By Kiegan Irish
Published in June 2020
What is consumerism? It is a slippery term to define as it has been used in a variety of ways over the years. It is rare to hear anyone explicitly defend consumerism, and yet since it has become a meaningful political and economic reality every so often the mask slips and those holding leadership positions will make some revealing comment about the relationship between buying products and the stability of our entire social order. For example, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks president George W. Bush urged Americans to go shopping. What could have prompted this seemingly incongruous exhortation?
To begin with, there is nothing inherently wrong with consuming energy and material. Consumption of some sort or another is necessary to our survival. But the way in which we orient our entire lives around consumption and perpetuating consumption today has deep impacts on who we are as people as well as the life supporting systems of our planet.
Economist Tim Jackson outlines the economics of consumerism in his book Prosperity Without Growth. He describes “the iron cage of consumerism,” an economic process which keeps the production and consumption in our economy locked in a forward motion, moving inexorably towards climate collapse. This process is driven by the profit motive on the one hand, generating ever greater levels of production, and a consumer culture on the other, generating ever greater levels of demand.
Firms seek constantly to lower costs of inputs in order to increase their profits. This in turn puts more and more people out of work who then depend on economic growth for their survival. At no point are inclusion or social goods considered in this process of expansion. Consumerism is all consuming, from work which is designed to enhance it, to the spending that is its goal. It creates people who are competitive and resentful towards each other. It erodes the bonds of community.
Increasing Scale of Consumerism
“The iron cage of consumerism” grows the size of the economy, increasing its scale and the amount of material throughput. The continual growth of the economy becomes the only way to ensure its stability—lest too many people are left out of labour markets, threatening unrest. The added material for increased production mostly becomes waste of one form or another and has significant environmental impacts. Jackson argues that there is no evidence to suggest that economic growth of this kind will ever become environmentally sustainable.
Most energy and resource use is not taking place at the level of the average consumer and the household, however. Industry and the military remain by far the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses. Most people have no say in the use of fossil fuels and natural resources, nor in the kind of goods and services the economy produces. They are limited to (consumer) choices between the economy’s products.
This does not prevent consumerism from having a profound impact on people. It needs to enlist support from the population at large and implicate them in its operations in order to win their consent and generate a sense of identification and complicity.
Jackson claims that culture drives consumer demand and therefore increased production. People living in western capitalist economies have become uniquely disposed to expressing their desire for human connection, but also for status and distinction, through the purchase and consumption of goods and services on the market.
Unconscious Shaping of Desire
“‘Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,’ wrote the US marketing consultant Victor Lebow in 1955, ‘that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.’” All of our deepest desires and needs, by the logic of consumerism, can be satisfied through making purchases and using commodities.
The marketing of consumer goods has been enormously effective at shaping the desire of individuals. Control over human desire is at the heart of the consumerist project. Advertising and policymaking induce us to desire a future of greater material wealth, greater status and recognition, and a more fully realized identity. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars yearly to shape and condition what it is we want out of our lives.
People do become invested in the system of production and consumption as Jackson says. Tim Kasser in his book The High Cost of Materialism carefully documents the impacts such emotional investment has on the psychological life of individuals. It affects their mental well-being; strong investment in materialistic or status-seeking values is linked to depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, among other ills.
Social theorist Mark Fisher provides useful context for these insights. He links the causes of epidemic depression and anxiety in our society today to the way capitalism has taken control of time and the future. Digital technologies have taken the logic of consumerism to the extreme. People are constantly submerged in a “capitalist cyberspace” through their devices. They are constantly exposed to ever more narrowly targeted advertising and data collections, producing an experience of life revolving around constant pleasure seeking. They desire the future advertisers and financiers have invented and they are incapable of imagining alternatives. Consumers are locked into the capitalist future through the burden of debt.
Fisher describes the difficulty his students experience in being parted from the “stimulus matrix” of cellular phones, instant messaging, video and music streaming. They have fallen into a kind of dull narcosis, a condition he describes as “depressive hedonia.” He writes, “Depression is usually characterized by a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.” This experience is common to most people today, not only students or young people.
The conditions of consumerism have led to a steady increase in mental distress, producing our society in which depression, anxiety, and a breakdown of the sense of meaning and purpose are widespread.
Mental Distress and Environmental Degradation
The culture of consumerism, according to this analysis, is less a driver of the economics of consumerism as it is its effect. It is an effect intended to produce in people a sense of desire for and investment in the economic order as it is—with its incredible scale of resource use threatening all life on earth.
Between the proliferation of mental distress and the environmental degradation caused by our economic system, the destructive impacts of the consumer society are clear. In the era of Covid-19, we have seen small reductions in environmental impact through decreasing consumption on the part of average consumers and households. And yet emissions from industry have continued apace. Both our desires for the future and the fate of the climate now depend on our disinvestment from the economic order of consumption and a struggle for the power to decide what goods we produce and what resources the economy uses in the first place.
