The Lifestyle


Why Corporations Need To Make You Unhappy
By Bill Morgan for Skyscraper & Pocketbook

The idea that the free market is a competitive one is well understood. What is not well understood, is that this system puts co-operation above competition, or rather, businesses co-operate first, compete second. A company's primary objective is to grow the market for its product, which it does through advertising. An advert sells two things simultaneously: first, it sells the product type, and second, it sells the company's particular brand. A car advert will first sell driving, or "the car", and then it will sell, say Ford's version of the car. The effect of this is that, through advertising, companies are (consciously or unconsciously) co-operating in order to increase the demand for their type of product, and then they are competing against each other for market share.

Assuming the same total profit, a CEO will be happier that his profit is made from a smaller share of a larger market, than from a larger share of a smaller and dwindling market. The former promises potential growth, the latter certain decline.

One way to increase the market for a product or service is by attacking a competing idea or product. So for example, you can increase the car market as a whole by encouraging people to stop using buses or trains and to start driving everywhere, and you can do this by undermining the idea of public transport.

Sometimes this is done quite subtly. For example in an advert for Ford vans (a commercial goods vehicle, not a passenger vehicle), a van is seen driving past people waiting by a bus stop, looking miserable, in the rain. The people at the bus stop represent a cross section of the potential car buying public (so as to not alienate Ford's potential customers); the road is perfectly clear, the bus doesn't come. We know that goods vehicles aren't in competition with buses, but we also know that Ford makes cars too, and if they can undermine public transport while promoting one of their vans they are doing their bit for the automobile industry as a whole, and they are doing it in a slightly covert way.

Once all the companies have co-operated in their combined effort to grow the market, they can, as gentlemen, go about the business of competing for the spoils. We, who consume these companies' services and products, are the spoils. We create profits for companies by actively engaging in the dream that they are selling, namely the dream that "my life will be better if I buy what they are selling me"; we engage in the dream because we are bombarded by the message.

We dream of improvement, but we don't have time to work hard at anything because we are rushed off our feet, with the work, the kids, the mortgage, the DIY, … the Lifestyle. I know what car I'd have if I had the money, I know what improvements I'd make to the house, I know where I'd go for a holiday if I had the time. If I had the time and the energy I know whose body I'd have. I know I need to get in shape, lose weight, and make myself attractive.

How do I know?

I have a personality and I know who I am and what I like. I have an individual psyche and my mind holds within it an idea of "me". This is called the "self". The self is also known as the ego. The ego resides on the left side of our brain. When we use our senses and perceive the world we understand it both subjectively as well as objectively. We understand our world by fusing both the subjective ego interpretation with the right-sided objective experience. Thus we have "me-in-the-world" - a sense of self and a sense of place. When we see others we use the right/objective side of our brains. When we see ourselves, we leave it up to our ego, our left-sided "idea of us", to interpret how and who we are (1).

If we have an idea of who we want to be, we may well judge that against who we think we are. If we don't match up to our unattainable desired self, we may well feel unhappy, certainly not content, and our discontentment may give us that extra shove, that drive, that urge we need in order to achieve. We will aspire to achieve whatever it is that we think will make us happy.

What do we think will make us happy?

Well, who's happy now?

Dennis Hopper looks happy in his Gap shirt by the pool with the pretty girl. Samuel L. Jackson looks pretty cool walking down the road selling financial services for Barclays - he was cool in that film too. These celebrity sales people are chosen not for who they are but for what they represent, namely "success" and because they live the lifestyle that comes with that success. We may not want to be like them, but we wouldn't mind their "lifestyle". We are introduced to the notion of success when we see the lifestyles of those deemed successful, e.g. when we watch chat shows, see supermodels on catwalks, watch morning and afternoon celebrity television, see films (especially Hollywood films), TV dramas and increasingly when we watch the news or read a newspaper. But we see lifestyles in their most refined and perfect form when we see them advertised, or rather when we see an advert for a product that is associated with a lifestyle:

So when do we see advertising?

NOTE: Governments sell security by creating insecurity. Security is a hugely profitable market - consider that the U.S. military budget for 2002 is approximately $360,000,000,000 - this money has to be raised by the taxpayer to profit the owners of private corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. Creating global insecurity (see "the war on terrorism") is, in the main, the government attempting (on behalf of its bellicose corporate constituents) to grow their market. You can't sell security to people who feel safe, and you can't sell a police state to a population that feels secure enough to want to be free.

