⁴. 2

The Fundamental Requirement ⁵. 2

Control of the Media ⁵. 3

Corporations vs. Parents ⁶. 3

Advertising ⁷. 4

"Stealth" Advertising ⁷. 4

Control by Advertisers ⁷. 5

Advertisers and Schools ⁷. 5

Why We Should Care ⁸. 5

Credits/Sources/Resources. 6

 

Consumerism -- The World's Fastest Growing Religion ¹

         

Recent years have seen the rapid growth of a new religion that may well have more devotees in America and elsewhere than any of the great world religions. This pervasive world view and lifestyle is perhaps best described as the religion of consumerism...

 

The missionaries of consumerism have been unbelievably successful in spreading their world view and lifestyle via advertising. It has been estimated that the average American sees more than 32,000 television commercials per year -- that's more than 320,000 by the time one graduates from high school! American corporations spend more than $110 billion per year on television and print advertising, more than is spent on all of our educational institutions combined.

And what is the message that is being preached? Consumerism's simple message is that the way to human happiness is through the limitless acquisition of material wealth and physical pleasure.

 

Consumerism's religious dimensions become most clear when we consider its implications for our understandings of meaning, truth, and loyalty. According to the gospel of consumerism, the meaning of life is to spend money and be entertained. The truth is what sells. If people buy it, it's right. The objects worthy of our ultimate loyalty are the gods of money and pleasure. It is at the altar of these gods that the adherents of consumerism bow down and worship. 

That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to man but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

Market driven forces have usurped the role once assumed by family, home and community.

Few societies could imagine themselves surviving very long when one of their central institutions was advocating unrestrained greed.

 

George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four ²

In a way, everything George Orwell predicted in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has come true.  In a way, nothing he predicted has come true&ldots;.

Orwell reckoned without capitalism's confounding capacity to avoid confrontation by merchandising it. Capitalism, like Pac-Man, can munch up anything. Control and conformism, the two Orwellian bugaboos, reckoned without behavioural psychology, which teaches that the most effective form of control is achieved by rewarding the organism, not by punishing it. Capitalism understands behavioursim as totalitarianism does not.  In totalitarian countries, there are coups and revolutions and liberation movements.  In capitalist countries, there are sales.

Consumer capitalism stands ready to push ideas, ideologies and revolutionary strategies with the same acumen it brings to marketing perfume and defense contracts; in street lingo, consumer capitalism is an equal-opportunity whore.  If it makes consumers feel good to avoid Big Brother, if it makes them feel good to think they are fighting against the system, the system will sell them that feeling.

 

Hollywood makes movies that call into question the morality of the corporations that own Hollywood, rock singers sing against the corruption of the record companies that record them, TV talk shows talk about TV as a menace. The law Orwell never took into account when foreseeing the future was this:  If somebody wants it, somebody will sell it.  And the corollary:  if somebody sells it, somebody will buy it.

"Today's worst addictions are not marijuana, cocaine or even alcohol. They are the addictions to money and self, and in the relentless pursuit of self-satisfaction, it is often children who are the casualties."

          Frank Jones

BUY, BUY, BUY ³

The dominant message found in all the corporate ads is BUY, BUY, BUY.  The collective impact of this message has had its effects over the past fifty years of intimately linking our most basic needs, and worse, the needs of our babies, to consumer items and channelling all our energies into the marketplace.

The Size of Corporations ⁴

Today many corporations are larger than countries. For example, Mitsubishi is larger than Indonesia. General Motors is larger than Denmark. Ford Motor is larger than South Africa and larger than Saudi Arabia. Toyota Motor is larger than Portugal. Wal-Mart Stores is larger than Israel.

Among the world's 100 largest economies in 1995-96, 51 were corporations and only 49 were countries.

The Fundamental Requirement ⁵

The fundamental requirement of the publicly traded corporation -- to turn a profit -- narrowly limits what corporations can do. In general, what is unprofitable cannot be pursued. The most well-meaning people in the world are not free to act on their personal philosophies when they are acting on behalf of a publicly-held corporation. They must do what is profitable, which is not necessarily what is right.

