This article has passed the "Hmmm..." test by my friends both to the right and to the left of me. Let's see how it plays here ~~~ Hallyx

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/desire1.html

Adbusters Magazine WINTER 2000

Manufacturing Desire

by Harry Flood

Welcome to the factory floor. The product? Things that are not essential, but hard to live without. What's being supplied here is demand. Want. Craving. All you could desire. All you can imagine. Maybe more than you can handle.

"WHY IS THIS CHILD SMILING?" asks a recent print ad of a cute tot blissfully snoozing. "Because he has lived his whole life in the biggest bull market in history." Cue the smug nods, the flush of pride. For here, swaddled in Baby Gap and lying in a Morigeau crib, is the immaculate American kid, born in the best damn place and time there has ever been. A child wanting for nothing.

He will soon learn, of course, to want everything.

Americans are beyond apologizing for their lifestyle of scorched-earth consumerism. To the strange little cabal of moralists -- Robert Frank, Jedediah Purdy et al. -- who have recently questioned the official program, the response has mostly been to crank up the volume and drown the doubt out. Global consumer culture? Supersize it, baby. Pile on the wattage, horsepower, silicone, cholesterol and RAM until the lights flicker, the smoke-alarms shriek and the cardiac paddles lurch to life. Give us marbled steaks and sport-utes, please, and put it all on our tab -- we're good for it. Because we are working dogs. And we have worked out the formula for millennial prosperity: keep your head down and your wallet open, and watch the economy roll. Enjoy the rollicking good times while building "the America we deserve."

Time was, decadence on this scale was something to fear. If one group of people was gobbling up resources out of all proportion to its needs, consuming at thirty times the rate of other groups of people, at everyone's expense, well . . . that was bad karma, to say the least. Their society was surely soft, cancerous and doomed.

But somehow, the First World has managed to give it all a happy spin. We have decided not to avoid decadence but to embrace it. Crave it. Buy it. Sell it. What's decadent? Ice cream with the density of plutonium, a bubblebath with a barley-flour chaser, that great new Gucci scent called "Envy." Decadence is just the celebration of universal human appetites, fully expressed -- and any premium wiener who'd object to that idea must already be half-dead.

There's no mistaking contemporary America for Versailles-era France or Rome in the time of the Caesars. Decadence has grown up, grown cool, grown systematic in its excess. It's an indoor trout stream in the tasteful lakeside mansion of a software magnate. It's leasing, rather than owning, a fine German automobile so you can exchange it for a new one in ten months.

You don't see the new deci-billionnaires of Silicon Valley splashing their wealth around wantonly, like the '80s Wall Street crowd. What you see is specific, laser-guided generosity -- like cutting friends and relatives into the IPO, or buying a tax-deductible painting by your boss' kid. Keeping the money in the family. The woman most recently canonized by the American media was a personal shopper, by trade. (It was said Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, whose job was to purchase things for other people too wealthy or time-pressed to purchase things for themselves, personified elegance, refinement and understatement.) The new design aesthetic, as seen in Wallpaper magazine, is sexily minimalist, with high design and hyperattention to every detail. Labor-intensive and expensive as hell, but worth it.

See how much we've grown up? Can you understand now why the rest of the world has its nose to the glass, wanting a piece of this?

Perhaps decadence isn't a thing but a behavior -- some gesture just arrogant and shameless enough to be Bad (read, good). An American golf fan, swept up by jingoism, spits on a rival golfer's wife at a prestigious international tournament. A real-estate mogul erects a great middle-finger of an apartment building shadowing the United Nations. The most powerful man in the world proves he is pathologically unable to apologize.

Or maybe decadence goes deeper than a behavior, as deep as the emotion that hatched it. The Motion Picture Association of America fixes an R rating on films that include profanity, nudity, sex, violence or "decadent situations." So understanding decadence may simply involve renting a few saucy blockbuster action pictures and monitoring the responses they provoke. As the beloved stars appear on the screen, predictable thoughts materialize in the primitive hindbrain of the viewer: I want your hair. I want your money. I want to see you naked on the Internet.

Not every American lives a decadent life, of course. But decadence, as the marketers say, has great penetration. Those who aren't themselves trashing hotel rooms or being photographed in their swimming pools for InStyle magazine, end up thinking a lot about those who are -- because the culture of celebrity (or the culture of "ornament," as Susan Faludi calls it) is the water we're all swimming in. Refracted through the glass of the tank, the contours of the world outside tend to distort.

