The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (42 page)

What makes materialism so toxic is that it robs the individual of the primary drive that animates our species—our empathic nature. We are learning from evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists that human nature is not what we’ve been told over the past several hundred years. Our Enlightenment philosophers, at the very beginning of the modern era, painted a picture of human nature as rational, self-interested, materialistic, utilitarian, and driven by a need for autonomy—all of which predisposes us to accumulate more property and become an island unto ourselves. The new scientific studies tell a different story. Human beings are the most social of creatures. We yearn for companionship and crave social embeddedness. Much of that sociability is soft wired into our neural circuitry and either nourished or extinguished by our culturalization.

In the 1990s, scientists stumbled upon mirror neurons in human
beings—popularly dubbed empathy neurons. Several of our primate relatives and elephants have empathy neurons—we are still not sure of other species. Mirror neurons and other parts of our neural makeup allow us to experience another being’s feelings as our own—not just intellectually, but physiologically and emotionally. For example, if I’m observing a spider travel up another person’s arm, I’m likely to feel the same creepy feeling in my neural circuitry as if it was climbing up my limb. We take these everyday feelings for granted but are just beginning to understand that it is this physiological ability to experience the other as one’s self—to feel their joy, shame, disgust, suffering, and fears—that makes us the social creatures we are. The empathic sensibility is what allows us to respond to one another as an extended self, embedded in a deeply integrated society. When we
hear of individuals who lack all sense of empathy, whose behavior shows no sensitivity to or concern for others, we think of them as inhuman. The sociopath is the ultimate pariah.

Studies repeatedly show a close correlation between materialistic behavior and the suppression or extinction of the empathic drive. Children who grow up with parents who are cold, arbitrary, sadistic, and uncaring, and who experience emotional abuse and the inflicting of corporal punishment, often become either aggressive and exploitive or withdrawn loners as adults. Their empathic drive is squashed and replaced by fear, mistrust, and a sense of abandonment. By contrast, parents who are affectionate and responsive and able to nurture an infant, and who provide him or her with a secure environment that encourages the development of selfhood, bring out the social trust that is so essential for empathy to flourish.

Children who never experienced empathy growing up are less likely to be able to express it to others as adults. Unable to connect with their fellow human beings at the most basic level, they become for all intents and purposes isolated and alone. Their materialism becomes a pale substitute for their sense of loss. Their attachment to things becomes a surrogate for a loss of attachment to people. Their obsession with material success, fame, and recognition also becomes a means to win social acceptance.

As their materialism comes to define their lives, it also shapes their relationships with others. In a world driven by material success, every relationship becomes a means to advance that end. Others are treated expediently and become reduced to instruments to accumulate more wealth. The sought-for prize of human warmth and affection becomes ever more elusive as the world of the materialist becomes divided into two realms—mine versus thine. The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
is both despised and pitied, and treated as an outcast by society.

For the materialist, advertising becomes the powerful drug that feeds the addiction. Advertising prays on one’s sense of inadequacy and loneliness. It promises that products and services will enhance a person’s personality and identity and make him or her more appealing, attractive, and acceptable to others. The German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel defined the new materialist man and woman coming of age at the dawn of the capitalist ethos. He argued that beyond its utilitarian and material value, property is an expression of one’s persona. It’s by forcing one’s will into objects that one projects his unique persona on the world and creates a presence among his fellow human beings. One’s very personality, then, is present in all the objects one claims as one’s own. Our property becomes indistinguishable from our personality. Everything that is mine enlarges my unique presence and sphere of influence and becomes the means by which others know me.

The philosopher William James described the consumer personality in terms that are uncomfortably recognizable to most of us living in a highly charged materialist culture. He wrote:

It is clear that between what a man calls
me
and what he simply calls
mine
the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. . . .
In its widest possible sense,
however,
a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he
CAN
call his,
not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down . . . a great part of our feeling about what is ours is due to the fact that we
live closer
to our own things, and so feel them more thoroughly and deeply.
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Advertising plays off the idea that property is the measure of a human being and pushes products and services as essential to the creation of an individual’s identity in the world. For much of the twentieth century, advertising pitched the idea that property is an extension of one’s personality and made deep inroads in reorienting each successive generation to a materialist culture. The Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor notes that by the 1990s, children spent “as much time shopping as visiting, twice as much time shopping as reading or going to church, and five times as much as playing outdoors.”
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Even more disturbing, youngsters said that they “would rather spend time buying things than doing almost anything else” and more than half believe that “when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are.”
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It’s been 15 years since these surveys were conducted. In the interim, a Millennial Generation has come of age, and the evidence is contradictory on the question of how the young line up on the spectrum running from empathy to materialism. Psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists are publishing reports and studies that are deeply at odds with one another.

