By Larry Romanoff,
August 06, 2022
I don’t know if Americans were ever fiscally responsible, if they ever had
a time when saving was valued, where you didn’t borrow for consumption, and
where low-quality throwaway goods and products were avoided, but if they did
experience such a period in their history, it was brief. Twenty years before
Elmer Wheeler’s discovery of sizzle, Bernays and his friends had
already instilled the equally important concept of spending tomorrow’s money
today. The process began with Layaway plans, then moved to ‘Pay as you Go’,
‘No money Down’, ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’, and other easy credit schemes.
Television ads displayed beautiful people enjoying their new home and car,
kitchen appliances and furniture, TV, clothing and vacations, and not having to
pay for them today. The marketers hired Bernays’ psychologists to
create a tactical plan to change American values from saving to perpetual
consumption, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. US marketers
conceived and created a ‘throw-away’ society, where appearance was more
important than substance, where quality was sacrificed for fashion. US
automakers changed the entire external appearance of their models each year,
converting transportation into fashion accessory with advertising campaigns
that made people ashamed of driving last year’s car. This is so true that since
the 1950s, one of the largest ‘fashion events’ of the year was the unveiling by
American auto manufacturers of their new models. There was never any attention
paid to engineering or quality; it was all superficial consumerism.
Most Americans are too young to realise that their throwaway society is a
recent development. It was not so long ago that quality and durability were
important characteristics of any purchase, because people weren’t rich enough
to buy shoddy products requiring repeated replacement. Consumer goods were
meant to last a lifetime – and many did. Many toys were expected to last for
generations, and often did. As a child, I played with toys that were handed
down from my grandfather. Early in his marriage, my father purchased a set of
kitchen pots for my mother, for which he paid nearly two month’s salary. My
mother died at 91 years of age, and those pots still looked as new as when they
were purchased. It was Bernays and his marketing people, the
evangelisers of capitalism, who found a better way to make more money faster.
Rather than selling you one good item and losing you as a customer forever
(since it would never need replacement), they began lowering the quality,
making and selling increasingly cheaper products that would soon fail and
require replacement. This way, American manufacturers would have high profits
and permanent repeat customers from a wasteful disposable society.
American manufacturers had developed the processes of large-scale mass
production to serve the nation’s war machine, but after the war these massive
factories would remain mostly idle. The solution of Lippman and Bernays was to
engineer one of the greatest shifts in social values the world has ever seen,
by re-defining the concept of “need” in the public mind to coincide with every
product American factories could make. They employed their wartime propaganda
methods to indoctrinate the American people with a need to purchase everything
possible, in their pursuit of “a higher living standard”.
“Bernays began the process of selling not so much products as emotion
itself. In psychologically linking the act of consumption to feeling free,
happy, empowered, and confident, he tied notions of identity and self to items
that could be purchased.” This was the true birth of consumerism, and why it
existed (and exists) only in the US. America evolved into a
‘shop-until-you-drop’ throwaway economy, based on easy credit and
superficiality. In a few decades, Americans went from ‘thrift’ to
‘spendthrift’.
Few people have any idea of the extreme, almost fanatical, extent to which
Bernays’ consumption virus succeeded in infecting the American population,
having long passed the point where it can be deemed pathological. As one
measure, that of shopping mall space per capita, Germany has 2.7 sq ft per
person, Japan has 3.9 and the UK has 5. For every American shopper there are 24
sq ft of mall. The so-called “American Dream” evolved from this massive
psychological abuse, and is why the American search for a higher standard of
living manifests itself in mere useless purchase and consumption. The US
economy, dependent for 75% of its life on consumer spending, is an entirely artificial
construct that could never have existed without the greed, immorality and
twisted psychological principles of Bernays and his “elite few”. Americans
have now defined this bizarre consumption standard as the default position of
all mankind’s economies, which they are now aggressively trying to inflict on
China as ‘best practices’ and the will of God.
In his book ‘The Affluent Society’, Galbraith so
wisely noted that US consumer demand was contrived and not natural. P & G
is widely noted today for their unusual marketing model that enjoys a mostly
artificial product demand driven by propaganda and supported by massive
advertising spending, twice that of any other firm in the world. It is not a
secret, and is acknowledged even among P & G executives, that the firm’s
sales would within months fall by perhaps 70% if the advertising flood were
terminated. As one author noted, “There is a very direct correlation between
demand for a product and the marketing expense in synthesizing that demand.”