Control of the Media ⁵

In the U.S., fewer than two dozen corporations own and operate 90% of the mass media -- controlling almost all books, magazines, records, videos, TV and radio stations, newspapers, wire services, and photo agencies. Thus the number of people who set the terms of public discussion in the U.S. would easily fit into one small room.  To the extent that they are visible at all, corporations use the mass media artfully to give themselves the appearance of benevolence.

Corporations vs. Parents ⁶

A struggle different than any before in world history is intensifying between corporations and parents. It is a struggle over the minds, bodies, time and space of millions of children and the kind of world they are growing up in.

Year by year parents are losing control over their own children to the omnipenetrating hucksterism of companies. Driven by tens of billions of dollars in sales, profits, bonuses and stock options, the men driving giant companies are in a race to the bottom with their competitors -- always pushing, pushing the range of violence, sex, addiction, and low-grade sensuality through evermore manipulative delivery systems.

They have large sums of capital, technology and influential connections; lobbyists, child psychologists, marketing, advertising and communications specialists. They use television, radio, videos, arcades,

movies, toys, malls, advertisements, magazines, even schools and cyberspace as well as stores, physicians, day care centers, fast-food restaurants, clinics, theme parks, maternity wards and the streets themselves. Thousands of employees and consultants analyze, test and interview children, hoping to learn how to stimulate and exploit their anxieties, fears, loneliness and sensual drives in order to sell, sell, sell.

Parents have no such resources. Parents are working to make ends meet, raising children, dealing with the stresses of workplace, household, school and street. Unless they throw out their televisions, radios and VCRs, keep their children in home schooling and quarantine them from friends and neighbors, parents cannot insulate their sons and daughters from the multilevel commercial grip of marketers.

Clearly, parents are spending less time with children than did any previous generation while corporate products and entertainment are spending more. So pronounced is this shift that many preteens are experiencing what might be called the "corporate week" -- more than 40 hours each week in the product world created and controlled by corporations. Corporate advertising and marketing specialists deliberately play on parental guilt. They incite children to nag parents into buying this video or that toy, this clothing or that sugary food, watch this television program or play that violent computer game. Guilt or weariness often induces parents into a dependency on corporate entertainment, the electronic baby-sitter, which exposes the child to even more promotions, logos and brand names.

Corporations are pulling children away from parents and into a world of commercialism that knows no restraints of time, is subject to no concern for any aspects of the child's development, and is under little or no regulation.

          This corporate organization of childhood was never announced or decreed.  It just keeps coming.

For the first time in human history, most children are born into homes where most stories do not come from the parents, schools, churches, communities, or native countries, but from a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell. Children are grown through products: the Disney Generation, the MTV Generation, the Joe Camel Generation, the Pepsi Generation. Stories used to sell products are being used to raise our children.

These companies are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. Specialists who track the takeover of children's time estimate that the average 12-year-old spends 48 hours a week year-round, with commercial entertainment (TV, music, video games, movies), excluding shopping at the mall or hanging out with friends. By contrast, these youngsters spend 30 hours a week in school, nine months a year and only 8 minutes a weekday with their father and 11 minutes with their mother in "meaningful conversation." It starts very early. Pediatricians William Dietz and Victor Strasburger estimate that 2- to 5-year olds average more than 27 hours a week watching TV.

Former chairman of the MTV Board and MTV creator Bob Pittman exuded: "MTV do[es] not shoot for the 14-year-old [market], we own them." (He's not kidding. Politicians running for national office now see MTV as perhaps the only way to reach young people of voting age.)

Advertising ⁷

A few years ago, a company called Space Marketing, Inc. (SMI) came up with a plan to send a mile-long billboard into space. Coated with reflective plastic, the billboard would beam down a corporate logo that appeared as large as the moon, and as it orbited the Earth, would be visible to every single person on the planet.

To marketers, it was a dream come true: a truly inescapable form of advertising. It couldn't be tossed out with the junk mail, hung up on, or zapped with a remote control. To the rest of us who'd heard about it, it seemed more like a nightmare. Amid howls of protest, SMI withdrew the plan, but not before several companies had inquired about launching their logos into space.

"Stealth" Advertising ⁷

In recent years, advertisers have pioneered many forms of "stealth" advertising -- ads disguised as something else, or placed where we least expect to encounter them. One form of stealth advertising is "product placement" -- paying to get brand-name products featured in movies. For a large cash payment, an advertiser can actually get the script rewritten to showcase their product.

