Addict Nation (6 page)

Most addicts don’t ponder the cost or consequences of their habit. Getting their next fix is always priority number one, so very few addicts seriously plan for the future. Most Americans live in complete denial about how much they will need to live decently in retirement. The Motley Fool puts it this way: “Let’s say you’re retiring in thirty years, and you want to live off the equivalent of $50,000 a year in today’s dollars. By then, that $50,000 will need to be $150,000 thanks to inflation, and if that amount is 4 percent of your savings (the guideline espoused by the Fool’s
Rule Your Retirement
service), your total retirement kitty will have to total $3.75 million.”
¹²
Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, as we fail to plan for our retirement, the pushers of products have developed a growing body of scientific research centered on understanding why people buy for all sorts of irrational and unconscious reasons. It’s all part of a master plan to figure out new ways to get us to buy even more. In the United States alone, market research is a $12 billion a year industry.
¹³
Martin Lindstrom, the author of the revealing book
Buyology
is a global branding expert and a leader in the field of neuromarketing. Using cutting-edge brain-scanning instruments, he has studied the brainwaves of thousands of volunteers as they’re shown ads, commercials, logos, and products.
¹⁴
He writes that his research “revealed the hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain, how our truest selves react to stimuli at a level far deeper than conscious thought, and how our unconscious minds control our behavior (usually the opposite of how we
think
we behave).”
¹⁵

“The government is so often focused on economic growth as the ‘be all’ and ‘end all’ of its aims. And of course economic growth relies about 70 percent on consumption in a nation like ours. You can see it in the thousands of commercial impressions that children and adults are exposed to every day—all of which have the same underlying message: buy something and your life will be better.”

—Tim Kasser, professor and chair of psychology at Knox College

Often the reasons for a purchase have little to do with practicality and rational need and much more to do with deep-seated, even primal desires for social acceptance, sex, and status. Lindstrom describes one study where a car maker showed volunteers various images of automobiles and observed, “. . . just as male peacocks attract female mates with the iridescence of their back feathers, the males in this study subconsciously sought to attract the opposite sex with the low-rising, engine-revving, chrome pizzazz of the sports car.”
¹⁶

Unlike peacocks, human beings are supposed to be able to man- age their instincts and impulses. Addiction is what happens when our instincts betray us. When we get an urge to buy something, it often feels
urgent
, like an instinctual desire such as an itch we need to scratch. In fact, our instinctive responses are often being artificially triggered by subliminal signals sent to our subconscious that manipulate us into associating the product with the fulfillment of a primal urge, like sex. But it’s all a mirage. An expensive men’s watch doesn’t make a man more virile or powerful. And a fur coat—no matter what the price—is a cruel obscenity that certainly doesn’t make a woman look sexier. It makes her look barbaric.

When hit with a seemingly uncontrollable urge to buy, it’s interesting to notice what fantasies are coming up in one’s mind in relation to the product. Are you visualizing yourself with the product in a grandiose way, admired by others? Such fantasies would be a tipoff that you’re seeking something this inanimate product will never be able to deliver.

“Part of this process of building our consumption culture, is to transform citizens into consumers. A consumer is a much smaller thing than a citizen. If you can get people to stop realizing that they have public lives that they can live in their communities and neighborhoods, if you get them to narrow down to think of themselves as just a consumer, then you get them hooked on this stimulus response model and the idea that they are only going to complete themselves through further purchasing.”

—Gene Halton, Ph.D., professor of sociology
at the University of Notre Dame

We know addictive behavior gets worse over time. That’s true with booze and it’s true with stuff. The United States and Europe are hoarding more and more of the world’s resources. The wealthiest 20 percent of the world accounts for three-quarters of total private consumption. The poorest fifth of the world accounts for barely a bleep.
¹⁷
I’m talking about stuff: clothes, shoes, cars, houses, dvds, books, furniture, toys, electronics, housewares, plastic bottles, and so on. Less than a quarter of the world’s humans gobble up three-quarters of the world’s stuff! It’s time we all ask ourselves,
Am I part of
that “20 percent” in the massive overconsumption range?

In the national bestseller
Why We Buy
, retail guru Paco Underhill— whose clients have included some of the biggest brand names in the world—explains why corporations hire him to videotape shoppers and analyze their buying habits: “If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse—boom. Fortunately, the economic party that started the second half of the twentieth century has fostered more shopping than anyone would have predicted, more shopping than has ever taken place anywhere at any time. You almost have to make an effort to avoid shopping today.”
¹⁸
That’s the understatement of the century!

While Underhill doesn’t see this overconsumption epidemic in the sinister light I do, he does issue a fascinating warning: “Every expert agrees, we are now dangerously over-retailed—too much is for sale, through too many outlets. The economy even at its strongest can’t keep up with retailing’s growth. Judging from birthrates, we’re generating stores a lot faster than we’re producing new shoppers.”
¹⁹

Leave it to a retail guru to describe a fatal flaw in our consumer culture. Our entire economy is teetering on a house of cards. And his description dovetails perfectly with the dynamics of addiction. Addiction is always about
too much
! An alcoholic drinks
too much
! A food addict eats
too much!
A gambling addict gambles
too much
! A shopaholic shops
too much
! A culture addicted to consumption
produces
too much
for us to consume and offers too many ways for us to consume it! We have too many stores, too many outlets, too many malls, too many boutiques, too many department stores. We’re constantly concocting products that claim to be “new and improved” to manipulate status- and novelty-obsessed consumers into buying that too. It’s all
too much
!