A Canadian newspaper recently quoted a Toronto woman who had taken a leave from her law practice to stay home with the baby. She was grumbling that the family was now forced to get by on her husband's $37,000 salary. "I love to live in poverty," she said, sardonically. "It's my favorite thing in life." The story was supposed to be about the social trend of professional women making domestic choices. But it was really about a different social trend altogether: the hyper-inflation of the concept of "enough."

To borrow journalist Robert Kaplan's metaphor, the First World is driving a Cadillac through Harlem. The passengers are hermetically protected. The air-conditioner is on, Wynton Marsalis is issuing from the stereo, beers chill in the minibar. It's hard to make much out through the tinted windows, but no matter. Nothing that's happening outside has any bearing on what's happening inside. At least, that's our willful illusion. It's an illusion that seems indefinitely sustainable, though it isn't.

Decadence is self-delusion on a massive scale. Like the motto of the new gadget-packed magalog Sony Style -- "things that are not essential, yet hard to live without" -- it's about convincing ourselves of the value of this lifestyle, because to question it would force choices we're not prepared to make.

'How much do I deserve?' we all ask ourselves, if only implicitly. 'Not just money, but adventure, sex, fizzy water, educational opportunities, time on the beach, peace of mind -- the package. How much do I deserve?'

A thoughtful answer might be, 'I don't deserve anything. The notion that some people are just naturally more entitled than others is for Calvinists, Monarchists and Donald Trump. It simply doesn't feel right to claim more than a modest reasonable allotment. If I've happened to stake a claim on a rich crook of the river, that's my good luck. The guy upstream has worked just as hard as I have. So I share.'

But that view now seems downright un-American. 'How much do I deserve? All I can cram in my mouth, brain, glove-box and daytimer,' says the hard-charging capitalist. 'I've earned it. And you haven't earned the right to tell me differently.' That's why, when the Australian ethicist Peter Singer wonders, "What is our charitable burden?" it strikes so many Americans as unusual, controversial, bizarre. For a lot of folks, the calculation of an acceptable level of personal sacrifice is easy: It's zero. No other answer computes. I think that partly explains the extreme responses Singer evokes. He touches people in a place they don't like to be touched.

Are Americans today intrinsically more base and self-centered than other folks, past and present? Hard to make that argument fly. It's just that never before in history have so few barriers been placed in front of the expression of a National id. No opponents challenge us. No authority figures monitor us. No threat of consequence or reprisal encourages civility, modesty, fairness or grace. The "life of struggle" that Schopenhauer identified as essential to man isn't obvious in the contemporary US. The struggle against want has been won; all foes have been conquered but one. That one is boredom, the opposite of suffering.

Not long ago, the actor Charlie Sheen, an Angels baseball fan, bought up all the tickets in a left-field section of Anaheim stadium and sat out there by himself, pounding his mitt, hoping to catch a fly ball. (None came his way.) Why did he do that? Because he could. America is decadent because nothing prevents it from being so. "Because I can" is the ironic successor to the more earnest, Kantian, "Because I should." When there's no other rationale for a behavior, and none seems to be required, that's decadence -- no less so for the smirky tagline.

Decadence is what happens when the energy of a whole society gets channeled into the trivial or the mercenary. In the age of the supercharged Dow, everything reduces to an "opportunity," at an incalculable (though unacknowledged) cost.

As hurricane Floyd blew through Florida, day-traders jumped into the commodities markets looking to cash in on tragedy. Orange juice and cotton futures shot up. Lumber futures rose because homes smashed to flinders would presumably need to be rebuilt. Then the hurricane moved northward, and traders eased off, waiting to see if there would be, as one trader put it, "any real damage." "I don't think morality has anything to do with the way markets work, that's what this is telling you," a labor economist reached for comment summarized. What does it tell you when the most powerful engine of the country, a chief driver of its culture, functions independent of human morality?

I pondered that question recently while sitting on the throne in the bathroom of the office where I work. Often there are magazines to read in there, but on the last few occasions there haven't been -- only catalogues. Another sign of the times. In the most private of the day's moments, where we used to relax and be told a story, now we gaze at pictures of a car or a computer or a coffeemaker. Consumer lust loosens the sphincter and in an almost orgasmic spasm, we let go. (Of maybe the last thing we're willing to let go.)

It's tempting to think of decadence as a personal act with personal consequences (namely, to the soul.). If that were true, it would all come down to a matter of taste, and we could agree to live and let live with our own strange preoccupations. But decadence is really a political act. Americans aren't living large in a vacuum; they're living large at the expense of things and people: the growing underclass, the stability of the economy, the texture of mental environment, the planet itself. Every mile we log alone in the car, every sweat-shop- made sneaker we buy, every porn site we visit, every tobacco stock we day-trade in, is a brick in wall of the new world we're creating. Not everyone got a vote in this process; yet everyone pays the price. Eventually, everyone pays an incredible price.