 

A few years ago 17 million Americans watched a "news" story about the 50th anniversary of Cheerios cereal. It was a light-hearted bit of human-interest fluff, featuring a tour of the Cheerios factory and some footage of a giant Cheerio made specially for the occasion.

But few viewers realized that the story was conceived, dramatized, filmed and distributed by Cheerios manufacturer General Mills itself.

Control by Advertisers ⁷

Advertising also affords corporations significant control over the content of the media that shape our world view. The news and entertainment media are wholly dependent on ad revenues, and advertisers wield considerable influence. In a 1992 study, virtually all of the 150 newspaper editors surveyed said that advertisers tried to dictate editorial content, and 37 percent said they succeeded.

Appalling examples abound. In 1993, Mercedes Benz wrote to 30 magazines, requiring them to pull all Mercedes ads from any issue containing articles critical of the company, German products, or Germany itself. RJR Nabisco, the giant food-and-tobacco conglomerate, canceled an $80 million contract with a New York advertising agency that produced ads for Northwest Airlines' no-smoking policy. And the cosmetic firm Revlon pulled its ads from Ms. magazine after Ms. ran a cover story about Soviet women exiled for publishing underground feminist books. The reason? The Soviet women on the magazine's cover were not wearing makeup.

Often, censorship is self-inflicted by media decision makers fearful of losing their corporate sponsors. This has produced a curious double standard in journalism, in which the news media go easier on corporations than on the government. As Bill Lazarus, a reporter for the Hammond (Indiana) Times, explains: "When you write about government, the attitude of [editors] tends to be `no holds barred.' When you write about business, the attitude tends to be one of caution. And for businesses [that] happen to be advertisers, the caution turns frequently to timidity."

 

Advertisers and Schools ⁷

 

Advertisers have also invaded other important cultural institutions: public schools. In recent years, advertisers have become more of a presence in schools than ever before: Ads are now plastered in hallways, piped in over public address systems and painted on the sides of school buses. And students are big target recipients of free product samples.

Why We Should Care ⁸

Quite apart from the fact that the consumption based lifestyle of 20 percent of the worlds' population is dangerously contaminating everyone's earth, water and air, it very upsetting to see a helpless infant being permanently maimed emotionally because its parents place so high a priority on consumer values that they fail to provide the empathic, affectionate care their infant needs during the relatively few years such care is a necessity.

Let us at least call a spade a spade. "We need two salaries just to keep up" means "We value the whetting of our Consumer and Material appetites for these few years more highly than our infant's future emotional health". "I need to work in order to feel fulfilled and content, and it's not fair to my infant for me to look after her when I'm unhappy" means "I believe I can find happiness and fulfillment through Consumerism and Materialism (and status and careerism based on these), and what I want for these few years takes priority over my infant's future emotional health".

Considering the extent to which it is possible to choose if and when parents will have children, it seems cruel in the extreme to risk a child's permanent emotional health for a few years of ... what? Doing so should be seen for what it is: Selling a child's birthright for a mess of pottage.

Let us also not delude ourselves by thinking that the way of life for which infants are so frequently sacrificed these days is either the only way or a necessary way. Let us hope that the Consumerism and Materialism that are currently so fashionable will soon be seen for what they are and are not, and will give way to values which are more compatible with emotional health -- both infant and adult.

 

"It is consumerism that drives the 80-hour work week. When we learn that consumer goods don't make us happy, we can get serious about reconstructing the family. The critical question in America, at the end of the 20^th century, is whether consumption or the family will prevail."                             

Christopher Lasch

Credits/Sources/Resources

This material is excerpted from the Halliday Lecture Early Childrearing and the Future of Society presented by Dr. Elliott Barker at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow Symposium: Early Child Rearing: The Fabric of Society March 26 1999

Adapted from For I have seen the face of God and it is K-Mart, by Bruce Grelle, Associate Professor of Religious Studies California State University, Chico  

Published in The Orion, Department of Journalism, California State University, Chico
Chico, CA 95929-0600 Wednesday, September 21, 1994  Copyright (c) Vol 33, Iss 4 Wednesday, September 21, 1994 by The Orion  orion@macgate.csuchico.edu

 

2. Big Brother Couldn't Foresee the Big C - Consumerism by Jay Scott.  Reprinted with permission       from the Globe and Mail, Toronto.

