Liberty in the television age - part two

Self with a Capital "S"

What I call here the "Self" is the result of one astute domesticated primate's business acumen. This clever chimp, Mr Bernays, hit upon the notion that as well as fulfilling the wishes of people, business and government could also use the knowledge that man was driven by irrational desires to generate new wishes. By attaching these wishes to brands, Bernays discovered how to make smoking cool for women, doubling the market for gaspers. Eggs with bacon? Bernays again. He continued his experiment in the field of politics, suggesting to Eisenhower that the people be given an irrational fear of communism to bind them to their State. The reader is left to judge for themselves whether Mr Bernays was correct, when, at the age of a hundred, he mused on whether he had created a monster with his new fangled 'Public Relations'.

It was he who promoted the notion that the population was best served by being distracted from political thought by being induced to believe that their real choices lay in what they choose to consume. The fact that his life was devoted to linking consumables to the deepest fears and hopes of mankind lends this insight a sense of mordant irony. What Bernays did with uncle Freud's work was to promote the elimination of choice, by developing techniques of anxiety manipulation that actively stimulate the mark's self esteem. He was expert in directing the anxieties of consumers whilst being careful to promote a sense of empowerment in the act of purchasing. By cleverly directing the desire for freedom towards the burgeoning marketplace, he produced a template for a form of subtle coercion that continues to be improved upon.
All one could want, eventually, is all that is on offer. In our times, almost a century on, it seems to some absurd that we would have cause to complain at all. States such as ours offer an abundance of cheap consumer goods, a variety of flexible working options, and endlessly available credit. Yet the concept of a free lunch, of something for nothing, or out of nothing, persists as a knowing skit on naive demands. At what price does all this abundance come?
Of course, the price is freedom.

There are those who would claim that freedom to purchase is all that matters. Bernays himself thought that States would eventually be replaced by businesses - more direct generated-wish fulfilment mechanisms. It is important to consider what else, if anything else, remains of freedom than the falsehood of choice offered in identical shops across the 'developed' world.
They Don't Call it Programming for Nothing
The mere term "developed" recalls a photograph. A fixed image of the world, that, in this case, comes to take the place of the world. Just as freedom becomes the freedom to buy, the experience that members of such "developed" countries have is chiefly of images - not of things, nor of events. The implications from neurosemantics alone are quite arresting. We have enough difficulties in communicating with one another, in rendering sensible the dendritic matrices of correspondence logical, magical, irrational and accidental that constitute our personality, without having to contend with the Baudrillardian simulacrum. This second-order reality, which can and does cascade into an infinite series of similar fixed images, is the composite structure of all the representations of the world made public. The strongest messages, the biggest brands; often these are, like what one calls 'thoughts', most consciously recognised as the mainstays of the digitised diorama that one often mistakes for 'reality'.

It is no accident that these virtual worlds reflect the order of our own minds. It is almost deliberate, near-accidental, and in that approaches necessity. How could it be otherwise, when mass media chiefly exists to sell, and its techniques are intended to draw on the deepest fears and hopes of individuals. It appears that a second mind has been created, an entire second-order consciousness complete with its own mythos, values, language and beliefs. What is interesting about this from the point of view of this essay is that this second order consciousness, the Self of the consumer, has achieved its goals and is firmly established as a viral parasite upon the consumer's personality. It may not be stretching the point too far to opine that in a literal sense it is the consumer who is consumed.

Eschatology and Afterfun

The notion that one should work to achieve the synthetic dreams of the consumer mythos is a mutation of Abrahamic eschatology - the belief common to Christianity, Islam and Judaism that there is an afterlife, and that is to this that one must direct one's conduct and aspiration while alive. This trick has worked so well for centuries in assuring fealty to religious laws that it seems natural that the current model of consumer politics would appropriate it to promote a work ethic whose promise is that, at the end of the month, one might spend a little time in the Paradise of the Adverts.

