It was only a matter of time before this started to happen. BoingBoing linked to this National Post article about psychologists who have identified a new syndrome in which sufferers believe they are the star of a reality TV show—that they are under constant surveillance and the people they know are actually actors and so on. They have dubbed it the Truman Show Delusion.

While traditionalists insist that this delusion offers nothing new—it is no different from, say, a deranged man who believes that the CIA has planted a microchip in his tooth—the Gold brothers argue otherwise. “It’s really a question of the extent of the delusion,” said Joel Gold, 39, who has been on staff at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center for eight years. “The delusions we typically treat are narrow: There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles. Or the Fregoli Delusion, where someone believes that one person is persecuting him: a doctor, mailman, butcher. The Truman Show Delusion, though, involves the entire world.”

The doctors who named the syndrome link it to social networking and YouTube-level self-publicity.

Ian Gold, who holds a Canada Research Chair in philosophy and psychiatry at McGill University, added that there are unprecedented cultural triggers that might explain the phenomenon: the pressure of living in a large, connected community can bring out the unstable side of more vulnerable people.
“The wish for fame is a form of grandiosity, and the fear of threats such as surveillance can bring about paranoia,” said the Montrealbased Dr. Gold, 46, who specializes in delusion.
“New media is opening up vast social spaces that might be interacting with psychological processes.”

That last sentence in many ways sums up the point I was trying to make in several dozen posts about social networking. Perhaps because the way technological innovations are publicized, we have a tendency to assume they are tools, passively waiting there for us to employ them to improve our lives. But they obviously begin to reshape us in light of their possibilities, and in that dialectic much can go awry. 

—Rob Horning

I have read Pierre Macherey’s Theory of Literary Production several times now, and I still don’t think I understand what he’s talking about. Either that, or I can’t grasp why it matters. But while re-reading it this time, I was also reading what seems to me a highly “produced” text, an Agatha Christie murder mystery, Evil Under the Sun, and this helped illustrate for me what I think Macherey is getting at.

Macherey is at pains to point out certain critical fallacies, which in his view obscure the literary object and prevent critics from generating “objective” or “scientific” observations about it. (Why deriving such knowledge is important remains unclear to me, but I may be an irredeemable philistine when it comes to “scientific” cultural analysis of the Althusserian school. Seems part and parcel of the dream of breaking through “spontaneous ideology.") One of these fallacies (the “normative fallacy”—if I were Macherey I would be sure to italicize it) involves critics trying to restate the message of a text in their own boiled-down formulations. “Criticism proposes to modify the work in order to assimiliate it more thoroughly, denying its factual reality as being merely the provisional version of an unfulfilled intention.” Such critics are intent on replacing the literary work with what Macherey characterizes as an idealized (and falsifying) version—one that has decoded the literary text and rendered it in unambiguous language, into crystalline commentary. But no language is ultimately unambiguous; every new formulation is subject to interpretation and so on, so this is a fruitless process ("critical works which attempt to put questions about the nature of discourse when they themselves are really discourse in disguise,” writes Macherey), but nevertheless a seductive one, as it places the critic closer to the truth, mediating between the author and the true essence of the ideas that the author was trying to communicate.

From the point of view of the normative fallacy, literature is a matter of stalling the reader’s recognition of the message, staging a bunch of distractions and transpositions and using elliptical or periphrastic ways of expressing things so as to make a text out of something that the critic, after the fact, expresses in its essence. Literary works are just belabored or cryptic ways of getting ideas across.

