Consumption as a Deliberate Goal

OUR USE OF RESOURCES, FROM OIL, GAS, WOOD, AND MINERALS TO air and water, has escalated dramatically in this century. Both individually and collectively, in cities and in nations, our consumptive demand has magnified our impact on the planet. But this rise in consumption has also been an integral part of the economy. It wasn’t always this way. As early as 1907, the economist Simon Nelson Patten was severely criticized for his prescient warning of a change that was taking place: “The new morality does not consist in saving but in expanding consumption.”

Consumption, a word that once meant to waste away under the effects of disease, now affects the planet as a central part of our economic system. What makes it insidious is that our own identities have become tied up in the need to have more. As Paul Wachtel says in The Poverty of Affluence, “Having more and newer things each year has become not just something we want but something we need. The idea of more, of ever increasing wealth, has become the center of our identity and our security, and we are caught up by it as the addict by his drugs.”

According to Allen D. Kanner and Mary E. Gomes, writing in “The All-Consuming Self,” “The purchase of a new product, especially a ‘big ticket’ item such as a car or computer, typically produces an immediate surge of pleasure and achievement, and often confers status and recognition upon the owner. Yet as the novelty wears off, the emptiness threatens to return. The standard consumer solution is to focus on the next promising purchase.”

I am often told, “Well, it’s human nature to want more. You can’t buck that.” It’s true that when members of the Kaiapo tribe from the Amazon visited me in Vancouver, they saw a lot of things they wanted. If they hadn’t found anything they wanted, it would have been a terrible indictment of a total emptiness of the way we live. But the Kaiapo lived deep in the Amazon forest in complete self-sufficiency. In contrast, our consumption is far beyond anything necessary for survival, and society’s hyperconsumption is driven by the billions of dollars spent annually to make us want things. Bill Gates spent more than one billion dollars in advertising alone for Windows 95.

It is instructive to remember that the Great Depression of the 1930s came to an end because World War II provided a massive economic jolt. American industrial might was fanned to white heat to support the war effort, but as victory began to loom the business community worried about how to keep the economic boom going. The solution was consumption. Shortly after the war, the retailing analyst Victor Lebow declared:

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, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.

By 1953 the chairman of President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers would state that the American economy’s “ultimate purpose” was “to produce more consumer goods.”

But there’s a problem. When products are made to be durable, industry will eventually saturate the market. Solutions such as planned obsolescence and constantly expanding new markets to the Third World, elders, yuppies, children, specific ethnic groups, and so on have worked well to overcome this defect, at least temporarily. Coca-Cola president Donald R. Keough expressed a religious attitude to market opportunity: “When I think of Indonesia—a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and with a Moslem ban on alcohol—I feel I know what heaven looks like.” The ultimate innovation to ensure an endless market has been disposability. Citing convenience or hygiene to justify products that are used once and thrown away, industry creates an endless market for those products.