Corporate Sponsored Group Think as American Consumerism

The Bottom Line:

According to Wendell Berry, American consumerism and individualism revolve around a single tenet: “when faced with abundance, one should consume abundantly” Berry, 45). This belief has been nurtured and allowed to flourish due, in large part, to the American frontier mentality and its closely related idea of manifest destiny. The frontier mentality encourages us to consume our way into oblivion, frantically wiping out the abundance which, only several hundred years ago seemed so boundless; all without a care for sustainability. But as resources dwindle, the privilege of mass consumption becomes consolidated in the few while the many are excluded from the benefits of consumerism. We are left with a world were social Darwinism and trickle down economics are called upon to explain the otherwise unexplainable fact that a tiny percentage of the worlds population consumes and controls the vast majority of its resources.
It seems all too easy to blame today’s societal predicament on our genetic predispositions, our biology, or the mismatch between our relatively slow biological evolution and our recent, rapid social evolution but to do so would be to turn a blind eye to the numerous examples of advanced cultures which practiced widespread sustainability. Moreover, to explain away our cultural shortsightedness as a product of a genetic predisposition towards short-term egoism leads to a fatalistic view of reality that resonates well with Hobbes and his Leviathan. But if Man, in his natural state is constantly pitted against his surroundings, then the Amazonian tribes that lived in cooperation rather than competition with each other, and shaped their environments based on an attunement to the ecological realities of their particular landscapes could not have existed. As the evidence of advanced cooperation based, sustainable civilizations piles up, American consumerism begins to look less and less like human nature, and more like an example of the folly of group think.
Group think occurs when dissention is discouraged. A group without room for dissenting voices can pursue a bad idea simply by ignoring its problematic nature and constantly telling itself that their idea is Right. This is what happens with American consumerism. At the individual and corporate level there is a noticeable lack of sociological imagination. We have apparently lost the ability to question the sanity of consumerism by repeatedly telling ourselves that our way of life is human nature.
Dissention, however, is protected by the constitution which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But these freedoms do not take into account the cancerous nature of American consumerism, nor do they factor in the state of today’s corporate economy. Freedom of the press has become an excuse for a laissez-faire attitude by the FCC towards a media monopoly that is driven by marketing and the bottom line rather than any kind of journalistic integrity. That’s not to say that dissenting voices don’t exist, -they do- it’s just that they have been excluded from the mainstream media where critical discourse was once accepted as a necessary part of an effective democracy.
In this essay I argue that American consumerism continues to drive us towards the brink of destruction primarily because of the interplay of a widespread participation in group think with relation to consumerism, and the intentional manipulation of the mass media by corporate interests who see the personal benefits of consumerism as outweighing the ecological and social catastrophes it promises to bring with it.
The Big Three: The Mass Media, the Government & Corporate America
If the early twentieth century was the gilded age, contemporary society must be diamond studded. The economic endeavors of John D. Rockefeller and his contemporaries seem like child’s play in comparison to the big players in today’s global economy. In contemporary American society governmental regulation of corporations is virtually nonexistent and international policy is often dictated by corporate greed rather than authentic Democratic process. The failure of the mainstream media has allowed for this rapid degeneration of American society into a state of corporate anarchy. Through succumbing to corporate control the media has agreed that its primary purpose is not to inform, but rather to make money, and as such it has joined the other corporate entities whose products are far less important than the profits they produce.
In his essay entitled “Stumped Speech,” Paul Taylor of the Alliance for Better Campaigns lays out the way in which the media has both allowed and instigated this state of affairs.
“We the public give the broadcast industry our airwaves for free, in return for their commitment to serve the public interest. At election time the industry turns around and sells airtime to candidates, fueling a money chase that saps public confidence in the political process and restricts the field of candidates to the wealthy and their friends. The money pays for ads that reduce political discourse to synthetic, deceptive, inflammatory, and grating sound bites” (Taylor, 319).

