Consumerism

Ellen Weis, San Francisco's Museum of Modern Mythology

Consumerism fuels the capitalist fire. In a capitalist society, the goal is to make money, by whatever means possible, exploiting whichever potential weakness that might exist. The human race is one with a wild imagination, and this wild imagination, though a great strength, can, like all great strengths, serve as a potential weakness.

It is our imaginations that advertising exploits, and it is our imaginations that religion and myth traditionally played the role of satiating, telling stories that have morals to them, lessons to be learned. Now consumerism fulfills this role. The consumer ideology serves as the golden rule, advertising serves as sermons, products serve as our idoltry, and just as religion instills faith at an early age, so too does consumerism.

Ellen Weis (qtd. in "Advertising Characters" 1997) speaks from the perspective of one who is an authority on mythology. Her analogy between religion and consumerism is an accurate one. Undoubtedly, she's referring to this role that consumerism is playing in stimulating our imaginations. It does t

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For example, nearly every cigerette ad features a picture of an ideal person smoking their brand, ideal at least by the standards of most people who long to be accepted. This sort of idoltry is exactly what consumerism offers. If consumerism is our religion, then Christmas would be our religious holiday, now representing both our worship for products as well as our worship of Christ.

The perfect marriage between consumerism and religion can be found in the myth of Santa Claus. This making sense of the world and simplifying to such a triviality is exactly the reason why myths are created. People seek happiness, acceptance, nobility, and love, and since these attributes seem so hard to come by in America, they instead substitute for them the products that represent them, which seem much easier to come by. One extreme example of such sermons are those presented by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in which he says, for example, that sinners "deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using his power at any moment to destroy them. " They ensure us that there is still hope, that things aren't as bad as they seem, although they also seem to imply that they're somehow partly the cause of it all. But most of all, the increased need for toys to supply for this myth provides a tenfold increase in profits. We want to believe that all it takes to be happy is a trip to the store. The effect is greatly underestimated and, for the most part, mysterious, because we're all caught in its spell. his by telling us a story, with us playing the lead role, painting a picture of life as being better with the products being sold to us. Finally, although religion does tend to portray sex as taboo, consumerism tends to cash in on this attitude by portraying it as something scary, as in the PalmPilot example; the ads seem to act like the only way to get sex is by buying their products. The ads seem to say, "this could be you.

It seems consumerism shares with religion many more of the bad characteristics than the good.

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Approximate Word count = 1778
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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