Consumption Assumption

A woman peruses the aisles of a bookstore. She is smartly dressed and moves with purpose. An elderly man approaches her and asks her to locate a book for him. The woman smirks. "Oh, no. I'm not an employee." The man cocks his head and after a brief pause, repeats his request. The woman turns towards the man again and explains more loudly, "I'm not an employee. You need to find someone else. Look for a person with a name tag or something." With the same tone and same words, the old man asks her to locate a book for him. Frustrated and desiring an end to the annoyance, she leaves her own pursuit behind and locates the book for him. She behaves like an employee.

Here we are witness to the power of persistence. A person is prone to redefine herself if she is persistently defined by others in a certain way. We have a name for the power of persistence in regards to defining ourselves: the self-fulfilling prophecy. Given enough repetition, a person is liable to go beyond playing a role and become the person the other insists she is. Even idioms capture the tendency (e.g., "Fake it 'til you make it.") Be called emotionally cold enough by other people and you are more likely to become emotionally cold. "But wait," you say, "You have stacked the deck in your favor. The woman you described could have ignored the old man, found an employee, or left the building." True, those are all possibilities. However, they are only viable if the old man ceases pestering her for assistance. If he continues to ask her—only her—for aid, if he follows her out of the bookstore and pleads with her all the while, she is all but forced to submit to the role of employee. "That is a very outlandish situation. What one person would follow a person around and insist she perform a task that she says is not hers to perform? A lunatic maybe, but there are few of those. Why do you waste my time describing a situation so rarely experienced as to be practically irrelevant?" Right you are to bristle at being subjected to such a worthless discussion. Worthless it would be if I was planning to discuss the suggestive power of a single person. What I am here concerned with is the suggestion of many, many more people—a suggestion that we all are exposed to on a daily basis.

Go out into the world. In what role do you find yourself most frequently cast? On billboards and buses, storefronts and signposts, taxis and telephone poles: the same role is addressed. The suggestion is inescapable. It is no use retreating into one's abode. In your home, in your magazines and newspapers, on your computer, radio, and television, before movies, and during sporting events: the same role is addressed. A person is likely to pass by a hundred living, breathing people without acknowledgment, but is often spoken to by the recorded voice of stranger addressing the role. A person could easily speak more with a representative of the role-purveyors than with his own neighbor. "Out with it. What role?" All of these suggestions effectively say, "You are a consumer. Consume this." Every individual is more frequently addressed as a consumer than anything else. Count the number of times a day you are asked for your money (for the sake of consumption) and it will far outnumber the times you were asked for your help, expertise, skills, or attention (for non-economic reasons).

"Where's the harm in someone thinking he is a consumer?" you wonder. Before you dismiss me out of hand, do not misunderstand me. I am not blinded to the truth of life's necessities. All living creatures consume. Humans are consumers. What I desire for us is a more apropos appellation. To persistently refer to a person as a consumer is as imperceptive as calling an automobile a cigarette lighter: both emphasize one of the many capabilities. To make matters worse, both references are to one of their lesser functions. Although you may bicker with me about the proper function of people, whether they have one or not, we can agree that they have a capacity for much more than digestion. Of all the deeds a person can do, consuming is not the noblest.

To clarify further, I am not writing to change the ways of those who call us consumers. I lack a platform loud enough to dissuade them and am not entirely certain it would be good for us if I could. I rather am writing with the modest goal of giving you pause. I want to make a clear and present danger just that for us in the hopes that we might better defend against it.

Returning to discussion: on most levels, there is no harm at all. Part of the allure of being a consumer is the ease of playing the role. It is natural. We consume a great many things in the course of the day. To be a consumer, one needs only consume. When one is not consuming, one needs to prepare for consumption through working, investing, gambling, or stealing. The constrained definition acts on a person like a magnet waved over flecks of iron. Thereafter, all the separate parts orient themselves toward the one pole. How effortless to take on the day with such a facile purpose constantly asserted!

It is easier than this to be a consumer. Not only is there uniformity in purpose and ease in acting for that purpose, there is great ease in thinking for that purpose. We did ourselves and our progeny a great favor when we monetized goods. From that point forward, we could affix numbers to our potential and actual consumption. We could set fixed goals for our preparatory efforts. Consumption, upon translation into a quantitative system, became a blissfully simple pursuit about which to rationalize. Problems required no more complex tool than basic algebra. Now, a person knows exactly how many hours he must labor in order to consume the objects of his desire. There is no harm in this at all. Instead, there is aid. Though not physically painful, is not ambiguity painful? Through monetization, we have clarified so much. Could there be any harm in an anesthetic? It suppresses pain. Those partisans of consumption shout, "If only we could quantify everything humanly relevant! Until then, we ought only consider what is quantifiable if only because we are accustomed to the effort involved in such considerations. We have mastered the land of numbers. Whether it is a fiefdom or an empire matters not—it is all ours!"

I see you growing tired of my rhetoric. "Get back to the point. Where's the harm in someone thinking he is a consumer?" If there is harm in a person receiving another person's prescription, then there is harm in being defined a consumer. These definitive messages we call advertisements. They make goods and services known to all those in the producer's (i.e., those who make the goods or provide the services) audience (i.e., those for whom the goods or services are relevant). The purpose of advertisements is to inculcate desire for the product, be it from a pre-existing or newly-forged need. Whether due to a lack of discrimination in the medium, cost-effectiveness, or straightforward profiteering, the messages often reach people outside of the audience—those of us who have no need for the good or service advertised.

