Viva Consumerism
In Iran right now there are underground and illegal rock clubs with photos of Kurt Cobain on the walls. In China, there are millions of nominally communist youths listening to Ke$ha and Lagy Gaga.
I believe this is a beautiful and useful phenomenon. I see two ideologies among my fellow humans: (1) collectivism and (2) individualism. Collectivism is manifested as nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism, sectarian religion, statism… and more severely as state communism, fascism, theocracy, totalitarianism, and mass cults. Individualism is manifested as voluntary individual action and interaction, as individual ambition, as individual rebellion, as markets… and more severely as consumerism.
The most significant modern proponent of collectivism was Karl Marx:
“Above all we must avoid postulating society again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. The individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species.”
Marx argued that the collective is primary whereas the individual is comes from the collective. This is in fact largely true. Evolutionary theory agrees – organisms are emergent from the gene pool. The individual is emergent from the species. Where Marx and other collectivists go wrong is in application of this deterministic fact of life to conscious human action, to society. Yes, collectives (in and of society) do exist. And while it is correct to say that society, culture, language, and so forth affect individuals and help shape human experience, it is wrong to set such a thing as the primary unit of analysis for humanity.
It is wrong for two reasons. The first is that these collective expressions are emergent from individuals and not vice versa. The second is that we only understand these collective expressions in terms of individuals and thus cannot have direct knowledge of them other than through revealed individual expression.
To illustrate that collectives are emergent from individuals, imagine the following scenario: A child is born and set in a large nature dome with no other sentient life, just plants and food. She never has interaction with other humans or materials of human communication. She lives, as it were, in the wild. No doubt, she would develop some form of articulating her conscious thought to herself (language), some norms of behavior (culture), etc. Would she be human? Of course. Now imagine multiple individuals were introduced into the dome. They would, upon interaction, develop some shared forms of communication (language), norms of behavior (culture), and so on. This is where culture, language, society, etc. come from. They are emergent from individual action and interaction, not the other way around.
[Now, once such collective expressions form, they do indeed act partially as dynamic feedback mechanisms that help shape individual experience. However the individual is still primary.]
To illustrate the second point, the knowledge problem, one really only needs to point out psychics are not scientists. The axiom goes something like this: I can’t read your mind. I don’t know what you value better than you know what you value. I don’t know what makes your life worth living better than you. What you value is only revealed to me by your individual expression, by your voluntary individual action and interaction with the world around you.
When we talk about collectives like “society” or “the community,” we are necessarily referring to our own conceptual aggregation of individuals. Thus we cannot know what the expression of the collective is apart from individual expressions, from voluntary human action and interaction. This logical axiom is the basis of modern economic science and what sets economics apart from holistically normative disciplines like critical theory or social philosophy or Marxism. The introduction of this axiom of subjective value in the 19th century became known as the Marginalist Revolution, and gradually made Marxian economics obsolete.
Marxian economics had been based on the objectivist Labor Theory of Value. This theory (famously argued for by Marx in Das Kapital) held that the Marxist could know what you value without your individual expression, and thus could know what you value better than you know what you value. Simplifying things, it proposed that the number of human labor hours put into something was what determined its value. Such a notion is now regarded as little more valid than astrology by modern economists – value is subjective, not objective. I may value a diamond or tree more than the pie you made regardless of how long you spent making it. However, that is individualist analysis thinking in terms of individuals. Marx argued for this objective value theory by collectivist analysis.
[Marx separated humans into “classes” based on where he saw them in relation to production. Thus, once he proposed collectivism, he could derive an objective value theory that would apply to all the individuals in those classes. Those individuals were after all merely emergent phenomena from those classes. If you want to voluntarily work for a wage for another human being, the Marxist is justified in using institutional coercion to keep you from doing so. I will leave it up to the reader to judge the validity of this kind of justification. I, along with the modern economics profession, thoroughly reject it as logically untenable. You cannot know what I value better than I know what I value.