"In a new way, America's decadence has made it vulnerable," a friend offers. Today, all is well, so keep your eye on today. Ten years ago the average personal savings rate in North America was about ten percent. Now it's zero. "If the Dow tumbles, people literally will not be able to tolerate a diminishment in their lifestyle. You'll see consumer rage, deeper and deeper debt problems as consumption patterns hold constant but income falls." Because, the thing is, the desire doesn't go away. The manufacture of desire won't slow down, even if the manufacture of everything else does.

-- (Hallyx@aol.com), March 05, 2000

Answers

Excellent!

-- jeile (tjfarrar@bellsouth.net), March 05, 2000.

Good article. Depressing, but good. Sounds like we (Americans) won't be winning any "Worldwide Good Citizenship" awards anytime soon...

-- I'm Here, I'm There (I'm Everywhere@so.beware), March 05, 2000.

Checking the archives I ran across this thread. Definitely worthy of bumping to the top.

This paragraph jumped out at me:

"Not every American lives a decadent life, of course. But decadence, as the marketers say, has great penetration. Those who aren't themselves trashing hotel rooms or being photographed in their swimming pools for InStyle magazine, end up thinking a lot about those who are -- because the culture of celebrity (or the culture of "ornament," as Susan Faludi calls it) is the water we're all swimming in. Refracted through the glass of the tank, the contours of the world outside tend to distort."

I've never understood the compulsion on the part of many otherwise intelligent individuals to revel in the lives of celebrities. To engage in gossip regarding the latest & greatest in Hollywood holds no lure for me. Yet I know many folks who can & do sit & talk for hours about strangers as if they are close personal friends.

"Oh, why did such & such change her hair?"; "She's had another round of cosmetic surgery!"; "I hope those two characters get together in real life."; "Look at that dress. It must've cost an arm & a leg!" - All the while turning greener shades of envious. Lives unfulfilled? Is it because these people haven't asked themselves, "What do I want from life?" Is the problem (I deem it a problem) societal pressures to fit in? To live an unexamined life?

Why is covetousness so prevalent? The flip side of that coin is taking things we do have for granted. Does the first exist, in large part because of the other side of that coin?

Here's a great word picture from the above article:

"I pondered that question recently while sitting on the throne in the bathroom of the office where I work. Often there are magazines to read in there, but on the last few occasions there haven't been -- only catalogues. Another sign of the times. In the most private of the day's moments, where we used to relax and be told a story, now we gaze at pictures of a car or a computer or a coffeemaker. Consumer lust loosens the sphincter and in an almost orgasmic spasm, we let go. (Of maybe the last thing we're willing to let go.)"

Any thoughts?

-- Bingo1 (howe9@shentel.net), May 14, 2000.

I'm gonna bump this to the top one more time. I find it hard to believe nobody has an opinion, 'cept little ol' me.

-- Bingo1 (howe9@shentel.net), May 16, 2000.

Yeah, I have an opinion:

Sour grapes combined with wistful nostalgia. The solution? Communism, were all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), May 16, 2000.

Here's just one:

Not long ago, the actor Charlie Sheen, an Angels baseball fan, bought up all the tickets in a left-field section of Anaheim stadium and sat out there by himself, pounding his mitt, hoping to catch a fly ball. (None came his way.) Why did he do that? Because he could. America is decadent because nothing prevents it from being so.

What horseshit. "America is decadent because nothing prevents it from being so."

And just would be the solution to prevent it from being so? A law that allows people to only buy one seat each, even if they can afford and wish to do otherwise?

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), May 16, 2000.

"Consumer lust loosens the sphincter and in an almost orgasmic spasm, we let go."

Hey don't talk about consumer that way!

-- Martha Stewart (loose sphincters are @ good. thing), May 16, 2000.

More:

As hurricane Floyd blew through Florida, day-traders jumped into the commodities markets looking to cash in on tragedy. Orange juice and cotton futures shot up. Lumber futures rose because homes smashed to flinders would presumably need to be rebuilt. Then the hurricane moved northward, and traders eased off, waiting to see if there would be, as one trader put it, "any real damage." "I don't think morality has anything to do with the way markets work, that's what this is telling you," a labor economist reached for comment summarized. What does it tell you when the most powerful engine of the country, a chief driver of its culture, functions independent of human morality?