Of course, mysteries are structured like this—the author stages a bunch of delaying tactics to prevent our seeing who committed the crime, and our pleasure comes from that protraction, from the sinkhole of time opened up within the simple details of a crime. “The detective story offers the best example of this disappearance of narrative,” Macherey explains. “It is constructed entirely around the possibility of this prophetic reading which completes the story at the moment of its abolition.” In a sense, the detective is the critic, who retells the whole story in succinct form at the end, replacing the version we just experienced before as we read. So in Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot explains away the entire book in the last two chapters and the function of all the clues Christie had so carefully planted earlier. He tells the story straight, while Christie had wound in all these distractions, detours, and misleading feints and red herrings. It gets very meta, because Christie has Poirot seem to criticize the ineffectiveness of her own imaginative conceptions earlier in the book. What we thought were just lame, lazy plot and character devices were actually clues—they were unconvincing because they were the inventions of the failed criminals, not of Christie, and Poirot was able to deduce the criminal intent from these cliches that we could only ascribe to Christie herself (a neat trick that would seem to insulate Christie from being judged for her own literary merits). “First of all there were certain preliminary scenes,” Poirot says, describing how the criminals prepared their crime. “A conventional jealous wife dialogue between her and her husband, Later she played the same part with me. At the time, I remember a vague feeling of having read it all in a book. It did not seem real. Because, of course, it was not real.” So what are we, reading a book of fiction ourselves, supposed to make of that evidence? Everything in the book reads like something you’d only encounter in a mystery novel. How can we distinguish? We can’t share the ground from which Poirot judges what is real and what is not.

Mysteries fit the theory of composition Poe put forward in “The Philosophy of Composition,” which Macherey wants to expose as being absurd, if not an actual joke Poe was playing in inviting readers to take it seriously. Poe argues for a teleology in literary works—the end is preconceived and all of a texts elements are designed to produce that end—“every element should contribute to the conclusion.” Poe claims that “it is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem.” So, Macherey notes, the artist is supposed transcending spontaneity, only the reader is experiencing spontaneous responses—the reader experiences ideology, the writer orchestrates it. And the critic who translates the work into its intentions stands even further outside ideology, exposing how ideological discourse works.

If you buy into Poe, everything in a work is intentional, and good critics can presumably read out the intention of every detail by working backwards from the achieved effect. That is what Poirot does at the end of the novel, collecting all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and placing them properly, as the hackneyed metaphor Christie works into the text would have it. A character doing a jigsaw puzzle tells Poirot, “I do think the people who make puzzles are kind of mean. They just go out of their way to deceive you.” Obviously Christie is venting some criticism she must have heard often. Poirot replies the his crime solving “is a little like your puzzle. One assembles the pieces. It is like a mosaic—many colors and patterns—and every strange-shaped little piece must be fitted into its own place.” By analogy, the text is conceived as a complete picture, and Poirot’s assemblage of the pieces is the narrative we experience in reading. 

But what Macherey argues is that it would be silly for literary critics to proceed in the same way as Poirot, deducing the proper meaning of every piece. He argues that this would be a “radical misunderstanding of the writer’s work,” and that a text is “never a coherent and unified whole”—there are always multiple things being suggested at every moment in the text, by every analyzable aspect, and these things are often moving us in different directions simultaneously.

If I understand Macherey correctly, he is saying that what is interesting or significant about a book like Evil Under the Sun is the stuff that Poirot can’t explain in his summation, the aspects of the book that aren’t integrated into his construction of the completed jigsaw puzzle. The excess, so to speak. These are details that prolonged the narrative but had nothing to do with the crime; they just helped perpetrate the novel itself—give it character types, make the motives plausible, provide the backdrop of normality on which the relevant anomalies in the criminals could be registered. In this excess, we can catch a glimpse of ideology, which Macherey, following Althusser, suggests is otherwise inarticulable. As they see it, ideology is lived in, a habitus—tangible, not merely a characteristic of certain statements or positions. Rather it enables ideas to be formulated and expressed, and can’t be expressed directly in language without again being masked or distorted. But literary texts, in their roundabout approach to rendering lived experience, capture something of it, pin enough of it down to make it subject to analysis: “The spontaneous ideology in which men live (it is not produced spontaneously, although men believe that they acquire it spontaneously) is not simply reflected by the mirror of the book; ideology is broken, and turned inside out in so far as it is transformed in the text from being a state of consciousness. Art, or at least literature, because it naturally scorns the credulous view of the world, establishes myth and illusion as visible objects.” It manages to “present ideology in a non-ideological form,” in what ideology enables it to say and what it inhibits.