It's worth noting that adverts appeal to our subjective subconscious and thus do not need to be consciously remembered in order to work. They do not need to make "sense" or be rational, as they are aimed at our unconscious, irrational fears and aspirations.

How are these fears and aspirations related to "the Lifestyle"?

We want the lifestyle because of what it means to have it. At the most basic level we are animals involved in the evolutionary game of self-improvement (which in a business-run society means "material" or "profitable" self-improvement). We are programmed by nature to compete for the best mate. The Bowerbird does this by collecting brightly coloured objects and arranging them in his bower. The male with the most impressively decorated bower gets to pass on his genes; less acquisitive Bowerbirds may fail to do so.

NOTE: There's nothing wrong with our instincts; what is wrong is the way our society measures success. If kindness and compassion were considered the hallmarks of success, we, as a species, would be far more civilised, probably a lot happier, and certainly further from extinction.

In a competitive social system such as ours most of us will not be rich and famous and many of us will not be "successful". We know this, so instead, rather like the Bowerbird, we try to look successful via the products we've acquired or rather through our "lifestyle choices", e.g. the car we drive; the house we live in, the figurines on the mantelpiece; the taps on the bath; the trainers our children wear and that endless line of products that "say so much about us".

Comparing ourselves to our unattainable "dream of us" gives us the drive and ambition to go after all of this, but we don't have much time or money, so we need convenient solutions, and these come in product form so as to profit those who make them.

A doctor will tell you that the key to losing weight is regular exercise, eating well (healthily) and possibly eating less. Conversely, an advert will tell you to buy very particular products, and these "solutions" will almost certainly fail, if not in the short term, then almost certainly in the long term. If such a product were to succeed the company would lose its market and we know that the first rule of business is to grow your market. Thus, we have Diet Coke, low fat crisps, fitness videos, chocolate flavoured diet milk shakes - all convenient, all guaranteed to fail and all more expensive than taking a walk. This is the "diet industry", the cruel love-child of the "consumer staples" and "healthcare" industries (2).

Adverts often tell us what our egos most want to hear: "treat yourself, you deserve it, you're the important one". In order to deliver their message they first make sure we're responsive by telling us something we agree with, and then while we're nodding they sell us the experience, the dream, the brand.

So we want to be rich (which we equate to being both successful and also safe), to be cool (accepted, liked and loved by others), and we want to be happy (because we've evolved, we're top of the food chain, and most of all because we deserve it). Dennis Hopper is rich and cool, and in the Gap adverts he's very happy. All of these attributes are the perceived characteristics of any celebrity that is employed by a corporation to endorse its product so they can sell it to you in order that its makers (the company's owners) can get richer and actually live the dream that for you is unattainable.

We are not players, we are pieces, moved about, manipulated by corporate media; by commercials, infomercials, PR, product placement, and subtle marketing techniques to create more wealth for the wealthy (3).

Interestingly, the "Lifestyle" that is sold to us doesn't actually make us happy. The rich are just as likely to commit suicide as the poor. You need time to be happy. To be happy you need to be free - free of rushing about and heavy burdens. To be happy you need to be content, and being content means needing not much and wanting little. Wanting little is not going to make anyone rich; it may make many, many people very happy.

Thus I conclude that it's in the interests of private profit-hungry corporations to make us, the consumers … UNHAPPY, discontent, always wanting for more.

There is no reason corporations should exist at all in their present incarnation. They should certainly not be the major instruments of power that they have become. They do, after all, make us unhappy; in fact they need to in order to survive.

HELPFUL QUOTES:

1. Corporate Globalisation:
The poor complain; they always do, But that's just idle chatter.

Our system brings rewards to all,
At least to all who matter.
- Poem by a Canadian economist (Gerald Helleiner)

2. Criminal:
"A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." - Clarence Darrow

3. Corporation:
"That inglorious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

4. Corporations:
The institutions for concentrating wealth - pop.

Sources:

(1) For more on this: http://www.sciencenews.org/20020824/fob8.asp

(2) "With more than 60 percent of Americans overweight, Shell says scientists and drug companies alike see obesity as the "trillion-dollar disease," which is why, even when their products have failed to deliver, they have resorted to devious and underhanded schemes to deceive people into taking them anyway. Diet drugs have proven notoriously ineffective at helping people lose weight, and also usually rather dangerous."

- Why We Eat, Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14523

(3) For more info: http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Corporations/Ads.asp

http://www.pocketbook.org/skyscraper.htm


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