Of course, the game is not as simple as that. One finds oneself rubbing up against the inability of events and things to match their idealised selves - the product, place or promise as image is perfect, garlanded in dreamlike special effects, bringing increased status and a sense of achievement in its train. As with the gulf between the idealised Self and one's actual personality, this is an abyss that is not meant to be bridged. Indeed, the gulf between promise and fulfilment, flattery and actuality, image and object is so vertiginously deep that one's instinct is to shy away from its yawning edge, and reify the very broken promises that brought us there. Persons willing to accept that they are easily duped, because they easily dupe themselves, are sufficiently rare to ensure that this tabu is one that remains largely unchallenged, even unacknowledged. The relationship between consumerist disappointment and personal dissatisfaction is well known to those who would have us buy more. The happy make for poor consumers. They are happy because they have begun, at some point, to determine their own desires through a capability to question their emotional responses as a valid basis for action. The ideal consumer is a person so disorded internally as to be desperate for any exit, however temporary. When so proven, the tenuous and momentary satisfaction that is stymied by possession of an object or experience inferior to the image can be dismissed as the possession of an obsolescent item. The search is renewed, for a rarer, fresher, more desirable object/experience. The governing system of behaviour, as with the personality, is never authentically questioned.

At the base of these repeated self-deceptions, this determination to have yet more 'satisfictions' at the expense of one's time, dignity, freedom of mind - is the fear of a meaningless life leading to an inevitable death. For centuries the possessing classes have learned and taught fear of the poor, erecting prisons and passing laws to legitimise their fear of expropriation. In times to come, as the populations of the developed countries become proportionately older, we will come to fear the young, and they shall be victimised in kind. The process has begun, in a relatively benign fashion, through the extension of that fantastically successful marketing fiction 'adolescence' into the twenties, thirties and forties of two generations of 'kidults'. The appearance of simplicity of mind, flippant dismissal of political and social issues, and the need to be ever more apathetically shocking are among the memes spread through this new mutation of the consumer Self. PR professionals wish their targets to recognise nothing but satisfiction as their goal in life. To reflect on the process by which this has been engineered is to be uncool, perhaps even to be envious of the types who profess themselves happy to snatch at the shelves for the shortly obsolete desirables of the day. It is a totemic substitute for the greatest fear of all: that one is oneself irrelevant, largely already obsolete - that with no Great War or Great Cause to participate in, one simply does not matter and whatever one does will eventually disappear. If we taught children to face these facts early in life they would be largely immune to the overtures of an industry seeking, through the stimulation of appetites for the useless, to needle incessantly at the hypersensitive membrane of anxiety that surrounds this deep truth.
In our culture it is horrendous to contemplate death. Jokes about death superabound: the news is largely a form of macabre entertainment, assisting in its way to insulate the viewer from their own inevitable end. Of course, the only message of television is "keep watching" - and therefore the tendency of even 'good' news programmes is to reduce their reportage to easily digestible soundbites, repeatable bylines, and to present a rapid and parodic version of international events that remains forever distant from the viewer's experiential world. One disaster comes to resemble another -occasionally, those of sufficient magnitude elicit some response, but there is rarely any interest in the underlying causes of these catastrophes. Small disasters - local wars in Africa or Indonesia, Iraqis exploded by 'martyrs', floods in Bangla Desh - these elicit a well-bred satisfaction, concealed beneath either indifference or faux concern. Large disasters may result in appeals, donations of cash - expressions of pity which once again allow the viewers to feel detached, 'lucky', superior, gratified by their largesse and by inference, pleased that their often horrendous working lives have gifted them the opportunity to buy into the theatre of magnanimity.

The result is identical as it is with 'ethical' consumerism - to place a barrier of credit between oneself and the finite resources in the account of life. Consumerism as a credo promises 'eternal' distraction. It is my contention that no-one escapes the reckoning of the death bed. It is this, the sammasati of the passing of life, that people fear most: the dread suspicion that life has been wasted. Constant distraction is the tool employed to deter the consumer from ever contemplating the consequences of being remote-controlled through clumsy emotional stimuli to buy - it is obvious that such an insight could prove incredibly galvanising to the most committed consumer.