By permitting the institution responsible for holding both politicians and corporations accountable to become controlled by corporate interests, we have allowed our government to backslide into a state of affairs that is not all that different from the Tammany Hall days. Today’s Boss Tweeds, however, are corporate executives that would have made Machiavelli proud, and today’s Thomas Nast’s have been forced into the media margins of blogging and other alternative media by a corporate controlled mainstream media.
What has emerged since the downfall of our only means of insuring the accountability of our socio-political hierarchy is a triumvirate of three institutions that work together to insure our collective impotence, to maintain a dangerously stratified social hierarchy, and to guarantee that we continue to consume in the face of clear data that shows our over consumption to be a problem. The mass media, big business, and the government are engaged in a three-way orgy that is driven entirely by lust for money and power, leaving no room in the bed for the public good.
Group Think in the Mass Media
American society is molded by the type of discourse it pursues via the mass media. In his essay “The Stories We Tell” George Gerbner writes that “the stories that animate our cultural environment have three distinct functions. These functions are (1) to reveal the way things work; (2) to describe what things are; and (3) to tell us what to do about them” (Gerbner,10). Through the media we receive messages that tell us not only who we are, but who we ought to be. We are presented, through media messages, with a spectrum of available life choices. According to Gerbner, in an ideal world “the three kinds of stories check and balance each other. But in a commercially driven culture, stories of the third kind pay for most of the first two” (Gerbner, 11). Due to this imbalance, messages that do not fall within the paradigm of things that support increased consumption have been deemed unworthy of airtime and have thus been excluded from public discourse. As a result, even while we perceive that we are faced with unlimited opportunities, the spectrum of life choices has been drastically reduced to fit within a structure of consumerism. Politically, for instance, we have the choice between Republican and Democrat. If we choose not to participate in either of these parties we effectively forfeit our political voice. Alternatives such as communism and socialism have become dirty words precisely because of the fact that they do not encourage the kind of blind consumption that fattens corporate executives, and drives us into debt.
When the bottom line dictates media content, content rapidly becomes pure propaganda. The dissenting voices within the media are limited to debates between republicans and democrats where the fundamental disagreement is over gay marriage, taxes, and big government versus bigger government rather than truly substantive issues. Many issues are simply off limits to reporters because they are deemed dangerous to corporate sponsorship.
Plenty of ambitious reporters and intellectuals have found to their dismay, that the unfair and unethical foreign policies, the unethical business practices, and the widespread political corruption which they uncover through diligent reporting, are no longer newsworthy. By denoting those who dare to question the ethics of mainstream consumerism as “conspiracy theorists,” thereby robbing them of any credibility, the mainstream media has made corporate group think inevitable. Independent thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader have, through no fault of their own, found themselves excluded from a great deal of the public discourse simply because they question American group think.
Group think is never good, but if group think is occurring among the masses as an intentionally propagated form of brainwashing it becomes truly evil. If the fundamental tenets of American consumerism were in fact that all men are created equal, that everyone has a right to personal freedoms, and that self determination was indeed best for everyone, and we all bought into it lock, stock and barrel we might honestly feel good about our participation in group think. As it turns out, however, the situation is not nearly as simple as the feel good solution of “Democracy for all.”
What seems to be happening with American consumerism is an entirely Machiavellian form of manipulation. At the top of our social structure a few individuals with tremendous power are all too aware of the fact that the spread of democracy, the containment of communism, and the protection of human rights as they form the justification for American imperialism are a crock of shit. These individuals realize that in order for our corrupt power structure to remain in place they must foster the illusion that American imperialism and stratification of wealth is really just American altruism. If you don’t believe it, just compare the facts of our foreign policy with the media messages that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. In his 1948 memo to the President, George Kennan, the Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff wrote the following assessment of US foreign policy needs:
“We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better” (Kennan, 524).

