Thoughts on Readings 3/11/09

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse

"The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence" (p. 4)

I found this week's reading to be a very interesting and critical deconstruction of a concept that I find fascinating: how the capitalist structure can manipulate through a system of wants and satisfactions that exists below the surface of awareness. In other words, how a free market society can manipulate the psyche of the American consumer so that basic critical human needs (food, water, sleep) are so commonly accepted that they are not even recognized. These "needs" are replaced by a hierarchy of products that are certainly not essential to life but almost accepted as though they are.

As Marcuse puts it:

"The only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction are the vital ones-nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture. The satisfaction of these needs is the prerequisite for the realization of all needs, of the unsublimated as well as the sublimated ones". (p. 5)

The distinction between wants vs. needs is clouded by the trappings of the mass consumerist culture that we live in. And the media is not the culprit according to Marcuse, this indoctrination begins way before the media has an influence over it.

Marcuse sums it up:

"The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of radio and television and with the centralization of their control. The people enter this stage as preconditioned receptacles of long standing; the decisive difference is in the flattening out of the contrast (or conflict) between the given and the possible, between the satisfied and unsatisfied needs." (p. 8)

I have often thought about the ways in which the media can use fear (of some previously unseen threat) to "scare" us into consumerist behavior. When the nightly news tells us of some deadly bacteria the COULD be creeping all over our kitchen counters, we run right out and purchase some anti-bacterial spray to solve this potential danger.

After the attacks of September 11, I was living in NYC and I clearly remember the press conference that Mayor Giuliani made the morning after when he encouraged the people of NYC to get out and SPEND, patronize your local establishments. The underlying message seemed to be, "we all will feel better if we shop and purchase products that should meet our immediate needs, and the local economy will get a boost as well!". I remember thinking that his comment was insensitive in light of the massive loss of life that day, but what was even more upsetting was the lack of backlash in the press. This supports Marcuse's construct that we are living in a "one-dimensional" society, a society in which individuals become integrated into the capitalist structure of production and consumption and oppositional thought patterns and actions of oppositional behavior are eradicated. Consumerism is a form of social power used to control thought patterns.

The media stimulates a culture of fear of not belonging which is already established, and this fear creates consumerist behavior which stimulates the economy and dampens thoughts of a revolutionary nature. As Marcuse states: "the intellectual and emotional refusal "to go along" appears neurotic and impotent" (p. 9).

Interesting to read Marcuse background and to see that one of his most vocal disciples was 1960's Left Radical Abbie Hoffman (who studied under Marcuse at Brandeis). Hoffman was the founder of the Youth International Party (the "YIPPIES"), and was a major figure in the Chicago riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Marcuse elaborates that the consumerist culture gives way to a better way of life, and this leads to complacency and a lack of critical thought.

To quote Marcuse about what I see as a key idea:

"It is a good way of life-much better than before-and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension". (p. 12)

I am again left thinking about how this reading applies to the present, specifically how the current economic crisis is curbing or halting consumerist behaviors, and whether this time will represent a positive return to core ideas and values. A society where we are not "numbed" by the promise of happiness through shopping, but one in which we are organized around a common set of humanistic goals.