So what is left over in Evil Under the Sun after Poirot is finished giving the official solution to the book? Quite a lot, actually. What’s particularly jarring are the superfluous suspects, who are given reasons to kill that are convincing enough within the context of the novel but then are dropped as irrelevant red herrings once the real killer is revealed. But if one of these alternate suspects was the guilty party, the novel wouldn’t change much at all. The motives are purely on the level of surface, one as significant as any other. Whether the woman was murdered by her stepdaughter or a drug-smuggling ring makes no difference in the world of Evil Under the Sun. The suspects are perfectly interchangeable, like the cards in a game of Clue. The implication of this is that there is always a superfluous amount of evil, that crime in the culture she depicts is overdetermined, but at the same time utterly arbitrary. No deeper implications can be inferred from the occurrence of any crime; each is isolated from larger social problems or deeper psychological insights.

But the main thing is the sexism—after the crime is solved, Christie is at pains to deprive the working woman character of her job, marrying her off to the husband of the dead woman, who was killed basically because she was a vain and pathetic attention-seeker. (Christie basically leads us to believe that she deserved to die.) This betrothal was utterly unnecessary to the mystery aspect of the novel, but it ties together other assumptions animating the plot about a woman’s place and her proper aspirations. Working women are essentially no different than criminals, cold-bloodedly calculating how they can prey on the world for gain. They should instead be at leisure, prettified trophies for the vacationing men to ogle at their own leisure (their attention should not be co-opted by ostentatious female vanity). If they become ornaments, they might be spared the unpleasant business of having murderous motives assigned to them. 

—Rob Horning

The myriad of choices we have in the consumer marketplace is supposed to make up the bulk of our inheritance for having been born into thriving capitalist democracies. Parsing these options allow us to experience the freedom of choice, which is elided with freedom and liberty in general and is meant to compensate for various inequities in income, social mobility, and political access. But as behavioral economists and various consumer researchers have attempted to demonstrate, a surfeit of choices is as likely to make us miserable as it is to make us happy, and the choices can feel merely like occasions to make mistakes, not reveal personal preferences and give tangible shape to our innermost sense of ourselves. We frequently lack the information to make wise decisions in the marketplace yet are compelled to make them anyway—to express our pseudo-political will, and make manifest our vaunted individuality, of which we are supposed to be so proud. So we are left feeling insecure, vulnerable, beleaguered—paradoxically looking for advice on what to buy to express our uniqueness.

The studies detailed in this Scientific American article make matters appear even worse, as it suggests that having to repeatedly make choices—as our consumer culture prides itself on making us do—leads to degraded “executive function”.

When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort-you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function—a talent we all rely on throughout the day—draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental capacity may be severely hindered in another, seemingly unrelated activity.

In other words, the bombardment of marketing we are confronted with tires out our brains and makes it more likely we will make poor decisions or lack the wherewithal to resist that marketing. The advertiser’s campaign against us is really a war of attrition.

If making choices depletes executive resources, then “downstream” decisions might be affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Indeed, University of Maryland psychologist Anastasiya Pocheptsova and colleagues found exactly this effect: individuals who had to regulate their attention—which requires executive control—made significantly different choices than people who did not. These different choices follow a very specific pattern: they become reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process, and can thus fall prey to perceptual decoys.

This way of viewing the brain suggests we should take a conservationist approach to decision-making, delegating insignificant ones so that we may be sharp for the ones that matter. One might even argue that we could let ads make the unimportant consumption decisions for us, trusting the ubiquity of certain products in the media as a proxy for their worthiness. But then, of course, we would need to decide which decisions to delegate (or make on automatic pilot) and which ones to take ourselves. And that may be the most insidious aspect of all the marketing—it obfuscates the importance of various choices, making silly things seem integral and important decisions seem matter of fact.

—Rob Horning

David Brooks has been on a kick lately of denouncing consumers for their addiction to shopping and how they have lost touch with the ”great bourgeois virtues.” In his most recent effort in this vein, he is responding to a Gretchen Morgenson piece about personal debt, and in particular one woman, Diane McLeod, who’s in way over her head. Who is to blame? Borrowers or lenders? Brooks says neither, and instead posits a “third way” of explaining how people get in over their head:

people are driven by the desire to earn the respect of their fellows. Individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them.
Decision-making—whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry—isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
According to this view, what happened to McLeod, and the nation’s financial system, is part of a larger social story. America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.

