Your products are making you happy and docile

November 15, 2007 | Filed Under Moment of Truth, Watch this 

A few days ago, I posted a link for the UK’s Buy Nothing Day on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, but didn’t highlight it as much as I now feel I should have.

Contemplation and information respectively done and received over the last few days have led me to the conclusion that I’d like to break free of consumerism. For a while, I’ve been toying with the idea of minimalism and I think that I might now be ready to embark upon such a mission.

Down with big business. To hell with somebody trying to get my money at every corner and on every remotely flat vertical surface without offering me something that’s actually going to make my life better. Forget these companies that have no personal connection with me and don’t care about me at all or what happens to me from their product because they don’t know me. Yeah, I love Whole Foods. But why can’t they be this great entity in one or a few locations? Why do they have to crush the “little” people? Screw that. Farmer’s markets, here I come.

What spurred this topic today? Watching Adam Curtis‘ BBC documentary called The Century of Self. There are four parts to it and I’ve only yet to watch the first, but it’s an incredibly powerful piece about the development of propaganda public relations, mass-consumer persuasion, and the resulting political idea of how to control the masses. You see, the use of the phrase “public relations” was just a euphemism for propaganda. The same techniques–and others–were used to sell products and then to control nations.

If you can keep stimulating the irrational self, then leadership can basically go on doing what it wants to do.
- Stuart Ewen, Public Relations historian

All four parts are available to view on Google Video.

Comments