Manufacturing Discontent

In their famous 1988 book: “Manufacturing Consent”, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that it is the role of modern electronic and print media to; “inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society”. Their analysis presented media as a propaganda machine, designed to facilitate the acceptance by individuals of the roles society (meaning the Ruling Class) has ordained for them.

Now, while this may be one effect of modern mass media, it would be difficult to argue that the media establishment (at least in the democratic world) was purposefully designed to fulfill this purpose. Advertising, on the other hand, is a different story.

In the meaningless wilderness of modern existence, there are few evils at large in the world that are quite so evil as advertising. As the agent most chiefly responsible for diverting us from the otherwise fulfilled lives we could be leading, and enticing us instead with the promise that we could be happy if only we bought a better car than our neighbour, drank a cooler brand of soft drink than the losers, or had marginally whiter teeth than we currently do, advertising is the enemy of contentment and the most potent instrument of control ever devised.

But advertising hasn't always been the mendacious, mind-control drug we know today. Advertising can trace its history to a simpler, more honest ancestor that served a far less evil purpose.

In the case of the semi-mythical American lemonade stand, if the sign announced lemonade for 25c, the customer could reasonably expect to get a cup of lemonade for 25c. The sign didn't exist to convince us that we needed a cup of lemonade. The kid knew the lemonade would generate a desire-to-buy based on its own merits. That's why he was selling lemonade as opposed to, say, leeches or doses of bubonic plague.

Advertising originally existed more-or-less to inform consumers about what a product did, and what it cost. Simple classifieds first emerged in seventeenth century newspapers as a fairly straightforward description of a product or service, and a price, and advertising remained in this fairly honest form for a few hundred years, but in the early 20th century something came along that changed the face of advertising forever. The two world wars happened at a time when technology was able to provide generals and politicians with a brand new weapon, which they didn't hesitate to harness in the cause of their war-efforts.

Wartime propaganda took advertising for the first time, above and beyond the realm of the honest. Truth has (as the saying informs us) always been the first casualty of war, but never before had the means existed to twist and subvert the truth and broadcast it so effectively, and so frequently, to so many people.

Postwar advertisers did not ignore the lessons of the wartime propagandists. As keen students of the psychological games employed by the various propaganda departments of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and the rest; modern advertisers became scientists, utilising market research techniques to convert products into icons.

The advertising man of the Brave New World (at least from the 1950's onward) had at his disposal two exciting new innovations that would provide never-before-seen opportunities for truth-twisting. One was the burgeoning consumer society; the flooding of the market-place with a never-ending catalogue of must-have items, which commenced in America and spread in short order to the rest of the capitalist world. The second great innovation was television, a technology that provided advertisers with unparalleled access to the conscious and subconscious minds of the consuming public. Technology gave the advertiser both an unending supply of new commodities to sell, and also the most powerful means yet devised to brainwash people into buying them.

It became the job of advertising to create need in the mind of the consumer. And the two-pronged approach to this was to:

a) Constantly create new commodities that people could be convinced they needed, and
b) Build obsolescence into these products so it would never be too long before a replacement had to be purchased.

This whole system underscores the way of life for most people in modern societies. It provides us with our self image, a stereotype to conform to, the illusion of happiness, a reason for being, and most importantly, a reason to buckle down and continue contributing to the capitalist economic machine.

It might seem from the above analysis that I'm suggesting advertising has displaced true meaning from our lives and replaced it instead with a shallow facsimile of meaning, but imagine what our lives would be like if the system was suddenly shut down? Imagine if we all reached a point where we discovered that the commodities in our lives are adequate. That we don't need a better kind of car, soft drink or toothbrush. Imagine if the advertisers didn't have anyone to convince any more. If the products stopped changing every week and the adverts just disappeared. Imagine a whole generation of individuals opening their eyes for the first time, thinking for themselves and having to find something real to replace the vanished pseudo-meaning once provided by the products and the advertising. What a horrible world that would be.