That sounds reasonable enough, but as Tanta at Calculated Risk points out, it’s always a little bogus to preach a return to a nonexistent golden age.

This nostalgia for the lost “culture of thrift” always gets on my nerves. America has always had both a “culture of thrift” and a “culture of conspicuous consumption.” We have had our Gilded Ages before the year 1992. The “BankAmericard” (which became the Visa) was invented back in the “thrify fifties,” about ten years after economist James Duesenberry first popularized the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.” Collapsing the history of America into a lost golden age of thrift contrasted to a degenerate present of consumption excess is a reliable sign you’re in the presence of ideology.

Of course, that’s a given with Brooks that you are in the presence of ideology, though to be fair, it’s safe to say ideology is present in any sort of opinion piece. Brooks wants to pin our fall from thrifty grace on housing wealth and changing norms.

Some of the toxins were economic. Rising house prices gave people the impression that they could take on more risk. Some were cultural. We entered a period of mass luxury, in which people down the income scale expect to own designer goods. Some were moral. Schools and other institutions used to talk the language of sin and temptation to alert people to the seductions that could ruin their lives. They no longer do.
Norms changed and people began making jokes to make illicit things seem normal. Instead of condemning hyper-consumerism, they made quips about “retail therapy,” or repeated the line that Morgenson noted in her article: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

Brooks probably wants to temper Morgenson’s thesis that lenders have deployed sophisticated marketing techniques to encourage more people to take on more debt and pin the blame those who some reactionaries have called “predatory borrowers”. But oddly enough, Brooks’s account roughly fits the leftist theory that Western countries entered into a late-capitalism phase after World War II, in which the economic emphasis shifted from producing to consuming. Since then, the theory goes, the populace of mass consuming sheep have perpetually had new needs induced in them to keep GDP growing for its own sake, regardless of whether or not that actually improves society’s living conditions. (Which is not far off from what I think—that consumerism in our society is the way to secure social approval and communicate our sense of self to others. Other routes to recognition have been systematically sealed off, so it’s harder to summon the wherewithal to derive esteem or even self-knowledge from any actions other than shopping. Hence, the ownership society—we are what we own. And this happens to nicely fit the lenders’ incentives. They profit through the myriad transactions required to keep the money needed for all these self-fashioning ownership projects circulating.) You’d think Brooks would adopt the conservative tack that consumer goods have democratized luxury, making income inequality irrelevant, but here he is, like a latter-day Carlyle, faulting “mass luxury” as a kind of moral failing.

So what’s his game? Retro-conservatism? He implies (somewhat risibly) that he’s a Burkean conservative in his op-ed. But I think Tanta has him pegged when she argues that he is trying to divert blame for our decadent social mores away from the media establishment he is a part of:

Brooks, writing in that influential arbiter of taste the New York Times, somehow fails to notice the role of the media in constructing popular standards for “risk” and “normal” consumption patterns. In Brooks’ weird little world, Americans responded to “rising home prices” that they apparently directly perceived, without media intervention. It was those house prices that “gave people the impression that they could take on more risk,” not the reporting on house prices or the columnists who solemnly opined that these prices meant that people weren’t taking on more risk by buying or refinancing. How incredibly convenient that line is.

Indeed. So when Brooks writes, “In a community, behavior sets off ripples. Every decision is a public contribution or a destructive act,” he ought to look in the mirror and think about what sort of contribution his own books celebrating bourgeois bohemia and living on ”Paradise Drive” in suburbia have made.

—Rob Horning

Prolific Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written several books over the past decade about consumerism—which he for some reason prefers to call “the world of consumers”—hence the verbose title of his most recent book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?—in what he has dubbed the “liquid modern era.” (He also dislikes the term postmodern, and this is his way of avoiding semantic arguments about what it precisely means.) There’s not much suspense about the question the title poses: The answer, as you’d probably guess, is basically no.

