The math is quite simple: it is impossible to sustain exponential growth in a limited system, therefore, we find ourselves in a predicament caught between our limitless desires and the hard limits of math and physics. It is a multifaceted predicament: a population soon to be nearing 10 billion; degraded land, water, air and oceans; vast inequities in resource use and wealth distribution; social upheaval; it goes on and on.
Our economic system of continuous industrial growth operates under a serious delusion; it imagines infinity on a finite planet. It believes the impossible: that growth can continue forever because the resources of the earth are inexhaustible and its capacity to absorb more and more human bodies and the waste they generate is unlimited - it all goes to that fantasy kingdom of “Away” where hidden magical formulas contravene the laws of physics. What is essential to life becomes inconsequential. What matters are those miniscule parts of the planet, what remains after brutal extraction and pollution, that can be commodified and bought and sold in the “free market” for profit.
It is buying and selling that matters. Everything has a price and everything is for sale. Even our own personalities. Warren Susman tells this story as the change from a “Culture of Character” - the culture of the village where everyone was known from how they lived their lives and judged accordingly - to a “Culture of Personality,” in which Susman says,
The social role demanded of all in the Culture of Personality was that of a performer… Every American was to become a performing self.
That “Culture of Personality” has now become a crazed frenzy of “brand” promotion and social media hyper-narcissism. In this new cultural wasteland, our very selves have become “brands” and we must compete in a marketplace of brands to sell our “selves” (the definition of which seems to be changing under this onslaught of marketing). And the very pinnacle of this dangerous and destructive shattering is the pathological “Trump” brand which has infected our democracy. Politics has been reduced to shallow brand promotion that is disconnected from any responsible concern for truth or facts.
But like the alcoholic who spins beautiful delusions about how their drinking is “responsible” or other such nonsense, while the biological reality of what is happening in their liver continues to move towards disaster, this brand promotion is empty magical thinking; an empty industrial proliferation of lies and propaganda, lipstick on a pig. Of course we can continue our shopping, our burning of fossil fuels, our magnificent economic delusions… forever!
It seems here in “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” we have fallen into confusion about the difference between freedom of consumption – freedom that enables us to accumulate possessions – and personal liberty.
Consumerism has attached itself to a novel identity politics in which business itself plays a role in forging identities conducive to buying and selling. Identity here becomes a reflection of “lifestyles” that are closely associated with commercial brands and the products they label, as well as with attitudes and behaviors linked to where we shop, how we buy, and what we eat, wear, and consume.
The identity politics of the 21st century is then part and parcel of the infantilist ethos. It mistakes brand for identity and consumption for character while treating Americans as consumers of Brand USA rather than as the free citizens of a democratic republic.
– Benjamin Barber Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
And in a little serenade called “Loyalty Beyond Reason” Kevin Roberts CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi “The Lovemarks Compay" tells us,
When everything can be a brand - religions, reality TV shows, presidents - brands can't matter. But hold on to your hats. The next big leap lies ahead. The transformation of brands into Lovemarks. A brand that's irreplaceable and irresistible…
Lovemarks inspire loyalty beyond reason…
Remove a brand and people buy a replacement. Take a Lovemark away and you've got a protest on your hands…
"Loyalty beyond reason," being the goal of billions of dollars of investment, cannot be other than powerful and intensive opposition to freedom. It is violent opposition to liberty masquerading as "consumer choice." An attack on reason, as this can only be, is an attack on freedom. John Locke, one of the philosophers the Founders looked to when they were refining their ideas of freedom and liberty speaks to this:
The freedom then of man, and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will. To turn him loose to an unrestrained liberty, before he has reason to guide him, is not allowing him the privilege of his nature to be free; but to thrust him out amongst brutes
In pursuit of "loyalty beyond reason" corporations and their advertisers stand in direct opposition to another building block of a free society: informed consent and the education necessary to give that informed consent. We are encouraged not to think but to be "irresistibly" drawn to those products we feel good about. A 15 year old buying and smoking cigarettes because being a "Marlboro Man" appears to him the best way to meet his deeply emotional need for acceptance among his peers is not making an informed choice. But he is an ideal consumer, especially if he becomes addicted to the product and spends his (shortened) life identified as a "Marlboro Man.”
And this has finally dragged us to the bottom with “Make America Great Again” and the victory of an empty brand, loved and promoted by profit driven media fascination with the outrageous and sensational; billions of dollars of free brand promotion delusionally divorced from any concern with responsible communication of reality. Telling the alcoholic, “Of course you can have another drink, those humorless dweebs telling you to cool it don’t understand your true magnificence.” And their lives continue to plummet towards the bottom.
Pruitt can continue to natter on:
I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see
Keep drinking! Keep shopping! Keep driving! Make America Great Again! No need to worry about the realities of chemistry, thermodynamics, physics — that’s boring, inconsequential drivel! Let’s take this powerful, virile, patriotic movement of ours and drive the country right over that cliff! We can fly! Gravity doesn’t apply to us!
It is my hope that in the aftermath of the inevitable collision between the Laws of Physics and the shmear of “alternative facts,” “fake news” and unhinged conspiracy theories, the damage to our lives and the life of the planet will be survivable. And it is not a foolish hope because in any war between reality and delusion there is no doubt about the ultimate outcome. The question, and it is a big scary one, is how much damage the delusion will cause before its emptiness is revealed in all its disastrous glory.