How Religion Caused The Great Recession

HOW RELIGION CAUSED THE GREAT RECESSION

PART TWO: THE RISE OF CONSUMER CULTURE

(Image from wikimedia commons)

In part one, we saw how the Plymouth Colonists settled in a harsh, untamed environment that required ceaseless labour just to maintain subsistence living. Gradually, though, the unforgiving Wild West would be tamed, with railroads and freeways stretching from State to State, vast swathes of farmland providing an abundance of food, and industrial centres capable of such high productivity it seemed as though everybody's needs would soon be met.

But while this might sound like a positive thing, it actually posed something of a problem to the economic system that had been established. It was a system based on perpetual growth and that was fundamentally opposed to any notion of 'enough' that might dwell in the human soul. In the competitive world of business, companies manufacturing goods were compelled to steadily increase market share and profits, of fear of being swallowed by a larger enterprise, but how could perpetual growth be maintained when customers acted with frugality and were content with what they had?

Psychologists were therefore brought in to change the human psyche. One such expert was Edward Bernays. He took certain ideas from Freudian analysis about human status and applied them to advertisement campaigns. Products were no longer to be thought of as mere practical solutions to a limited set of problems. They were, instead, symbols representative of one's identity, physical representations of one's status. The car, the appliance, the furniture, were to be less relevant in terms of their utility and seen instead as fashion accessories. Advertising played a major role in developing this new consumer culture, because if the economy was to fulfil its imperative of perpetual growth, the customer had to be persuaded to buy things they did not even know they needed.

(Bernays. Image from SourceWatch)

SALES AND SERVICES

The consumer economy necessitated the rise of sales and service-based industries and those kinds of workplaces proved fertile breeding ground for positive thinking. After all, we all expect staff in shops and waiters serving us food to be friendly and greet us with smiles and a positive attitude (even if we don't really believe the grinning sales assistant is genuinely pleased to see us).

Increasingly, then, employees found themselves in occupations that required the kind of self-examination and improvement that practitioners of positive thinking strived to achieve. As Ehrenreich explained, "the work of Americans, and especially its ever-growing white-collar proletariat, is in no small part work that is performed on the self in order to make that self more acceptable and even likeable to employers, clients, coworkers and potential customers". Nor were interpersonal skills and constant optimism confined to obvious places like sales and service-based industries. As Carnegie observed, "even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering".

And so, whether in work or out, the consumer lived surrounded by the positive thinking message that anyone can have whatever they want, provided they exercised sufficient belief that good things will come their way. It was a belief generated in no small part to create an insatiable appetite for consumer culture. And as the corporate world seemed to ascend to increasingly dazzling heights of financial success, some clergymen noticed this ascendency and recognised within it methods to grow their churches.

Continued in part three

REFERENCES

'Culture In Decline' by Peter Joseph

'Smile Or Die' by Barbara Ehrenreich.