Enough, Desire, and Populism
How desire functions in our society, how it's breaking down, and why that's a problem for the future.
I ended my last Whale post, which queries the meaning of “enough”, with this line, “An appeal to establish a why, so that we can better do the how”. It occurs to me, though, that just about any why can be established, and the how, accordingly, justified.
So, in this post I’m going to look more closely at the whys.
My interest in the concept of enough has to do with the way that our culture of consumerism functions. We love to buy, so much so that we wind up with far more than we need. We even put ourselves into debt to do so, and increasingly carry burdens of health issues caused by overconsumption.
What does enough mean in this sort of culture? Is it even really relevant when the driving force of our economy depends on people continuing to purchase things, when the race between nations hinges, in large part, on the ability of their people to produce and consume ever more?
Limits
Most of you reading this will be familiar with the environmental implications of this dynamic, and will immediately recognize that, yes, there should be a way of determining the extent to which we mine and transform the earth, ocean, and sky.
To ask “why” in light of this is to attempt to establish some concept of goal toward which we are working, and this, in turn, helps establish when enough might be reached.
The Enlightenment framed this why as, roughly, the attainment of knowledge, freedom, and happiness. These values are reflected in the founding documents of many western countries, and are intimately related to liberal democracy as a form of government.
There are some basic constituent parts that I think we can all agree form the foundation of this. Having a home that provides shelter and safety, work that provides satisfaction and a sense of meaning, food, and a sense of belonging, are outlined by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs schema.
Over the past century, an almost inexhaustible number of parts, of goals that we try to achieve, have been added on top of this level of basic necessities.
This is deliberate and by design.
The Roaring Twenties
In the aftermath of the First World War a concerted effort occurred to shift an economic model from one that largely relied on purchasing goods that were durable and practical, to one that made a connection between emotional satisfaction and the purchase of a product. The emphasis, in other words, shifted from the usefulness of the item itself, to the emotional feeling that simply purchasing, and thus having, that item had.
The nascent field of psychoanalysis developed new understandings of how human beings think and feel, and in short order these insights started to be used as a way to exert influence on large populations.
Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, is widely regarded as the father of public relations, and played a central role in developing the playbook for manipulating what people wanted. As Bernays’ contemporary, Paul Mazur of the Lehman Brothers Bank, put it, people were, “trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed…man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.”
While Bernays started with outright propaganda on behalf of the US government, helping to make the case for fighting in Europe in World War 1 to the American public, after the war he realized that the same techniques could be used to convince people to buy products that they might not otherwise need.
The appeal to emotion, which worked far better than an appeal to the intellect or rational side of a person, elicited in people a desire to have the products that the factories, primed by the war effort, pumped out. This addressed a major concern that business leaders had at the time, which was that their factories would overproduce, and they would be left on the hook for their investment in increasing capacity. It also, of course, served to make them very rich.
The tactic worked incredibly well for a time. The “Roaring Twenties” saw a decade of cultural and economic dynamism. Telephones, radios, cars, and air travel began to be prominent features of the economy; Jazz, or, as Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah calls it, “creative improvised music”, flourished, as did art deco.
Collapse
But, in October of 1929, Wall Street collapsed, and “contagion” on the stock market exposed the weakness of an economic system predicated on emotion.
Over the next decade, during the Great Depression, movement was made toward a more steady-state economy, with President Roosevelt explicitly seeking, with the New Deal, a balance between quality of life for workers and the economic productivity demands of business.
The throughline, here, is of unbound exuberance, collapse, difficulty, and then establishing a renewed sense of the social contract, all centred largely on the individual and the role they play in society. In Europe, specifically in Germany, however, while this same course of events was playing out very differently, it also intimately connected in certain, surprising ways.
Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, admired both the techniques Bernays’ used to influence the masses, and the interventionist hand of the state in economic affairs exemplified by Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In the United States business fought back against the New Deal, and after it became apparent that defeating Roosevelt in the polls wouldn’t work they sought the advice of Bernays. An avalanche of marketing followed, seeking to convince people that democracy, or personal choice and autonomy, was intimately connected with private business and the products it provided – consumer choice was meant to become synonymous with citizenship.