A massive study of 14,000 college students conducted between 1979 and 2009 by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan concluded that “college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”
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Sarah Konrath, a University of Michigan researcher who conducted the meta-analysis study, which combined the results of 72 studies of American college students over the 30-year period, says that today’s college students are less likely to agree with statements such as, “I sometimes tried to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”
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Other studies on the Millennial Generation, however, appear to show the opposite trend. Unlike the Gen Xers, millennials are “much more likely
to feel empathy for others in their group and to seek to understand each person’s perspective.”
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Studies also show that the Millennial Generation is more likely to give others’ opinions in their peer group equal weight, prefer to work collaboratively, and seek group consensus, all of which require an empathic mindfulness.

On the question of trusting others, which is so essential to fostering empathy, while millennials are far more distrustful of government, the business community, and experts of all kinds, they are far more trusting of their fellow collaborators on the Internet and, as mentioned earlier, more willing to put their trust in opinions, reviews, and rankings of their peers and in the combined wisdom of crowds.

Studies also indicate that millennials are the least prejudiced and most empathic of any generation in history in championing the legal and social rights of previously marginalized groups of the population, including women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and the disabled. They are also less xenophobic. About 23 percent of American college students have studied abroad, and 73 percent of millennials favor liberal immigration policies compared to only 39 to 57 percent of the rest of the adult population.
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My sense is that the Millennial Generation is not a monolith, but rather a mix of contradictions. While there is evidence of their famed narcissism and materialism, there is also evidence of an increase in empathic engagement. I also suspect that the narcissistic and materialistic inclination is of waning influence in the aftermath of the Great Recession. A spate of new studies concur. In December 2013,
The New York Times
ran a lead article in its “Sunday Review” section reporting new findings by researchers that suggest that the millennial generation, deeply affected by the Great Recession and a stagnant global economy, has begun to shift its psychic priorities from material success to living a meaningful existence. A report commissioned by the Career Advisory Board found that among millenials between the ages of 21 and 31, having a meaningful career took precedence over making lots of money. A longitudinal study carried out by Jennifer L. Aaker, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and her colleagues, followed several hundred Americans for a month to assess what the subjects meant by “meaningful.” What they discovered is that young millennials who said they have a meaningful life “saw themselves as more other-oriented—by being more specifically a ‘giver.’” People who said that doing things for others was important to them reported having “more meaning in their lives.”
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Even more telling, in a 2013 survey of 9,000 high school high achievers conducted by the National Society of High School Scholars, students were asked to pick a place they would like to work for in a list of over 200 enterprises, and health care, hospitals, and government accounted for 14 of the top 25 choices. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was the top choice of the best and brightest high school students in the country. James W. Lewis, the CEO of the National Society of High School Scholars,
summed up the findings, saying that “the focus on helping others is what millennials are responding to.”
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As noted, less empathic individuals tend to be more materialistic. If millennials are more empathic than previous generations, then we should pick up the trend in their changing views on materialism over the past decade. That’s beginning to happen. In a study published in the summer of 2013 in the journal
Social Psychological and Personality Science
, researchers examined surveys that tracked the attitudes of hundreds of thousands of high school seniors over nearly 40 years and found a startling reversal in values with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. While empathy for others had been decreasing and materialism was becoming more rampant with each passing year, the trend suddenly turned around after 2008 among young millennials, who reported “more concern for others and less interest in material goods.”
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The new studies find that millennials are less interested in keeping up with materialistic trends and less invested in obsessive consumerism as a way of life.

These findings dovetail with the sharp rise of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy. All over the world, a younger generation is sharing bikes, automobiles, homes, clothes, and countless other items and opting for access over ownership. A growing number of millennials are eschewing designer brands in favor of generics and cause-oriented brands and are far more interested in the use value of material things than their exchange value or status. A sharing economy of collaborative prosumers is, by its very nature, a more empathic and less materialistic one.

The waning of the materialistic ethos is also reflected in the increasing commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship. It’s not surprising that materialists display less empathy not only to their fellow human beings, but also to their fellow creatures and the larger natural environment. They view nature in a purely instrumental manner as a resource to exploit rather than a community to preserve. For them, the environment, like their relationships with others, is valued only for its utility and market value and never for its intrinsic value.

At the University of Rochester, researchers tested 80 students to ascertain how materialistic values affected the way they chose to use natural resources. The students were categorized as holding either highly materialistic values or nonmaterialistic values. They were then invited to play a game in which they were the head of a timber company in competition with other companies bidding to log 200 hectares of national forest. Each could bid to cut up to a maximum of ten hectares per year, with the understanding that whatever remained would grow back at 10 percent a year. If the group bid to cut only a few hectares, profits would be low. But if they bid to cut a huge number of acres, profits would be high but the forest would be depleted in short order.

Not surprisingly, the materialists bid to harvest far more of the forest than the nonmaterialists, giving them a quick profit but at the expense
of an equally quick depletion of the forest. They consistently focused on short-term financial gain over long-term conservation practices. The nonmaterialists enjoyed greater profit in the long run because the forest lasted longer.
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