The Labor Theory of Value is rarely talked about anymore, and Marxian economics is all but extinct in academia. However, what many in other disciplines have not come to terms with is that their entire theoretical framework – that is Marxism and virtually all collectivisms – is based on the Labor Theory of Value or religious authority on “goodness” or some other objectivist value theory. From sociology to philosophy to international theory to politics to popular discourse, collectivism is rampant. Yet those who engage in such analysis do so on entirely on logically untenable ground. Even most economists who competently analyze the economy via methodological individualism never apply this logical axiom to the government.]
What is the result of this strong collectivism? Is indicated previously, the manifestations of collectivism include communism, fascism, sectarian theocracy, and statism in general. The difference between these manifestations is entirely a matter of degree and development. They are functionally the same: a few individuals claim to be representative of the collective and are popularly recognized as such. Those individuals then enjoy a drastic subsidization of mass coercion due to this ideological projection. The dangers of the extreme stages of statism—communism, fascism, theocracy—I will assume given by the reader.
Consumerism says “I matter.” In the extreme this is criticized as sociopathy or absolute selfishness. However, in reasserting this basic premise of individualism, one combats the collectivist ideology of the theocrat and dictator. And nowhere is individualism better and more clearly expressed than in modern consumer pop culture. Some people call it “trash” culture. I see it simply as the inevitable evolution of human society away from atavistic collectivism and toward individualism.
Fame, doin’ it for the fame
’cause we wanna live the life
Of the rich and famous
Fame, doin’ it for the fame
’cause we gotta taste for champagne
And endless fortune
Don’t ask me how or why
But i’m gonna make it happen this time
My teenage dream
Yeah i’m gonna make it happen this time
- Lady Gaga, “The Fame”
When the Chinese student watches to Ke$sha and Lady Gaga singing about risk, ambition, and wealth; when the Iranian youth listens to Kurt Cobain singing about rejecting social norms and asserting individuality, there is an influence away from collectivism and toward self-determination.
These sentiments are strong throughout consumer culture, for consumerism feeds off such individualism. The individual who has ambition is the individual who will work toward it, who will seek to consume the goods from the producers, will seek freedom to express their individual choices. In doing so, the individual begins to recognize the collectivist institutions of state as barriers to self-fulfillment. They then begin to defy, undermine, and resist those institutions. This is seen constantly, and in concentrated events such as those in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and on the streets of Tehran in 2009.
Consumerism, trash culture, therefore is a powerful force for good. In fact, I imagine that bombarding Iraq with the Billboard Top 100 and consumer goods and wireless internet might have been a more efficient way of removing Saddam Hussein from power and reforming the Ba’ath Party government for the good of the Iraqi people than war. And even after the second course was taken, we see the rise of consumerist pop culture in Iraq and across the Muslim world.
An example of this, Pakistani pop singer Deeyah, the so-called “Muslim Madonna,” has gained popular fame and religious and state persecution for her individualistic music and defiance of cultural norms. In response to persecution, she has organized campaigns for individual rights and religious reform. She thus joins Ke$sha and Lady Gaga in the tradition of individualist consumerism in opposition to collectivism, that is, on the side of humanity over superstition.
From the land of the free to the jewel of the empire
Does the truth only come from the top of a holy man’s spire?
From three paces back, covered head to toe
Are rules just for the masses and written just for show?
Do you stand up, lay down or follow?
What will it be?
Will it all be the same again tomorrow?
What will it be?
You can claim it but the words are hollow
Do you stand up, lay down, or swallow?
What will it be?
- Deeyah Thathaal, “What will it be?”
Karl Marx. “Private Property and Communism.” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. 1844 [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm]
That is, beyond absolute physiological measures like the need for food, for eyesight, for hearing, air, water, basic mental capacity, etc.
The exceptions to this are modern microeconomics, experimental economics, and public choice economics. Those economists who study the government logically and empirically in terms of individuals strongly tend toward skepticism of the state. Most notable among such economists are libertarian anarchists like Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, et al. and libertarian minarchists like Nobel laureates James Buchanan and FA Hayek.