And George Kennan was writing in 1948. Since then the disparity of wealth has only grown greater, and since then the media has continued to use the “vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization” as justification for our efforts at economic imperialism. And while the corporate media tells us that our strong-arm methods of economic expansion are really in the best interest of the people we conquer our Political leaders deal in straight power concepts. Using the mass media as a mouthpiece through which to deliver a barrage of propaganda, a bevy of corporate executives, leading Washington along with the promise of large capital donations has paid heed to the advice of George Kennan and created a “pattern of relationships which permits [them] to maintain [the current] position of disparity.”
Our foreign policy displays a selective attention to the plight of the people of the world. We only really feel the need to “spread democracy” when we stand to gain economically by meddling in the affairs of another country. Hence we invade Iraq where we stand to gain its rich oil reserves and we ignore Sudan and North Korea where the human rights violations are just as glaring. Hence we fight the evil communists, not because communists are evil, but because communism threatens to remove an entire country full of potential resources and consumers from the global structure of domination and exploitation that is the market economy.
The Effect of Group Think on Individuals
The spread of American individualism through economic imperialism is on the verge of annihilating the very culture which champions it, as well as the environment upon which it is dependent. The American frontier mentality encourages us to consume our way into oblivion while the world around us falls apart. On the individual level, the most impervious factor which keeps us from effecting any real change and binds us to the destructive cycle of mindless consumption springs directly from a Judeo-Christian conception of the self which fosters the illusion of the possibility of a stable self, independent of others, rather than the more Eastern mystical idea of the self as a part of the world. This illusion of a purely agentic self is achieved largely through the media’s creation of cultural myths which solve the problem of isolation with individualistic solutions.
Early psychoanalytic theory brought us the idea that the self is often dictated by subconscious drives and impulses. Eros and Thanatos –two starved pit bulls, locked together inside of the subconscious. Here lies Freud’s foundation for human existence; Eros –the life drive, consisting of the instincts for self preservation, pleasure, and procreation; and Thanatos –the universal death instinct.
This controversial claim is the basis for significant body of psychoanalytical theory. One of the most insightful interpretations of Freud’s theory of human motivation is laid out by a psychologist named David Bakan. Bakan deems the two conflicting motivational factors “agency” and “communion” rather than Eros and Thanatos. In his book, The Stories We Live By, Dan P. McAdams explains Bakan’s theory: “Agency refers to the individual’s striving to separate from others, to master the environment, to assert, protect, and expand the self” (McAdams, 45). McAdams describes communion as, “an individual’s striving to lose his or her own identity by merging with others, participating in something that is larger than the self, and relating to others in warm, close, loving ways” (McAdams, 45).
Bakan has laid out a way for us to understand the self. We are all the product of some combination of these two subconscious drives. The first, an attempt to master, dominate, achieve, and separate ourselves from others, and from our environment; the second an attempt to join something larger than ourselves, to return to the plentitude from whence we feel we came, to coalesce, to belong.
Yet another theorist, Jacques Lacan provides a theoretical approach to the study of self that accounts for the conflicting drives of agency and communion. Lacan offers a developmental theory that attempts to shed light on the early years of a child’s development. Most importantly, Lacan focuses on the years between birth and the child’s induction into the world of language –the symbolic realm. During this time, Lacan introduces us to the “mirror stage.” During the mirror stage, the child goes through a transformative process, wherein it moves from a realm Lacan calls the Real that is characterized by perfect unity, interconnection and plentitude, and into the realm of the imaginary, where the child experiences lack and loss, as well as the origins of ideas of self and other. To reduce Lacanian theory to its lowest common denominators, one could say that infants start out as something very close to the Buddhist ideal of being one with everything but, upon seeing themselves in a mirror and being encouraged to identify with the visual image in the mirror, they begin to understand themselves in separation from everything. But, as Lacan hypothesizes, life is about striving towards a return to the state of interconnectedness, while simultaneously attempting to understand yourself in terms of what makes you different from everything around you. Lacan indirectly tells us that agency comes from a child’s need to understand itself in terms of others and to be inducted into the symbolic realm, and that communion comes from our desire to erase the distinction between self and other and to return to the plentitude of union with the maternal body, but that we need both drives (Klages, 3).
