The Engine of Want: How Modern Culture is Formed
How mass marketing quietly became the most powerful force shaping our children—and why intentional character formation must counter it.
The following is an excerpt from Setting the Bar: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Era of Distraction, Dependency, and Entitlement.
It relates well to last week’s post: Creating a Certain Kind of Person. It also explains the foundations of marketing and the Hedonic Treadmill—essential concepts that aren’t taught in schools. File this under the True Core for living well in the modern world.
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” - Edward Bernays
It takes a village to raise a child, or so the saying goes. But our villages have undergone a rapid deterioration over the past decades. They show all the markers of growth—the new schools, restaurant chains, and Super Targets—but with a marked loss of connection and identity. Communities are no longer the vehicles where culture spreads and evolves so much as they are the playing field where consumerist forces manifest.
Now more than ever before, our cultural values are being formed by people we’ve never met. Parents and community organizations have watched their influence steadily decline as an explosion of mass marketing and mass entertainment came to define our world. Today, these intertwined industries are the primary source of our values. They’ve transformed every sector of society and re-shaped the goals that drive our lives.
Americans consume more food, material items, and entertainment media than any people in history. This is not by accident. Our staggering abundance began with the birth of free market capitalism and the industrial revolution that it spurred. In a market economy, businesses compete to create the highest quality products at the cheapest price. This has stoked incredible efficiency and life changing innovations like refrigerators, vaccines, and automobiles. But as our quality of living went up, a greater portion of the economy became dedicated to increasing consumption for its own sake.
We saw the rise of processed sugary foods, porn, and eventually an attention economy where media outlets were rewarded for keeping us scrolling longer. If a desire could be tapped it would be, and then it was refined to become as irresistible as possible. Supernormal stimuli came to dominate the environment exploiting our impulses at every turn. But we weren’t just surrounded by more temptation than ever. An elaborate marketing industry developed based upon an explicit intent to influence people to crave, consume, and then crave more.
Perhaps no one was more responsible for the birth of marketing than Edward Bernays and his uncle, the groundbreaking psychologist, Sigmund Freud. Most of us think of Freud whenever there is an unfortunate slip of the tongue—Yes ma’am. Thank you. This is the breast steak … I mean best steak I’ve ever had. But Freud’s influence goes far beyond explaining an embarrassing slip of the tongue—the so-called “Freudian slip.” Freud believed that most human behaviors are controlled by unconscious drives and that despite the illusion of conscious choice, we tend to be pulled by our feelings. We behave as our subconscious feelings tell us to and, like a lawyer, our logical mind goes about rationalizing this course post hoc.
Bernays saw the opportunity in his Uncle’s revelation. If he could use modern technology to prey on those unconscious drives, he could manipulate mass behavior. He put these theories to work creating propaganda to increase support for World War I. But Bernays’s real impact came after the war when he realized that the principles of propaganda could be used to influence mass movement during peacetime.
Before Bernays, advertisers focused on making people aware of products that they might want. Potential customers were seen as rational individuals who would hear about a product and decide whether they wanted it or not.
Bernays demonstrated that by understanding the unconscious mind, advertisers could implant desires. Companies began adding marketing departments to conduct research on human persuasion. They made a science of pulling on our pain points and planting messages in every sector of society. Soon sports arenas, newspapers, and magazines were littered with ads and catchy jingles bounced around our brains. But modern marketing didn’t really take off until after World War II, when an explosion of television consumption exponentially expanded the ability for advertisers to shape our thoughts and desires.
Today, the reach of these forces has multiplied. Marketing experts estimate that Americans see anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements per day. With the advent of smartphones, Google, and algorithms capable of making sense of mass data collection, companies now exploit our individual vulnerabilities, sending personalized marketing packages right to our pockets—each with the same message:
Here is something you need to be happy. You have a problem and our product is the solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy this stuff too. I was over the moon that Brixie’s stroller could do advanced Jiu-Jitsu to convert itself into a car seat. And while it initially felt like a luxury, her noise machine was re-purposed as my noise machine. She never appreciated it anyway…
There are a lot of great products out there that really can enhance our lives. My critique is of the association many have developed between self-worth and material possessions and between happiness and pleasure. Prioritizing these ends stands in the way of deeper fulfillment. We all know money doesn’t buy happiness yet our actions speak to a very different belief system complete with rituals, sacred texts, saints, and even a holy season.
