Lecture: Consumerism (OUAN401)

This was an awesome lecture because it was extremely relevant to my area of study for C.O.P. It also woke me up to the harsh truth that perhaps I am not as unique and special as I think I am.

Nah, that can't be true. It's just literally everyone else who's been brainwashed, not me. What a bunch of suckers.

The best part about this lecture was learning of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, and how Bernays exploited what he knew about how brains work from knowing Freud and applied it to manipulating people's emotions to become one of the greatest pioneers of consumerism. He birthed an entire culture of female smokers with his campaign in the 20s and was a propagandist in the Great War who applied these principles to everyday marketing. He said that we must  "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies."

Freud spoke about how our modern way of living, with social taboos and laws, doesn't satisfy the primal, sexual, animalistic part of the brain that yearns for dominance. In evolution, we want to climb the hierarchy and buying stuff as a mark of status is a way of channelling that need. Freud even said that we shouldn't have been surprised that the Great War happened as it was inevitable, given the way humans are hardwired to crave dominance.

A major theme of this lecture was revolution. Trotsky said that "revolution is impossible until it is inevitable", but what I heard today made me think about whether this could be true. The speaker told us that our Western society is more unfair than it's ever been, which is true to extent. Council houses are being torn down to build luxury flats, university is becoming more expensive and the big companies like Amazon don't pay fair taxes. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, so why are there no stirrings of revolution? Why do young people so consistently fail to show up to vote?

It could be our culture of consumerism. We receive short term gratification from buying products and brand names that, through clever advertising, make us think we've achieved something or grown as people while the real achievements we should be striving for are social change!

This is from an Apple Macintosh ad from 1984. Man! Look at this sexy macintosh user. A bronzed, athletic revolutionary. She's not afraid to break the confines of society's draconian constrictions.She's different! Wait a second. I HAVE an Apple laptop! I'm just like this woman in the advert! I'm a revolutionary too!

This is from the exact same advert. Man, I sure am glad I'm nothing like any of these dumpy squares who DIDN'T buy a Macintosh.

As long as we all remain compliant and passive, there will never be a revolution!

Well, I guess we sort of had a revolution last June.
But it was a bit shit.

I'm not putting myself on a high horse, here. I am just as much of an armchair revolutionary as the next pretentious guy sat at his laptop with no real problems, but I speak truths!