The propagandists representing the elite owners of US industrial production
recognised early on that contrived demand and consumption were a royal road to
riches for them, and that they held the key to infecting Americans with a
consumption virus. They eventually penetrated not only the homes but
the school systems, to the extent that today Americans are taught from
kindergarten that consumption is king. In this model, industrial
production cannot increase without a corresponding increase in consumer demand,
which means Americans must be moved to increasingly desire more products and
spend increasingly more money to obtain them, which meant not only marketing
and advertising but the development of consumer credit. Since Americans would not
always have enough money today to purchase today’s new products, they were
increasingly encouraged to borrow and spend tomorrow’s money. In a PBS program
series, the narrator boasted that “One of the most wondrous inventions of the
age was consumer credit. Before 1920, the average worker couldn’t borrow
money. By 1929, “buy now, pay later” had become a way of life”.
This is virtually the entire picture of the US economy today, consisting of the
production and purchase of unnecessary and increasingly lower-quality products,
the sales of which are stoked by ever-increasing advertising expense and the
fiction of brand value, all financed on credit.
Galbraith noted correctly that American society evaluates people by the
products they possess. Because for generations the corporate propagandists
created and propagated the myth of striving for “a higher living standard” –
which they defined as owing more things – as the epitome of the American Dream,
it is natural that Americans now judge themselves and others according to their
rates of useless consumption. It is probably true that the principal
social goal of Americans is owning more things, the direct result of
generations of intense programming. It is often said that Americans
have a standard of living while Europeans have a quality of life, an accurate
observation beyond the appreciation of most Americans. Galbraith again noted
that American values are wrong, that “We set the wrong goal, the national
dream, which created the evaluation system that is now conspicuous consumption
and possession”. He wrote further that the urge to consume – which is virtually
the bedrock of the US economic system – was deliberately created by fostering a
false value system that emphasised production and consumption as the governors
of prestige.
As far back as the 1920s, economist Paul Nystrom claimed
that changes in lifestyle had induced American society to a “philosophy of
futility”, of consumption for its own sake as a kind of social fashion.
Norwegian economist Thorstein Veblen first coined the term
“conspicuous consumption”, which was defined as a narcissistic behavioral
addiction, a kind of psychological deformity induced in a population by
promoting the purchase of usually expensive goods that are not necessary to
one’s life, simply to show that one is able to afford them. Veblen’s original
proposition was that conspicuous consumption was a psychological end in itself,
providing the honor of superior social status while provoking envy in others.
This kind of consumption is most notably seen in the behavior of the
newly-rich, demonstrating their immaturity and lack of good taste by showing
off, though we can sometimes observe it in the lower social classes who
perceive themselves as relatively poor and give themselves a psychological lift
by the unnecessary purchase of an expensive item. We see this often in the
black ghettos in the US, where the poorest teenagers will spend unaffordable
sums to buy a pair of sport shoes that happens to be in vogue.
This is not the same as purchasing something that we really do want for its
own sake, and which would add pleasure and enjoyment to our lives. If we really
love something and would be happy for owning it, there is no harm in indulging
ourselves. Life is for living. But if you buy something for the sake of status
or prestige, in other words, not because you love it for itself but to impress
others, you are not living your life – you are living theirs. The
British economist John Stuart Mill stated this quite well when
he wrote, “I by no means wish to see discouraged any indulgence which is sought
from a genuine inclination for, and enjoyment of, the thing itself; but a great
portion of the expenses of the higher and middle classes in most countries is
not incurred for the sake of the pleasure afforded by the things on which the
money is spent, but from regard to (public) opinion.”
Of course, American society and quality of life were the natural victims of
this propaganda. When we are overwhelmed with advertisements to buy new cars,
we have much less sympathy for higher taxes that would pay for schools,
hospitals or a high-speed rail system. And since US corporations and their
elite owners and financiers exert a virtual ownership function on the US
government, American government policies were recalibrated to support the
capitalists instead of the best interests of the citizens and the nation. It
is not for nothing that the US has no government-operated health care system,
spends more on prisons than on education and that virtually its entire physical
infrastructure is crumbling today. All of this stems from the same propaganda
directed to serve the top 1% and satisfy their personal greed.
A significant characteristic of US media that exists in no other country is
the subtle but persistent reinforcement of consumerism. When George Bush
finally appeared on TV after 9-11, his only advice to Americans was to “go
shopping”. Ben Bagdikian, Danny Schechter, Noam
Chomsky and others have all detailed the extensive infiltration of
consumerism into all aspects of media communication, where informational
programs, documentaries and other important measures are eliminated because the
media want “to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing
controversies that interfere with the ‘buying mood'”. Media owners want
to keep Americans sequestered in their private little local worlds, cut off
from too much knowledge about the world, preferring viewers to be
“tranquilized, pacified, entertained”. According to Shechter,
the dominant media mantra to viewers and readers is “shut up and shop”.
