Youth orientated consumerism as the root to all societies vices.

dublin | consumer issues | opinion/analysis Sunday October 07, 2007 16:05 by Ciaran Carroll - none

Discourse on affect of youth orientated consumerism on academic philosophy and wider society

this started as a letter to my philosophy lecturers expressing my disatisfaction about the passiveness of acadmic philosophy. Then i got carried away and started to spew my frustrations about youth orientated consumerism. I never hear this subject, that i believe is the root to most of the flaws in society today, debated in the media. I sent it to the major newspapers but got no response. Maybe some of you could give me your views.

Philosophical academia bends to the will of the empirical sciences. These sciences are far more required for business, industrial and economic purposes, and so get more financial support from government and sponsorship from companies. For this reason they are far more important to university boards, executives and presidents This is understandable from a large perspective but doesn’t take into account the value that free-thinkers and writers have had to progressiveness in society. So to deal with this lack of support, philosophical department heads all over the world
(but mostly America and any countries around the world that subscribe to the US university planner or doctrine, created to quell the student activism in the 60's and 70's) promote the idea that one can't write subjectively with any credibility and the only good philosophy is born from objective analyses of the universe which complies with the laws of empirical sciences (most importantly for social science, the field of statistics). This is, in part, delusional though. It over-rates our logical our rational faculties and denies the fact that all thought is subjective and therefore all philosophy is subjective. It also disregards the fact that all the great philosophical writers of the 19th century where free thinkers and not straightjacketed by forced reference to they're predecessors. Unfortunately this is another reason for the lack of progressiveness of contemporary academic philosophers (with the exception of renegades like Peter Singer, who is only famous due to his controversial beliefs). The nineteenth century free thinkers like Nietzsche and Rousseau are widely blamed for being used to bolster the intellectual credentials of very powerful, violent regimes, and justifying authoritarian ideals.
I source our over-analytic, stagnant schools of philosophy back to child-orientated consumerism. Our contemporary society is not conducive to creating open mind intelligent philosophers in abundance and in order to keep up the numbers lecturers must “dumb-down”, for want of a better term, classes and seminars and hold back those few who may have had a slightly estranged upbringing from dense consumer populaces and have been aloud to develop to their intellectual potential (the Beatles’, “fool on the hill” comes to mind).

The passiveness of current philosophical venture is reinforced by our lowest common denominator, consumerist environment that usurps parental control and corrupts children, creating impulsive closed minded animals, controlled by their desires and conformist urges. People are taught how to be closed minded and superficial by constant relentless advertising which purposefully bypasses the intellect and treats people like animals. This may be a natural development and to regulate the media, (and advertising, the particular aspect of this vital social institution) in the wrong fashion may be authoritarian and undermining to the liberal values that our society is based on. But to allow children to engage in commerce and in turn to be enveloped in an ocean of advertising and superficiality denies the rights of parents to have control over the development of their children. Consumerism stunts the intellectual and individual development of the child in our society by appealing to the base superficial and animalistic aspects of the human being. In effect, it trains the human being to act in accordance with its immediate requirements and devalues our ability and capacity for foresight and enlightened, abstract thinking.
This is a quote from Isaiah Berlin’s “Four essays on Freedom” referencing John Stuart Mill, a progressive liberal and substantially influential mind in both the theoretical and political development of the contemporary “free” capitalist state:

“What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred to Mill? In his famous essay he declares that, unless men are left to live as they wish 'in the path which merely concerns themselves', civilization cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a free market in ideas, come to light; there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, for mental energy, for moral courage. Society will be crushed by the weight of 'collective mediocrity. Whatever is rich and diversified will be crushed by the weight of custom, by men's constant tendency to conformity, which breeds only 'withered capacities', 'pinched and hidebound', 'cramped and warped' human beings. 'Pagan self-assertion is as worthy as Christian self-denial.’ All the errors which a man is likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem is good.' The defence of liberty consists in the 'negative' goal of warding off interference. To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choice of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live. This is liberty as it is taken has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days of Erasmus (some would say of Occam) to our own. Every plea for civil liberties and individual rights, every protest against exploration and humiliation, against the encroachment of public authority, or the mass hypnosis of custom or organized propaganda, springs from this individualistic, and much disputed, conception of man.”

This passage struck me because Berlin is arguing against the coercive forces of ideologically authoritarian governments & parties and he is promoting a more economically and socially “free”, liberal society (He calls it “negative freedom” as opposed to authoritarian “positive freedom”). But I feel that the image of the politically coerced conformer is identical to the commercially coerced conformer who is a result of economically liberal government policy. Nietzsche detested his Apollonian world, but Apollo is the only one who can save us from our Dionysian tyranny.
Industry and the free market hold power and influence over government policy in the contemporary west. They are social and economic institutions that treat human beings as natural recourses to be used. Because they hold legislative influences they a priori hold influence on the institutions of education. This means they can in effect train the individual for tasks, jobs and tricks like a family would train a dog or puppy or horse. We are not individuals or even human to these institutions anymore. This would be completely opposed to the liberal ideals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but they, understandably, didn’t anticipate, or live long enough to witness, the technological advances that would enable the consumer media such over-whelming influence on the nature of the theoretically (yet not practically) liberal or free human beings in their conceived society.

