Benjamin R. Barber
The noted political theorist on the dumbing-down of adults, faux needs, and saving capitalism
"Let's be clear," Benjamin r. Barber insists, "this isn't a book that says there's something wrong with shopping. It says that when shopping is all we do, when commerce is all there is, that's a big problem."
In his new book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole, Barber argues that American youth culture has metastasized, infecting society as a whole with a bad case of Peter Pan syndrome, an induced childishness easily manipulated by ideologies of privatization, branding, and homogenized tastes. That this phenomenon of "kidults" and "rejuveniles" gathers steam even as the country's population skews older and older, he adds, belies the relentless marketing strategies of global consumer capitalism that are willing it into being.
Back in the 20th century, Barber says, when American capitalism ceased supplying real demands with tangible products, our economic system began developing insatiable needs of its own, building a creature that requires ever-increasing consumption in order to survive. As a result, he says, we're living in a world precisely calibrated to promote non-stop shopping by short-circuiting mature thinking. From the simplistic, political theatrics of Ann Coulter to the Hummer driver unwittingly spurring on war in the Middle East, Consumed details how we're feeling the pernicious spillover effects of a population which has ceased seeing itself as a group of active citizens and instead thinks of itself as gang of passive consumers.
-Mindy Farabee
CityBeat: Why does capitalism at this late stage require what you call "infantilized consumers"?
Benjamin Barber: Adults are well-rounded pluralistic beings, who like to pray and play and create and make love and make art and do recreation and work and do politics and citizenship and shop. But in a capitalist economy that needs them to shop all the time, it really doesn't want them doing all those other things. So it encourages impulsive acquisition, shopaholic buying habits that really require a dumbing-down of the adults. Thus, instead of well-rounded adults doing many things, you get, in effect, adults who are teen-like, impulsive, acquisitive shoppers, happy to consume things they don't really need all the time. Turning adults back into acquisitive children is really a function of a capitalist economy that needs people not just to shop, but to shop all the time, and to buy not just what they need but to buy, buy, buy way beyond what they need.
Americans have a tendency to equate liberty with free markets. You write that much of that stems from libertarians like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan who were wedded to a conception of liberty that's essentially negative - freedom from regulation - and that's actually dangerous to modern democracy. What do you mean by that?
I also distinguish not just between positive and negative liberty, but public and private liberty. We Americans can choose between about 200 automobile brands. We can buy or rent any kind of car we want. We have infinite consumer choice. But the one choice you don't have in Los Angeles is the choice for efficient, cheap, accessible, public transportation. That choice is the result of citizens working together and making public choices. Much of what appears to be choice in America is trivial, small private choice. We're always making choices off a menu we don't get to write. Public liberty, public choice, writes the menu. This is why we have to retrieve our power as citizens, and once again begin to make public choices about public interests.
There's growing concern that American capitalism is becoming an unstable system because it's propped up by so much foreign debt. Do you think this emphasis on fulfilling bottomless, fake needs fundamentally throws the system out of whack?
That's really important, because it's easy to say I'm just moralizing and everyone's got a right to the values they want. But the reality is, American capitalism itself is no longer working the way it's supposed to. Capitalism is a remarkable wealth-producing machine. At its best, capitalism allows the entrepreneurial spirit to produce new wealth on the way to meeting real human needs and wants. One of the problems with capitalism recently, with mergers and acquisitions and the marketing and the manufacturing of faux needs, is that, instead of creating new wealth, it's simply living parasitically off the wealth that's already there.
As it does that, it begins to really fail as a system, because it depends on the production of new wealth and growing prosperity to work. A huge problem is its inability in this new economy to produce new wealth by producing new solutions to real needs. Another example: Americans have free access to clean tap water through wells and reservoirs. Yet we spend $10 billion a year on bottled water. There is no "need" for bottled water - it's something pushed on us. It's an unnecessary expense; the bottles themselves are plastic that muck up the environment; they have to be shipped around the country using fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in the Third World three or four billion people don't have access to clean water at all.
So instead of selling bottled water to Americans, the water industry should think about how they can begin to address the real need for clean water in those parts of the world that don't have it. That could actually lead to the new production of wealth, new methods, new technologies, at the same time it would address real needs. Same thing for fossil fuels: We are buying it from abroad instead of entrepreneurially trying to figure out how to utilize wind power, solar power, tidal power, geothermal power, all the alternative forms of energy that could spare us the dependency on foreign oil, but also would create a new entrepreneurial industry. There are lots of ways that capitalism could satisfy real needs and build new wealth; instead it's doing neither and putting its own future at risk.
How do you propose we redirect the system?
There are two sets of solutions. The first I look at is how capitalism can save itself by once again meeting real needs. That's something that's beginning to happen, for instance, with micro-credit at Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank. He just won the Nobel Prize for the idea.
But the other line of solutions has to be re-establishing the balance and partnership between democracy and capitalism. Capitalism has always worked best, markets have always worked best, in partnership with democratic oversight and regulation. When you have markets left to their own devices they become anarchic, they become monopolistic, they become cartel-oriented, they become self-contradictory. When they work in concert with democratic oversight, with the direction of a democratic people looking to make the economy serve the people, not the other way around, then you get a very healthy balance.
The problem, in the last 30 to 40 years, is you've seen this radical privatization, this attack on so-called "big government" which is actually an attack on what I call "big democracy." It's an attempt to disempower us of our public right to chose the nature of the world we're going to live in. So restoring the balance between democracy and markets and retrieving our role as citizens as well as consumers, and remembering the will of the consumer should be subordinate to the will of the citizen, will go a long way to saving capitalism from itself.
Published: 05/10/2007
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