Embedded in this approach is also a constant selling of the benevolence of
capitalism and benefits of free enterprise. Bagdikian detailed how subtle forms
of this cultural reinforcement appear almost everywhere, displaying corporate
imagery flattering to capitalism, promoting the concept that “all businessmen
are good, or if not, are always condemned by other businessmen”, that the
‘American way of life’ is beyond criticism.
P&G’s expenditures on TV advertising are so huge the company uses its
power to dictate program content to the networks. For decades, P&G have
demanded of TV networks: “There will be no material that may give offense
either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There
will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the
concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or
spiritual motivation.” Sound familiar? I could provide a list of significant
events that might easily categorise P&G as “cold, ruthless to the point of
criminality, and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivation”. Not only
that, P&G have a vested interest in maintaining the utopian mythology that
so controls American consumers. From their policy statement again: “If there is
any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same
show”. The result of all this influence from owners and advertisers is that all
US media content, not only news but all network programming, and all movies,
are subject to a subtle but pervasive censorship, all of which works together
to reinforce not only the consumer society but the entire range of American
social and historical mythology. The entire media and communications
landscape in the US is infected with propaganda of one kind or another.
Let’s put aside marketing fraud for a moment and review the most important
consideration of US consumer spending. To re-state, the American economy
depends for 75% of its life on consumer spending, a ratio far higher, nearly
twice as high, as that of most other nations, a condition that is pathological
by any economic or psychological measures. This condition did not derive from
natural development but was instead the result of decades, generations
in fact, of an insidious program of marketing propaganda consciously
promulgated to turn Americans into witless consumers for the sake of enriching
the industrial 1% of the nation. An economy based on a level of
consumer spending of this magnitude is so unbalanced that in the long run it
cannot survive. And indeed, its temporary survival comes at enormous cost to
the nation. One such cost is that the US is now a country with an
infrastructure, including dams, highways, bridges, airports, railways and more,
that has seen no maintenance or upgrading for more than 60 years and that is
increasingly experiencing collapse. The money that should be extracted in taxes
and spent on crucial national needs is instead spent on shoddy goods at
Wal-Mart. In fact, the funds requisite for critical national needs are being
siphoned off as corporate profits for the benefit of a chosen few. Yet we
have the Americans today furiously urging China to follow their path and
drastically encourage consumer spending. Of course, part of this evangelising
is an equally furious urging for China to cease all infrastructure spending and
other national development to release funds for consumers to spend. The reasons are two-fold.
One is that following the US advice would mean China’s development would be
frozen in place, all improvements would cease, China’s hopes for the future
would die on the vine, all this being part of the plan. The second reason is
that the Americans hope to profit the most from a potential doubling of
consumer spending in China. It
is astonishing to me the clearly-flawed economic theory postulated by the
Americans has been able to gain any traction in China. Briefly, the postulation
is that consumption, consumer spending, will replace investment in development
and therefore permit China’s economy to continue to grow unimpeded, a theory so
obviously false one would need to believe in fairies to give it credence. Consumption
– consumer spending – is not the driver or creator of national growth and
development, but is the result of growth. As the economy grows, wages
and incomes rise, and people have more money to spend. To freeze investment and
encourage the population to spend all their money will not make the economy
“grow”, regardless of the temporary (and false) effect on GDP statistics. It
will simply transfer private savings and incomes to the owners of those firms
selling consumer goods, impoverishing the nation while enriching primarily the
American MNCs. The entire proposition is rubbish, pushed onto China for the
perceived benefit of American firms with the added attraction of derailing
China’s economic development and thus removing China as an economic threat to
the US. And that is the entire story. China’s economy is neither
unsustainable nor unbalanced, and to follow the advice of the Americans to
“shift China’s growth model to one driven by household consumption rather than
by investment and exports”, will serve only to destroy China. And that is the
plan.
NOTE to readers:
This essay is a companion piece to a chapter in one of my E-books titled
Bernays and Propaganda, which deals with a wide range of related topics. This
is the link:
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/BERNAYS-AND-PROPAGANDA.pdf
The related part is: Chapter Four — The Transition to Education and
Commerce, which provides more detail and background, and some live
examples. Scroll down to the heading “Turning to Commerce”. The Chapter is not
long but is necessary for the extended view it provides.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more
than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries,
as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a
retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive
positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international
import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan
University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA
classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of
ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at:
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2022