"I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer-deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if i were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. This is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that is my reason that distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility to my own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realize that it is not." – Isaiah Berlin.

This is the type of self-conception that should be nurtured in today’s society. If we do not allow our children to buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of Guinness (whether its because we don’t believe they have the intellectual capacity to do so without indulging, ignorant to the consequences or if it’s a parental choice) then why are they aloud to purchase burgers from McDonalds or mars bars or music singles. We are in effect training people to be impulsive consumers without foresight or sense of moral will. Damon Albarn says, “Its all desire…they’re turning us into monsters”, Conor Oberst says it is “Its love of money not the market, these fuckers push on you” and Bill Hicks says “YOUR RIGHT! YOUR RIGHT! NOT THOSE FUCKERS THAT WANNA TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK! YOUR RIGHT!!!!!!!”. Our intelligent musicians, poets and comedians can see it but the power that commerce wields over the population drowns their words into obscurity. How can people hear them if they are not trained to use their intellects?
For me there is a very simple solution. Begin a slow legislative process disallowing youths to carry currency or engage in commercial trade for goods or services. In order to allow the market to adjust, start from the age of two and increase the minimum age slowly over a long period of maybe 30 years. Over time the social environment can reassessed and to take into account unforeseen consequences. At the very least the issue should be under discussion and a topic of public debate, in the media, political and academic forums.
In my view most of the major issues and vices in society today come from our failure to examine and criticise consumerism. It is not a communist, Marxist or even socialist ideal to wish to protect the development of our children. Alcoholism, drug abuse and black market drug industry, obesity, anorexic tendencies, etc. can all be sourced back to child-orientated consumerism. I would also like to say that global warming is sourced at wasteful short-sighted ignorant consumerism and the populist nature of our superficial, democracies (or maybe oligarchies) also. What are human beings defined as and what makes us transcendent and more important than animals? This must only be the intellect and our capacity for foresight. I would like for people to criticise or expand on that statement, as it is basic to some major current public and political debates as well as being the basis for my arguments. I put all my faith in it as I do believe it to be true and the most necessary axiom of our social existence.
I foresee that as the minimum age increases, the market will cease their advertising towards children. As children grow up they will not be in the habit of buying mars bars and confectionary, which is not an inherently evil part of society but it is the first step onto a slippery slope to alcohol and drug abuse as well as our problem of obesity. If the market still desires confectionary then they would be free to choose to consume anything they wish when they are over 18. I even foresee that hard drugs would become slowly legal, or the law enforcement of such illegal abuses would be non-existent. This is because I believe that we are trained to be impulsive consumers from birth and without such training we would retain the ability consume in moderation. Right now, people cannot be trusted to do so. The chasm that grows between the underclass and the middle class (not to mention the ultra rich class) which always occurs in free market capitalist states is due, in part, to the cheap food that is consumed by the lower classes. It is a common conception that fish oils and other parts of a good diet increase mental capacity and brain development, so it seems obvious that a bad diet of processed food would be less conducive to brain development and in turn lower the education standards of the lower classes, thus further widening the gap between rich and poor due to the obvious fact that this is an education class society.
Our public institutions, which are said to be in crisis at the moment, also require enlightened, open-minded individuals to operate and function. John Stuart Mill was involved in the nineteenth century debate on how to educate a population. He knew that education was the foundation of liberalism. Without satisfactory education of the whole of society liberalism moves in the direction of anarchy and finally its anti-thesis, fascism, as one extreme breeds its opposite. This is a recurring theme in the history of sociology. The usurping nature of child focused marketing and consumerism undermines Mill’s conception of education and stunts the personal development of the individual as I have said already. People cannot be trained to do jobs and take positions in the public sector under these circumstances. They must reach a level of self-awareness, education and intelligence that they can learn and train themselves in a broad way. Mill himself could read ancient Greek and Latin by the age of seven and was reading at what we would consider a university level by the age of 10. He never considered himself any sort of genius. He just had the benefit of an extremely unique education. This shows the potential that human beings have locked within our nature that is buried by they powers that be. We can see clearly that the Irish Leaving Cert. standard is getting lower and Britain’s A-levels are even worse. They have become memory tests.
I would welcome any criticism you could provide and also some advice about where I could send this, so people who feel the same might read it. I’m sending it to some newspapers out of curiosity.

Thanks for your attention,
Ciaran Carroll.