An example: A man hears that a good is available for purchase while driving to work. The advertisement speaks to him informally, addressing him in the second person. He considers the good, considers his need, and if the good is needed he considers further his potential to consume it. If the advertisement is effective, a desire is stimulated. Now, the man daydreams about using the good, imagines himself happy like the voice in the advertisement. He is primed to consume it. He is a consumer.

To find the harm in considering oneself to be a consumer, we need to understand the situation that so frequently brings about the consideration. In the foregoing example, we have two people: the speaker and the audience member. We have a communication from the former to the latter. We have the content of the message transferred to the audience member by the communication/advertisement, which assumes the the audience member is a consumer. The advertisement is the immediate cause of the defining, thus advertisement requires our attention.

What can we say about the communication? It implies a course of action the person should take (e.g., "Buy our product."). In this way, it is normative. It states what one ought to do. The proposed course of action was taken into the man's consciousness and pushed out other possibilities. In the event that the communication was solicited or, by coincidence, spoke to a pre-established and unmet need, it benefits the man. The more likely event, however, is that the message is harmful. "Preposterous! How can mere words be 'more likely' to be harmful? They are not insults. They defame no one. Your imaginary man is at liberty to ignore the message." Yes, he can ignore the words just as you suggested earlier the woman could ignore the old man earlier. Sometimes our man now does as much. How often does he hear such messages, though? Are those messages not more frequent than the old man's demands? How often is our man distracted by them? They are after all designed to be distracting, to garner attention. Cannot the hearing of such messages be harmful? You would not suggest distraction is helpful when it is as ubiquitous as advertising, would you? The energy expended reclaiming one's attention could have gone towards continuing a better line of thought. A person could be learning a language, honing a skill, observing beauty, playing a game, reflecting on his life—to list only a few the the possibilities. Instead, he is interrupted or barred from beginning and must first fend off a message aimed at a consumer. He must immediately judge, "No. This is not for me."

What if he does not defend himself but instead lets it wash over him like so much clatter? "In one ear and out the other," you may think. You neglect to look for the residue. Communication is never so neutral. Every moment of consciousness alters the self like a glacier over the mountain. What alteration occurs as a result of ignoring? Desensitization. He spends so much of his time being passively assailed by advertisements that he is atrophied by it. He becomes accustomed to glossing over perceptions. Images affect him less. Sounds lose their potency. For the sake of what? Easiness. What takes the place of the skill of concentration? Nothing but a tolerance for boredom.

The upshot of the messages: "Indulge! Devour! Everything is grist for the universal mill, so be a mill of your own. Grind as much as you can before you die." What paltry fodder for the audience's minds! No wonder they are malnourished. Their minds have so little of substance to digest. Ironic how this talk of consumption starves a person. I am reminded of an old malady that shared a name with our subject. It was so called because of how the disease consumed one's ability to breath. Being a consumer is in itself consuming: it reduces a person down to her most basic functioning.

There is harm too in who relays the message—or rather how it is relayed. What interest do the others have in you? They have no loving interest. They are neither family nor friends. They have no collaborative interest. They are neither co-workers nor compatriots. Their interest in you is transactional. You have something they want and they have something they want you to want. "Is that not a collaboration?" It is a collaboration of sorts, but lowly kind. This sort of relationship, which is so quickly and regularly formed, consists of mutual use at best. Each side relates to the other to the extent required to gain access to what the other has. At worst, the use is lopsided and creates injustice through compounding power inequalities.

These strangers interacting must have an effect upon the character of the consumer. A person becomes accustomed to being used. She becomes calloused by the previous injustices. She becomes cold and frigid without being touched by the warm hands of beneficence. There are no flesh and blood hands associated with advertising. These messages are overwhelmingly disembodied. It is their very abstraction that makes them so far-reaching. One person could never contact as many people in all her life as the most obscure of advertisements can. Bleak is the life of a person who is solely addressed by advertisements.

"Recall earlier the other possible courses of action our imaginary woman could have taken. You left one out of your list: she could simply have helped the man without resistance. She would not be an employee but simply a helper." What an astute observation! There was no great risk of harm in finding a book for a man even if it is not one's job. Helping is an option that accomplishes the same end without requiring redefinition. One can help another in a store without being an employee. Can one be a person who consumes without being a consumer? What would it look like?

To resist the pervasive suggestion of others while doing what is necessary to maintain life, one needs to consciously and preemptively define oneself as something other than the suggested role. "I am a person who consumes, not a consumer. A consumer consumes for the enjoyment of it. A person who consumes does so in order to do something else—to sustain oneself and to achieve one's goals." See how dignity is retained by such resistance? The former feeds and thinks about matter alone. The latter feeds on matter and thinks of something better. Now when one is confronted by such advertisements, one can brush them aside quickly. They become trifles, laughable in their futile pandering to banality. They become the mutterings of senility, not to be taken seriously. "Bother someone else," you could say. "I am busy with a task of my own. I will not do as you want because I am not what you take me to be."