Some decades ago, politics started competing with big business about the way society was to be shaped.
After the crash of the New York stock exchange in 1929, the western economies sunk into crisis. Facing recession and unemployment, millions of workers stopped buying goods they didn’t need. The crash led in Europe to intensified economic and political crisis in the new democracies and big public uproar. Democracies and capitalism were shaking and both were rethinking their concept of how to unify people.
To the background of that time Freud argued, civilizations had been constructed to control the dangerous animal forces inside human beings. What was implicit in Freud’s arguments was that the ideal of individual freedom, which was at the heart of democracy, was impossible. Human being could never been allowed to truly express themselves because it was too dangerous. They must always be controlled and thus always be disconsent. This believe found it’s expressions in both the reshaping of the political systems and capitalist model of big-business.
Politically this idea found its expression in the Nazi regime (to unify those within society and release it uncontrollable and destructive forces to the outside) and U.S. president Roosevelt’s call for much larger governmental influence on the ‘free’ market. American businesses protesting to Roosevelt’s ideas invented the consuming self as a way to fulfill desire, shaped by Edward Bernays (Freud’s American nephew)
Big business won this battle by creating the idea that democracy and capitalism was an ideal match trough the consuming self, creating docile citizens through consuming. What we see today in the western capitalist word is a direct result of this battle. Capitalism has shaped our societies. So now politics are engaged in the play field of the consuming self, expressing self, choosing as individual for personal gain. Consuming products that we really don’t need, only wants that satisfy short term desire. Our decision-making has a lot more to do with irrational emotions than factual information.
In a democracy people vote according the ideas, hopes and fears they have. The frame in which people think is largely created by what people define as their society, their personal living space and the impulses they receive from that society. When society is under the influence of the manifestation of ‘self’, how does that affect leadership of that society? How does that affect politics?
In a time in which the consuming and expression selves celebrate and in a globalizing world, I’ve witnessed the rise of more polarizing politics and politicians. It feels like politics’ aims used to be advertised little more than necessities and were promoted in their functional terms. Nowadays it seems to me it is much more desire driven, winning the popular vote and profiling of self. Since the polarizing popular vote is encapsulated around expression of self it is at the same time not sustainable for acting and interacting as a collective. The ideas in current societies will not be sustainable in larger (globalizing) scale without crisis.
I think if you look at politics nowadays and compare this with advertising, you get the creepy feeling of watching a jeans commercial that says it will make you stylish and well respected by your friends. Just after some trial and error you find out the promise of the brand was nothing more that a fata morgana in which you so wanted to believe, because it gave you the idea of transforming yourself.
The popular politicians seem to have copied this strategy and there main weapon is moral standards. What you see is politicians targeting their campaign on the desire for the moral good, (Bush’ argument of weapons of mass destruction, Wilders or Verdonks claim for emancipation and so on) while their actions leave the feeling of a different agenda. So in this way you can state the moral claims they make as the promising adverts of a brand. Sad but true this leaves only the conclusion of their politic goal to be compared with the company whose only goal it is to make profit, not being interested in the other promises they made at all.
I think this kind of politics, as it goes for business as well, cannot be sustainable on the long term. While consumers are busy shooting gaps in the campaigns of misleading companies, whose advertising is not backed up by an actual program, voters will on the long term not stay with their believe in the popular politician whose program is also missing. Still your question remains to be asked…will this clearing be executed in a democratic process or do we need a crisis as a wake up call?
It is interesting to link capitalist society to the theories of Freud, seeing the consuming self as a form of Id-suppression. Eric Fromm has argued that consumption is one of the two ways in which modern man escapes from the responsibility of freedom (the other is authoritarianism, like indeed Nazism).
However, one could also argue that Freud did not ‘create’ consumerism, but himself was shaped by it, leading him to a fragmentary view of man: Freud’s ideas that human beings treat each other as objects (for sex or aggression), that their relations are based on crude desires, that they are in continuous conflict, and that every society always stands in the way of individual happiness, are all aspects of modern capitalism. His assumptions on man belong to such a society and are not necessarily universal.