3. Excerpted from the book Open Reality: The Way Out of Mimicking Happiness by Richard Altschuler and Nicholas Regush, published by G.P. Putnam's & Sons, New York. Copyright © 1974 Richard Altschuler and Nicholas Regush. Reprint permission granted courtesy The Putnam Publishing Group.

4. Ward Morehouse, Multinational Corporations and Crimes Against Humanity, in Trent Schroyer, editor, A WORLD THAT WORKS (New York: The Bootstrap Press, 1997), pg. 51. ISBN 0-942850-38-6.  Morehouse attributes the data to these sources:

corporation data from Fortune's Global 500, The World's Largest Corporations, FORTUNE magazine August 7, 1995.

Country information from: THE WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1996).

5. One Fundamental Problem  

Excerpted from RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #582  January 22, 1998.                     .

Peter Montague is Editor of REHW, published by Environmental Research Foundation  P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403  Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@rachel.clark.net  To subscribe: send E-mail to rachel-weekly-request@world.std.com with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It's free. Back issues available by E-mail; To get instructions, send E-mail to INFO@rachel.clark.net with the single word HELP in the message; Back issues available from http://www.monitor.net/rachel/       

6. America's Corporate Exploitation of Children by Ralph Nader and Linda Coco

Ralph Nader has repeatedly been rated in national polls as "the most respected person in America." He has surely been the single most effective voice in the United States on behalf of consumers, democracy and the environment for the past three decades. Linda Coco is a law student who for two years researched Children First: A Parent's Guide to Fighting Corporate Predators for Ralph Nader's organization in Washington D.C. Copies of this important work can be obtained by sending a cheque or money order for US$12.00 to Children First, Box 19312, Washington, D.C.  20036

Reprinted with kind permission from a most remarkable publication and organization Touch the Future -- Creating New Models For a New Generation Of Children, 4350 Lime Avenue, Long Beach California 90807 Tel (562) 426-2627  Fax (562) 427-8189  email  TTFuture@aol.com 

7. Laurie Ann Mazur is co-author, with Michael Jacobson, of the book Marketing Madness: A Survival Guide for Consumer Society. Foreword by Ralph Nader. Michael F. Jacobson is founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  Laurie Ann Mazur is a writer and consultant to non-profit organizations who has written widely on environment and poplation issues. For order and other information, write to: WESTVIEW PRESS 5500 Central Avenue  Boulder, CO 80301-2866

8. Editorial, Empathic Parenting, Journal of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Volume 4, Issue 3 Summer 1981

Centre for a New American Dream

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Tel: (802)-862-6762

Fax: (802)-860-1735

http://www.newdream.org/

How consumerism affects society, the economy and the Environment.

http://www.hooked.net/users/verdant/society.htm

 

Enough Anticonsumerism Campaign

One World Centre

6 Mount St.,

Manchester M2 5 NS

Tel: 0161-237-1630

Fax: 0161-228-2347

http://www.envirolinl.org/issues/enough/enough05.htm

email: ethicon@mcr1.poptel.org.uk

The Communitarian Network

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Phone: 202-994-7997

E-mail: comnet@unix1.circ.gwu.edu

Foundation for Global Community

222 High Street,

Palo Alto, CA 94301-1097.

Tel: (415) 328-7756

http://www.globalcommunity.org

 

The Media Foundation

1243 West 7th Ave.

Vancouver, B.C.

V6H 1B7

(604) 736-9401

Fax (604) 736-6021

http://www.adbusters.org/adbusters/

Publishes the Adbusters Quarterly and sponsers NATIONAL BUY NOTHING DAY, November 29th each year.

Center for the Study of Commercialism

1875 Connecticut Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20009-5728

Tel: (202) 332-9110

The New Road Map Foundation

P.O. Box 15981

Seattle, WA 98115

Tel: (206) 527-0437

Worldwatch Institute

1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20036-1904

Tel: (202) 452-1999

Community Currencies: A New Tool for the Twenty-first Century, Bernard Lietaer,  Center for Sustainable Resources, University of California at Berkley

http://www.transaction.net/money/gc/gc01.html

David C. Korten, WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD

(San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 1995).  ISBN 1-887208-00-3.