Churning Consumption
World War II had been a catalyst for the economic recovery which pulled the US out of the Depression. Towards the end of the war President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was challenged to find a way to convert the burgeoning war economy to peace.
Economist and retailing analyst Victor Lebow gave this evidence and solution in his paper Price Competition in 1955: “Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
“We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate,” Victor Lebow, 1955
The chairman of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors, Arthur F. Burns, seemed to buy this hook, line and sinker and canonised the new economic gospel by stating: “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more Consumer goods.”
Freud’s daughter Anna was also influential in post-war USA. Her continuation of Freud’s psycho-analytic vision led to huge government-funded programmes to make people conform to “normality” and help free people from their inner desires and drives, which she felt were a danger to society.
There have been only momentary backlashes against this cultural shift, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal, Martin Luther King’s speech against normality and various civic protests.
The corporate world fought hard and kept one step ahead of the emergence of the new “non-conformist” by helping people self-express with products tailored to their “individualist” image. Advertisers and their research institutes had by now built up sophisticated ways of understanding and driving people’s inner desires.
New technologies also revolutionised the way companies could make products. Now every individualised whim and created desire of the Consumer could be pandered to. Self-actualisers thus became the new motor of the economy.
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