It’s a not a question you’d ask if you were actually optimistic about it. Bauman, while not as thoroughgoingly pessimistic as such past consumer-society critics as Jean Baudrillard, is still left dispiritedly positing utopian scenarios after laying out his grim analyses of our social situation—he calls it a “battlefield” in the introduction—which, in his view, technology is rapidly worsening. The characterological changes brought on by consumerism are accelerating, he argues, turning the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood into the diminished qualities of security, parity and networking.

In Bauman’s account—and it is a familiar, comfortable story to anyone schooled in leftist, Adornoesque social theory—the liquid modern world’s problems start when aspects that traditionally limited our possibilities in the world (religion, geography, class, occupation, family, ethnicity) gradually became less restrictive, thanks mostly to capitalism’s modus operandi of creative destruction. Things once regarded as more or less permanent or unmarketable were subsumed by the market, reified, branded, and made subject to neoclassical economic truths about privatization, rational choices, and marginal utility. No longer assigned a specific role in the community from birth, we are alienated, atomized, cut free as an individual, forced to make our place. This has tangible benefits, obviously, in expanding our freedom to act. But it also brought with it the scourges of insecurity and boundless responsibility. (This is Frankfurt school orthodoxy—not unlike Erich Fromm’s and Herbert Marcuse’s ideas about freedom, in Escape From Freedom and One-Dimensional Man respectively.) “As Alain Ehrenberg convincingly argues,” writes Bauman, who frequently selects choice quotes from other thinkers (one of the nice things about Bauman’s book is that it serves as a kind of index to recent theoretical trends), “most common human sufferings tend to grow from the surfeit of possibilities, rather than from the profusion of prohibitions as they used to in the past”—an insight he may have attributed to any number of behavioral economists as well. Overt coercion in the pre-consumerist world was replaced by the regime of flattering persuasion, which is just as coercive, only we feel like we are in control, volunteering to participate in it (we shop because we want to), making the meaningful choices (between the things supplied by the market to satisfy the needs it has trained us to adopt). “As Pierre Bourdieu had already signaled two decades ago, coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires.”

At this point, I’m nodding in agreement, but none of this is new—this is more or less the case that all left-leaning thinkers have made about consumerism. It seduces us to control us, replaces the ideal freedom of citizens in the public sphere determining a future for society collectively with that of a a bunch of individuals free only to choose among doodads after having their brains filled with bafflegab.

But Bauman turns an interesting corner. He cites philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of society as not a limit on our selfishness, as Freud, for instance, claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, but as a limit on our boundless ethical responsibility to our fellow humans. “Using the vocabulary of Levinas, we may say that the principal function of society, ‘with its institutions, universal forms, and laws,’ is to make the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the Other both conditional (in selected, duly enumerated, and clearly defined circumstances) and limited (to a select group of ‘others,’ considerably smaller than the totality of humanity and, most important, narrower and thus more easily manageable).” Society may be not the force that stops the Hobbesan war of all against all, but “an outcome of tempering their endemic and boundless altruism with the ‘order of egotism.’ “ (It’s like bizarro Ayn Rand.) That altruism—that feeling of ethical responsibility to others—is an impossible, crippling burden. Only by curtailing it can we accomplish anything. But in doing that, we also curtail the spontaneous impulse Levinas believes that we have to trust and help others. And possibly we curtail the source of life’s meaning.

The way consumer society allows us to escape from that responsibility—its innovative method, perhaps—is to train us to fix it on ourselves. “Responsibility now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself (’You owe this to yourself,’ as the outspoken traders in relief from responsibility indefatigably repeat), while ‘responsible choices’ are, first and last, such moves as serve well the interests and satisfy the desires of the actor and stave off the need to compromise.” The celebration in consumer society of individualism and our “right” to convenience mean that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people’s needs—and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the hassle they represent. “The privatized utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumerist era show vastly expanded ‘free space’ (free for myself, of course),” Bauman explains, “a kind of empty space of which the liquid-modern consumer, bent on solo performances and solo performances only, never has enough. The space consumers need and are advised on all sides to fight for can be conquered only by evicting other humans—and particularly the kind of humans who care for others or may need care themselves.” (This ties in another subject Bauman has written about frequently: the systematic exclusion from society of the victims of the Holocaust.)

