Affluenza by John de Graaf & David Wann & Thomas H. Naylor

Author:John de Graaf & David Wann & Thomas H. Naylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

HYPERCOMMERCIALISM

Our hypercommercial era is one in which images are everywhere, and “image,” as tennis star Andre Agassi says in the sunglasses commercial, “is everything.” The daily bombardment of advertising images leaves us forever dissatisfied with our own appearance and that of our real-life partner. “Advertising encourages us to meet nonmaterial needs through material ends,” says Mazur. “It tells us to buy their product because we’ll be loved, we’ll be accepted, and also it tells us that we are not lovable and acceptable without buying their product.”9 To be lovable and acceptable is to have the right image. Authenticity be damned.

Back in 1958, a prominent conservative economist and staunch defender of the free enterprise system warned that the twentieth century might well end up being known as “the Age of Advertising.” Wilhelm Röpke feared that if commercialism were “allowed to predominate and to sway society in all its spheres,” the results would be disastrous in many ways. As the cult of selling grows in importance, Röpke wrote, “every gesture of courtesy, kindness and neighborliness is degraded into a move behind which we suspect ulterior motives.”10 A culture of mutual distrust arises.

“The curse of commercialization is that it results in the standards of the market spreading into regions which should remain beyond supply and demand,” Röpke added. “This vitiates the true purposes, dignity and savor of life and thereby makes it unbearably ugly, undignified and dull.”

Only by limiting the scope of its reach, claimed Röpke, could the free market system be expected to continue to serve the greater good. Extreme commercialization, the very sine qua non of our era, would, if not kept in check, “destroy the free economy by the blind exaggeration of its principle.”

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