In Germany, business became subsumed to the National Socialist Party and the goals it determined for the nation. Individuals, rather than expressing their citizenship as consumers, did so as members of the Nazi Party and believers of the propaganda in support of it that Goebbels pumped out “to forge the nation into a unity of thinking, feeling, and desire…”
There is a distinction here, between, on the one hand, individual desire and satisfaction facilitated by the marketplace, and on the other by that desire and satisfaction facilitated by the state and the reification of its leader.
The why in the former is dynamic and always changing, identities shaped and reshaped by advertising – from bell-bottom to boot-cut to slim jeans – while in the latter it remains attached to the leader and the mythos constructed around him.
Desire
Among the most powerful levers of control that Goebbels utilized was, what Freud called, the “deep libidinal forces of desire” that are unleashed when an individual becomes part of a mass. The organized displays of this, the massive rallies with the focus on the leader, are among the most well recognized aspects of the Nazi regime.
A key feature of this unleashing of the forces of desire, and their alignment with a leader, is the the placement, on one hand, of love, directed toward the leader, and the displacement, on the other, of hatred, which is directed toward some external other. In Nazi Germany this hatred was directed toward Jews, toward LGTBQ, toward disabled, toward the Roma, among others. This creates the cause or unity of purpose that enables direction and control.
The why and the how become clear, here, but, while the enough is identified, horribly as the extermination of a people, it remains elusive, as the expanding categories for extermination imply. The project must continue to evolve so that the effort to achieve it never runs out.
Growth
In consumerism the why is more elusive, but rests at the heart of the enterprise. To quote pioneer consumer economist, Hazel Kyrk, “New needs would be created, with advertising brought into play to ‘augment and accelerate’ the process.” People would be encouraged to give up thrift and husbandry, to value goods over free time. Kyrk argued for ever-increasing aspirations: "a high standard of living must be dynamic, a progressive standard," where envy of those just above oneself in the social order incited consumption and fuelled economic growth.”
If there is a why, here, it would be economic growth. Metrics like Gross Domestic Product, or the stock market numbers intoned on news broadcasts, provide some blurry notion of progress toward some sort of goal, even if the goalposts constantly move. Productivity and the need to increase it, the pressure on workers to make more, even if the time they have remains finite, is a message constantly reinforced by political and business leaders. Yet without a goal, without some notion of enough, the tail wags the dogma.
Populism
The populism of the Nazi party in the aftermath of the Great Depression fed off of people’s desire for hope, for a sense of self-worth. But this hope was channelled into a why that, with the collapse of the Thousand Year Reich in a decade, had a definitive end.
The channelling of desire in consumerism has been fed by economic growth, by a continual progression of new things, each promising to be better than that which came before. And underlying all of this has been the exploitation and refinement of natural resources.
As we begin to encounter the limits to this model of growth, with the breakdown of our climate due to the dumping of pollutants into it, with the depletion of resources, we are beginning to see the breakdown, too, of the sense of identity associated with it. Populism has reemerged in Europe, in the United States, as well as here in Canada, where the leader of the Conservative Party openly associates with individuals who sought to overthrow our elected government.
It is far easier to outline what’s wrong than it is to provide solutions, but I think one of the central problems here is the absence of a true why when it comes to the social contract we currently have. This absence is what allows populism to creep in and take root, it provides the space for the “deep libidinal forces of desire” to coalesce around those, like Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre, who utilize the mechanism of division, the identification of the other and the directing of anger, fear, and hatred toward them, to direct and control the love, or the unquestioning support, they themselves seek to use.
As the tensions in the world continue to increase, which they will due, in large part, to our collective inaction on climate change, I think it is likely that we will see this trend toward “strong” leaders, toward those who offer a false and too-easy sense of self worth to vulnerable individuals, who cast the world in simplistic dichotomies of us and them, increase.
The antidote to this, I believe, is to know yourself, to establish values, or whys, rooted in caring and, perhaps most importantly, values that are based on adequate knowledge of the impacts your actions might have.
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Very good article Adam, Mom.
Really fascinating to see it from this wide-angled and historical perspective.