Along with that championing of individuality and training of responsibility on ourselves instead of others comes a newfangled responsibility for shaping and projecting our own identity, which used to be dictated entirely by our circumstances but is now subject (seemingly) to our control. As a consequence, we are now all required to continually fashion our identity and project it in social symbols, which are supplied by the language of consumer goods and brands. In order to keep the consumer economy dynamic, the meaning of these symbols are constantly in the process of redefinition, and we adapt our identities to follow suit, let our identities function as brands for ourselves. What Bauman doesn’t mention, but is sort of implied, is that in making identity formation a never-ending process, consumer society sells that process as pleasurable. Actually, it probably is in fact pleasurable—it makes real life into a kind of daydream in which we can impersonate anyone and fantasize freely and openly, playing pretend games in public. And when you embrace novelty as an end in itself, it becomes a need easily (albeit temporarily) gratified. If you’re a dog who likes chasing your tail, you’ll never want for entertainment. The point is that pleasure comes not in some final achievement of the right identity, but in the multiplicity of identities always available to us, and the freedom we feel in swapping them out. If we were easily satisfied, it would take a lot to motivate us as workers (we could just sit in the park and watch butterflies rather than work overtime to buy a flat-screen). Not accidentally, our consumerist refusal to be easily pleased, to demand more, is routinely portrayed as a positive trait, a testament to our superior discrimination.

Bauman argues that we all are forced to become pseudo-artists, with our identity as our chief work, a kind of temporary installation in our own bodies. At the same time, any continuity between identities is discarded, leaving us living through a series of discrete moments in which it is possible for us to be anything. Bauman argues,

What follows is that the sole skill I really need to acquire and exercise if flexibility—the skill of promptly getting rid of useless skills, the ability to quickly forget and to dispose of the past assets that have turned into liabilities, the skill of changing tacks and tracks at short notice and without regret, and of avoiding oaths of life-long loyalty to anything and anybody.

As individuals, we need to embrace capitalism’s creative destruction at the personal level, seizing upon a moment’s given opportunities with no recourse to past or future inclinations or sentimentalities. The most important aspect of that flexibility is the ability to forget—to believe that we have always been at war with Eurasia. Skirts have always been knee-length. Crocs have always been stylish.

The institutionalized contempt for continuity encourages us to replace friendships with the network: “relations set by and sustained by network-type connectedness come close to the ideal of a ‘pure relationship,’ one based on easily dissolvable one-factor ties, with no determined duration, no strings attached, and unburdened by long-term commitments.” What this gives individuals is “the comforting (even if ultimately counterfactual) feeling of total and unthreatened control over his or her obligations and loyalties.” Of course, if you control obligations, they aren’t exactly obligatory—they are voluntary. That is what conceals from us the larger dimensions of our cultural obligations.

Bauman implicitly likens this situation to the notion of “groups of belonging” and the conditions of exclusion that set up the parameters of the Holocaust. The illusion of control may mask our obligations to play the game. The coercion to be a consumer is experienced generally as freedom (our ideology’s accomplishment), but if you resist it, you run the risk of social exclusion—not on a stateless-person-headed-to-concentration-camp level, but moving in that direction. “All of this may be intuited,” Bauman writes, “from the dark premonitions that haunt them at night after a busy shopping day—or from the warning that goes off when their bank account falls into the red and their unused credit reaches zero.” To be without credit takes on multiple meanings—you become worthless as a human being.

This is a roundabout way of point out that in a society where purchasing power is how we experience freedom, being poor means being very unfree. In other words, poverty really sucks, moreso than it did when society was less open. (Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation explores this simple truth at length.) The poor, and those who are sympathetic to them, or nostalgic for old roles, or repulsed by the identity shuffling were expeced to relish, perhaps “do not view this life as a kind of life that they themselves, given genuine liberty of choice, would wish to practice.” But these people obviously need reeducation. “Those who go solely by what they believe they need, and are activated only by the urge to satisfy those needs, are flawed consumers and so also social outcasts.” If you aren’t worried about keeping in tune with the zeitgeist, you are seen to be expressing some kind of contempt for the socially-agreed-upon way of being happy.