If the religious analogy seems extreme, consider the verbiage used by marketing consultant, Victor Lebow, at the beginning of this consumerist revolution, in the Spring 1955 issue of the Journal of Retailing:
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats, his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies…. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption…. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.
Lebow’s vision has come to fruition. Between birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and the ever-expanding list of gift-worthy occasions, shopping has become everyone’s part time job. All of our societal rituals revolve around purchases. If you are graduating soon, you need a class ring (which you will wear for less than a year). If you’re getting married, you need another ring, a wedding shower, a $20,000 venue, a $3,000 photo package, and a brand new thousand-dollar dress that you will wear once. If you’re having a baby, you need a baby shower, a bigger car, a wipe-warmer, fourteen sleeping contraptions, four million one-time photo-shoot outfits, the Jiu-Jitsu stroller, and two noise machines (get one for yourself and thank me later).
We’ve shortened the holiday that is about gratitude so we can get back to the store to shop for the holiday with loads of presents. We regret the Apple watch that was brand new three months ago, because there is now a newer version that alerts us of an impending fart.
Our culture is constantly telling us we need more comfort, more convenience, and more entertainment. And while I’d agree that Netflix, Amazon Prime, and pizza delivery are undeniably awesome, the problem is that, for most people, they are more than nice additions that enhance life on the way to a larger mission. They are necessities. They are the priorities that drive our daily lives. They are our culture’s collective why.
Why should I care about school?
So, you can get a better paying job and buy all the stuff you want.
Why do you work so much?
To get more of the things I need to be happy.
What do you do to be happy?
Eat sweets, scroll social media, shop, and binge television shows.
Pursuing Happiness in The Wrong Places
The pursuit of happiness is the defining objective of modern culture. But no matter how easy and full of pleasure our lives become, we aren’t satisfied. The more society “progresses” the more our expectations grow. In other words, the more we pursue happiness the more it eludes our grasp.
This phenomenon has been called the hedonic treadmill. Each improvement in lifestyle becomes our new set point and our expectations rise making that old way of life, incomprehensibly meager. How did we ever live without a Roomba?
The hedonic treadmill explains why an oceanside drive is breathtaking to a vacationer, yet overlooked by the local resident and it’s why the car you were so excited to purchase eventually becomes no more than a means to get from A to B. The hedonic treadmill is based on the same adaptive process as antifragility (see chapter 3). We build a tolerance to whatever is normal in our lives. Whether stress or pleasure, we only notice the change, while things are either getting better or worse.
No matter how magical our lives become it will not be enough. But there are more fruitful pursuits that make our lives meaningful and foster the competency, connection, and authenticity we need. Lasting happiness is better thought of as eudaimonia or self-actualization. Rather than accompanying the satisfaction of an external end-goal, eudaimonic happiness emerges within us as a consequence of pursuing better values...
…Unfortunately, both our most innate impulses and our marketing-saturated environment pull us toward unfulfilling values.
But let’s not blame this all on big business. Businesses are often bastions of ingenuity and community. Marketing may have fueled this new religion, but for most of the players, our shift to consumerist values wasn’t the result of some nefarious plot. Every business sets out to sell a good or service and if they can’t influence us to consume their product then they will be replaced. The problem isn’t that any one company worked to make sales. It is that business interests superseded every other concern. All our systems, from healthcare to politics to education, bowed to the whims of commerce. There was no institution working above the fray—no one standing up for human flourishing—no value above the market incentive.
Shouldn’t We Be Prepared for This World?
As far back as 1947, English writer Dorothy Sayers, called upon education to check the influence of materialist culture and prepare society to live in a world of mass marketing, stating:
“For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being masters of them in their intellects.”
Like Sayers, I believe education is the answer. Schools are the cultural nucleus best positioned to pull our values in a better direction. They should be the authority in human development dedicated to giving people the tools to take control of their lives, make sense of the world, and determine what pursuits will be most rewarding. But such goals are largely absent from the thought-process of most educators. This leaves our kids are woefully unprepared for the world we have created.
A culture that won’t form people leaves them vulnerable to every temptation. It’s time to restore a clear path to forming a certain kind of person. That is my goal here. I’m in the process of building a series of short lessons for families and community groups to fill this void. More to come!
If you enjoyed this please share with a kindred spirit!
And if you haven’t yet, grab a copy of Setting the Bar!
Carry the fire!
Shane