And what it tells you is that people want to make a profit! But the way in which this profit might be made is "immoral". Subtle inference: MORE LAWS! Just because you are smart enough to see that the price of OJ may go up, we must keep you from making a profit! And the only way to do it is by more laws.

What the writer of this article really wants is for everyone to live as HE sees fit.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), May 16, 2000.

I asked for opinions...Hey Unk, Monday treat you badly? ;^)

As you know Hallyx leaned heavily left. This article obviously leans that way as well. I can see how you might be slightly, er, peeved at the overall tenor. Yet I appreciate it from the standpoint of general behavior of the individual.

I fight a constant internal battle - I want gizmos, but do I need gizmos? For years I've looked for ways to simplify my life. The reason being I don't function well when overwhelmed by stimuli. Hence my semi-hermit lifestyle.

Yet what would I do with, say three million in hard, cold cash? Would I buy those gizmos? Would I follow the Philadelphia Flyers around the country during the playoffs? Maybe. Is this considered to be decadent behavior? I'm tempted to say yes.

I hope I would choose simplicity. A comfortable AND simple lifestyle. Am I a left-leaner? I didn't think that I was, until reading & absorbing this article.

Unk, help!

-- Bingo1 (howe9@shentel.net), May 16, 2000.

What we have here is an example of why our country is so great. The thoughts of this author are allowed to be freely distributed and likewise, the resulting opposing views. Every issue has many sides and all of them are encouraged to bloom. The MMM this weekend is another centerpiece of our freedoms, that quite frankly most of us take for granted. Further proof that if you can imagine it you can write about it.

-- Ra (tion@l.1), May 16, 2000.

Bingo,

I have no problem with left leaners, so long as they do not wish to have everyone else made to follow suit. An oxymoron maybe. Give up all of your worldly goods and live in a cultish commune for all I care, just don't force me to. The trouble with the left is that they want utopia run by govt decree, something that will never happen because govt is run by imperfect humans.

People will always act in their own best interests. What the writer, and folks like him need to do is to show the rest of us why it would be in our own best interest to give up mindless consumerism, rather than to simply decry it as "immoral".

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), May 16, 2000.

Yes, yes, yes. I'm not a left-leaner. Whew!!! Musta had a brain cramp.

I don't see where the author calls for Big Gov to step in. This is what confused me. My brain hurts. I'm taking a break. Thanks.

-- Bingo1 (howe9@shentel.net), May 16, 2000.

Yes, OK, let's all agree it's immoral to have what we want. It's not clear whether we should want less or just differently, but whichever, we're immoral. Great.

But nowhere in this essay can I find any clear suggestion of what we should be doing or how we should be living instead. There is an implication that it's better for our character and our souls if we do without, provided others do WITH what we do without, somehow. We are "living large at the expense of things and people: the growing underclass, the stability of the economy, the texture of mental environment, the planet itself."

In what ways? The "underclass" isn't a static group of individuals, it's an arbitrary economic grouping with a high turnover rate. Many happy consumers are ex-underclass folks, and most underclass folks are ex-consumers fallen on (nearly always temporary) hard times. Is their lot improved if everyone else decides to do without?

How is the economy destabilized by full employment? What the hell is the "texture of the mental environment"? Is the argument being made here that our mental texture would be improved by deprivation, frustration, inefficiency? Or is it that we should spend *much* less time being productive, and spend it sitting around singing folk songs because those who *used* to entertain us are also sitting around rather than producing entertainment? But doing it morally correctly, of course!

So the cost is "incalculable" if I purchase an SUV rather than ride a bicycle? Doesn't seem that hard to calculate. But let's say I go with the bicycle, and save the money. Save it how? Can't buy stock, since I'd be doing so somehow at the expense of those who can't afford to. Can't bank it, the *bank* would speculate with it imorally, loaning it to someone who looked likely to be able to repay. I suppose I could go to Harlem and just GIVE it to needy people, provided they promise not to become consumers with it! Bad for their souls, you know.

So I guess the only morally correct option is to "share", from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. This sounds vaguely familiar. People always act according to their most concrete understanding of the control structure. If you're rewarded for producing and deprived otherwise, you produce. If you're punished for producing and rewarded for needing, you find a way to become needy. Maybe if everyone becomes maximally needy, we can all starve with proper moral rectitude and the planet will be saved? Uh, you go first, OK?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), May 16, 2000.

Flint, I really, really wish to respond. Time is precious at the moment. I'll do my best to write something during lunch.

Best,

-- Bingo1 (howe9@shentel.net), May 17, 2000.