It is often said of such people that they are indifferent if not downright hostile to freedom, or that they have not yet grown up and matured enough to enjoy it. Which implies that their nonparticipation in the style of life dominant ... tends to be explained by either ideologically aroused resentment of freedom or the inability to practice it.

If they only loved freedom a little more, they wouldn’t be concerned with how the system is basically rigged to assure that they will never be regarded with dignity in the public sphere, that they will always seem helplessly out of touch. Their fashion backwardness seems to justify their social exclusion, as we are invited to see how they manifest their identity as an expression of their own poor opinion of themselves. “If ‘to be free’ means to be able to act on one’s wishes and pursue the chosen objectives,” Bauman notes, “the liquid-modern, consumerist version of the art of life may promise to all, but it delivers it sparingly and selectively.”

So what do you do if you don’t want to include yourself in the consumerist economy, you want to preserve an ethical code, but you don’t want to risk living as a semi-persecuted outcast. Do you ”go live in a jelly jar”?  Bauman’s text doesn’t offer much in the way of answers. He urges that we become better educated in the sorts of things I was taught in civics class—fundamentals about the how politics works and so on—and that we become citizens instead of consumers. But it seems that in order for that to happen, citizenship will have to assume some of the technique of consumerism—it will have to be able to generate the personal, individualistic pleasures we have come to expect from consumerism and which we now regard as the guiding purpose of our lives. We need to make the pursuit of happiness an explicitly political matter once again.

—Rob Horning

A few days ago Will Wilkinson linked to this brief piece in the Harvard Business Review by professors Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz, summarizing their research into consumer regret.

Our research shows that forgoing indulgences today can feed strong regrets later, and that near-term regrets about self-indulgence dramatically fade with time. These responses are so strong that we were able to influence people’s buying behavior simply by asking them to anticipate their long-term regrets.

The gist of this is that they are conducting research to support the contention that people are not indulgent enough in their consumer behavior, and they need to be persuaded to indulge themselves more. All work and no play, and all that.

People who unduly resist self-indulgence suffer from an excessive farsightedness, or hyperopia—the reverse of typical self-control problems. Rather than yielding to temptation, they focus on acquiring necessities and acting responsibly and they see indulgence as wasteful, irresponsible, and even immoral. As a result, these consumers avoid precisely the products and experiences that they most enjoy. Their hyperopia can inhibit consumption in ways that are bad both for their own well-being and for marketers’ bottom lines. We don’t advocate trying to motivate consumers to make ill-considered purchases, of course, but marketers can help customers make appropriately indulgent choices that they’ll appreciate over the long term.

The “of course, but” in that last sentence seems very telling. These are marketing professors after all. It seems to me that they are trying to motivate consumers to rethink their resistance to consumerism and are trying to encourage marketers to remind them of a future self that will nostalgically look back on that consumerism as a life well lived.

Our findings suggest that marketers of luxury products and leisure services could benefit from prompting consumers to predict their feelings in the future if they forgo the indulgent choice. For instance, a travel company might ask customers to consider how they’ll feel about having passed up a family vacation package once the nest is empty.
Consumers, too, can benefit from such prompts. In the words of the late Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, “Nobody on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.’”

This rationale is often used in defense of advertising—it helps consumers find their wants, and get more out of the concept of desiring itself by stimulating it. It unleashes our impulsivity, which is freedom in action, right? I’m sure all those people who thought long-term about the houses they were buying in 2006 feel great about their purchases now and are so pleased that they didn’t stop themselves from indulging.

If desiring things is in itself pleasurable—and it clearly is—then advertising does us the great service of stoking it. But desire is not an unalloyed good; it’s a cognitively draining state of contradiction—mixed in with the excitement and fantasies of possession and the motivation to achieve that it brings, it also yields envy and disappointment and dissatisfaction at the same time. The point of criticizing consumerist desire is not that it’s inherently bad or unpleasurable, but that it restricts us to certain definitions of what is pleasurable, and casts our dreams and regrets (as the researchers discovered) into a specific mold. Clearly we should take more action in the present moment, but that need not take the form of making purchases, as this marketing research seems to imply. Seems like similar studies could be contrived to suit this unconsumption motto: Work less, buy less, do more.

—Rob Horning