Needless to say, contemporary American society heavily favors agency over communion. The resulting version of the self becomes characterized by extreme isolation, which may account for the high suicide rates among the most successful Americans. By repressing our need for communion we come to understand ourselves as static, disconnected beings. Communion is, in essence, the recognition of interdependence and interconnectedness. This movement towards Lacan’s “Real” has become all but extinct thanks in large part to our demented version of individualism. We seem to believe that to understand ones self, and to understand the world is to differentiate and separate the self from the other and from the world. We have removed ourselves from the world we live in and from the communities we live in. Only in a society that fails to understand its interconnectedness and interdependence could the possibility of space civilizations be pursued. Likewise only in such a society could nuclear armaments reach a level where their use would result in total annihilation of life as we know it.
But our need for interconnectedness and communion is not just repressed. It is intentionally co-opted and channeled towards the cause of agency. In his book Hollywood Goes to High School Robert Bulman suggests that Hollywood’s portrayals of suburban high schools reflect an implicit desire among the middle class for an “escape from a world of status competition, envy, coldness, exclusion and conformity” (Bulman,123). He tells us that such an escape is ironically depicted in Hollywood movies about suburban high schools as being achieved through rugged individualism, but that “the meaningful relationships and sense of belonging that Americans long for happen to challenge the ideals of individualism and free expression that they also hold dear” Bulman, 123). It seems that Hollywood recognizes this fundamental contradiction but simultaneously recognizes that by presenting individualistic solutions to isolation (in spite of the implicit contradiction) they can reap enormous rewards. The problem, as Bulman points out, is individualism itself. It encourages isolation and competition rather than cooperation and interconnectedness. Our perceived isolation is today’s Gordian knot and individualism with its twin sibling of consumerism makes up our Alexander the Great. Isolation provides the perfect market for a society that values getting more than it values having. We can never solve the problem with a solution which is, in it’s self a contradiction.
Baby You Know I Love You
The most apt metaphor for describing the relationship between individuals within the market economy and the three interlocking systems of domination (the media, the government, and corporations) may be that of the dysfunctional marriage. If we see the big three as a cheating, dominating husband and the public as a submissive, gullible wife we might adequately make sense of our current predicament. The husband went wrong when he started cheating on the wife by choosing the bottom line above the public good. In order for our metaphorical patriarch to cover himself, and still benefit from his wife’s submission and loyalty, he was forced to lie to his wife about his real agenda. He logically chose to do this through the media. But the more he lied about his affair with the bottom line, the more elaborate his lies had to become, and as the lies became more elaborate the husband’s deception was apparent. Meanwhile the wife was in denial, not wanting to admit to herself that she had married the wrong man, and knowing that to challenge the husband would be to forfeit the beautiful mansion he provided, but simultaneously knowing deep down that something was amiss.
But the wife no longer wants to take the husbands word when he says “baby you know I love you” while acting contrary to the accepted rules of a relationship based on trust. The rest of the world is telling her that she’s being had, that her man is a lying, cheating son of a bitch; the evidence to prove it is readily available, and she is starting to question the apparent contradictions between the husband’s words and the husband’s actions. Furthermore, the wife is being pushed further and further towards the back room of the mansion so that the husband can have room to accumulate his wealth. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the relationship is abusive and that the wife would have legal precedent for obtaining a restraining order.
What America really needs now is either a very good relationship counselor or a divorce. Let’s make it a divorce and find a better man before this one puts us in intensive care.






















Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. "The Possibility of Place." At Home on the Earth. Ed. David L. Barnhill. London, UK: University of California P, 1999. 45-50.

Bulman, Robert. Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools, and American Culture. New York: Worth, 2004. 110-123.

Gerbner, George. "The Stories We Tell." Readings in Mass Communications. Ed. Kimberly K. Massey. Boston: McGraw-Hill Co., 2002. 10-11.

Kennan, George. "Memo PPS23 by George Kennan." Wikisource. 28 Feb. 1948. US State Department. 6 Apr. 2007 .

Klages, Mary. "Jacques Lacan." www.colorado.edu. 8 Oct. 2001. Colorado University. 7 Apr. 2007 .
McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By. 1st ed. Vol. 1. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co, 1993. 52-53.
Taylor, Paul. “Stumped Speech.” Readings in Mass Communications. Ed. Kimberly K. Massey. Boston: McGraw-Hill Co., 2002. 318-322