In fact, we now have so much unnecessary stuff that self-storage has become a huge industry! Hideously ugly self-storage facilities are popping up all over the country like pimples as people store all the crap that they never should have bought in the first place and for which they have no room. The truth is that absent food, toothpaste, shampoo, electricity, Internet/cell phone connectivity, and gas, most of us could go for years without actually
needing
to buy much of anything. In fact, there is a new philosophy whimsically dubbed “Enoughism.”
²⁰
The concept is that at a certain point consumers actually own everything they need and buying anything more starts to make their lives worse, not better. Like any addiction, materialism starts out as fun and then crosses a line into fun with problems and, finally, steers us into misery.

The Big Consumer Economy Con Game

We are constantly being told that economic growth is essential to our economic well-being. Since American consumers account for two-thirds of domestic economic activity, that means average Americans are being told they
need
to keep spending for our society’s very survival. Everything depends on our going shopping! But here’s why it’s all a big con game at your expense. The capital being generated isn’t being distributed to the average American. The capital being generated by all this unnecessary shopping is increasingly being collected by a tiny percentage of the population.

More and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. For decades, CEOs have been getting mind-boggling raises, even as they’ve presided over massive layoffs. How’s your standard of living improved by comparison? Unless you’re at the top of the income ladder, chances are your answer is “not much.”

The vast majority of taxpayers have seen their incomes remain nearly flat for the last three decades. But income for the top 0.01 percent shot heavenward by almost 1,000 percent!
²¹
I’m going to think about
that
the next time I’m being swayed to buy some gizmo I don’t really need.

Our Addiction to Materialism
Is Creating Wealth Disparity

The unspoken promise of this so-called capitalism is that we too could, one day, become billionaires. Hey, it could happen. We could win the lottery several times in a row. But what’s the chance of that happening? Slim to none. Nevertheless, we consumers—brainwashed and addicted—march in lockstep, proudly defending capitalism, even though it’s not really capitalism anymore. And it’s certainly not making most of us rich.

Faux Capitalism

Hey, I enjoyed those Ayn Rand books as much as anybody. I’d love to spend a night tooling around town with John Galt or Howard Roark, Rand’s fictional heroes who personify the capitalistic ethos. But I hate to break it to you . . . we no longer live in a capitalistic society. The dictionary definition of capitalism is “An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production.” But today, the so-called “free market” is hardly free! It’s ironic that anyone who challenges today’s economic system is accused of being a socialist, because what we have today is actually
corporate socialism.
Giant for-profit corporations consistently get unfair advantages and subsidies from government, undermining the whole concept of open competition.

Big Business Controls Our Government

Capitalism’s sacred law of supply and demand has been perverted by our morally bankrupt political culture. Entrenched, corrupt government bureaucrats consistently give rapacious corporate behemoths an unfair advantage over small, local, progressive, ecologically minded and ethically aware private enterprises. Big business has its thumb on the scale.

Corporate interests dominate most government agencies, effectively reducing them to ethical wastelands. In her must-read book,
The Story of Stuff,
Annie Leonard writes, “In the United States there are about 900 advisory committees that provide peer review of scientific research, develop policy recommendations . . . and serve other functions to support good governance. These committees are so active in providing advice to Congress, federal agencies, and the President that they are sometimes referred to as the ‘fifth arm of government.’ Federal law requires that these independent committees have members who represent a balanced diversity of views and who are free from conflicts of interests . . . however, industry influence continues to dominate these committees.”23

In other words, these powerful committees are loaded with business -people who stand to make their industries bigger profits by influencing the committee’s recommendations. Government agencies also have been known to base their decisions on studies funded by biased parties like industry trade groups.

“These are very good ways to addict people: to create a culture of people who have been smothered before they can even develop through a combination of technology, media, and consumption dictates. Is that good for growth? It probably is. But is it good for the growth of the individuals involved? No.”

—Eugene Halton, author of
The Great Brain Suck

Addicted to Growth

Corporate greed is the other side of the overconsumption coin. Why are we being pressured to buy so much stuff? Because America’s corporate culture is addicted to constant revenue growth! America’s CEOs are hooked on showing ever-increasing profits, quarter by quarter, to meet or beat analysts’ expectations. As ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff proved, you can’t profit unwaveringly without taking ethical shortcuts. And the accessory to corporate crime is usually the U.S. government. We have a fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem in almost every agency of government, from the USDA to the FDA to the Interior Department. The U.S. government looks the other way while corporate giants decimate taxpayer-owned public lands and natural resources, risking the safety and health of our citizens. Take big oil.

Who could ever forget that terrible day in the spring of 2010 when oil started spilling into the Gulf of Mexico? The slow-moving apocalypse killed eleven workers, laid waste to large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, and threatened countless species of wildlife and vast stretches of shoreline. Soon, America learned that the oil company had decided several days before the deadly rig explosion to choose a type of casing for the well that it knew was the riskier of the two options. Why? For one thing, it was cheaper. In the oil company’s own documents, the strategy was described as “best economic case.”24

Where were the federal inspectors who are charged with looking out for our interests, given that the drilling was occurring on public property? God only knows. Perhaps engaged in a beer-pong contest. As the devastation mounted, a government report revealed that federal inspectors overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico regularly chowed down on free meals and took tickets to sporting events from the very companies they monitored. The report said some of the government inspectors even let oil company workers fill out their inspection forms in pencil, which the inspectors simply copied over in ink before submitting them. One inspector admitted, “Everyone has gotten some sort of gift . . .” from the companies they were supposed to be scrutinizing.25