The Rewards of Being a Good Late-Capitalist Consumer

[Also posted to the Fusion-Zaangha Global Community pod.]

Cultural Repression
or if you prefer,
The Rewards of Being a Good Late-Capitalist Consumer

I.

A scholarly friend recently wrote to me, "What I want to interrogate here is the notion that ours is an 'open society'. How open are we? Is the main difference that in some societies the coercion comes from political processes where in ours it comes from economic forces?"

Consistent with these questions, I'm comfortable making the statement that capitalism, especially post-modern late-capitalist society, is an inherently repressive society. My exposure to counter-cultural idealism tells me that this statement is a truism, yet I couldn't easily articulate why. At first.

I've also been looking for ways to get a handle on "culture". I mean that literally: a handle, like the one on a lever, from which we can shift the weight, the emphasis, the direction of billions of people.

My gut instinct (and maybe a little lower) is that there are two areas in which to do this: food and sex. Addressing Rich's question through these filters makes it much easier to answer. Just consider the basic premise that our culture rewards conformity - and by extension, punishes noncomformity.

II.

Let's say you're a farmer, and want to increase your yield and profit. Conventional farming dictates a series of steps. First, you scale up - provided you have the credit rating to do so, because profitable farming requires lots of land and large equipment. In order to get the best return on your land investment, you'll probably want to farm fencerow-to-fencerow. Likewise with your equipment, keep as close to monocropping as you safely can. Your market is secure - the middleman buys on behalf of ADM and your product joins the golden rivers of grain flowing down our railroad tracks to CAFOs throughout the Midwest. This covers the farmer's costs, and the US government provide the profit margins and crop insurance in the form of public subsidies.

Small-scale, bioregionally-focused, family-based organic growers need not apply. Today's farmer is an uber-capitalist, up to his eyeballs in debt, controlling massive means of production, thoroughly indentured by the system. Market methods based on commercial products, reinforced by economic viability without regard for hidden costs, have replaced our historically organic, diverse, decentralized, labor intensive, traditional food growing methods.

As a consumer, our food options are equally uniform for those who are willing to conform. McDonalds and Starbucks meet our basic needs at thousands of locations world-wide. We could go on to examine the cost of 1,000 calories versus the nutritional benefit, the health effects, the embodied energy costs, etc., but we already know how the food production and distribution system fails us. (If not, Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a great starting point.)

Here's how it represses us.

If you want an alternative to industrially-farmed vegetables, you have a series of options. Pay more. Drive further. Buy product shipped from far away - even overseas. These will get you by while you spend considerable energy learning your options, because there are many, and they're hidden behind mountains of mainstream. You have to learn a completely different way of buying - and producing - your own food, because these are not the methods taught to us by our society. In fact, we often taught the opposite - you can't drink raw milk, you can't trust organic vegetables, you are always best served by uniformity.

We're not just paying more because of the the farmer wants to make a living, either. When you choose to eat authentic, sustainable food, you are paying twice: once for the real cost of responsibly grown food, and once to cover the hidden costs of factory farming. The direct subsidies to the industrial-agricultural producers come out of the public coffers - i.e. your pocket, without regard for whether you benefited from their cheap food. The indirect subsidies - cleaning up after unsustainable methods, environmental damage, depleted soil, loss of the topsoil, deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, extinction, global warming, etc. - come out of our children's inheritance. If we are trusting enough to have children.

When you do know what you want, you have to fight to get it. Food labeling laws favor the corporation - and by extension, the conformist. Food processing laws favor the industrial farmer. Even worse, you can't take anything for granted: recently, the chef at a yoga retreat told me all their food comes from Wal-Mart.

The barriers to living differently are significant, especially when you cross from acting on principle to acting out of need. My natural food experience comes from a desire to live according to my beliefs. I'm grateful I didn't fall feet first into the deep end without any other options, as many people using diet to treat cancer, fibromyalgia, Chrohn's, chronic fatigue, and autism have done.

Free markets options drown out the responsible, sustainable options - at least until those options become profitable. Open society passes laws that openly benefit the corporations hiring the lobbyists and making the campaign donations, often while crowding out alternatives through legislation.

In our society we almost act as if there aren't alternatives, that the only food option we have (sometimes we'll throw the words "viable" food option, "realistic" food option) is mass production. That's not true, and the messages are out there: Urban farming and organiponicos. Community supported agriculture. Bioregional eating. Decentralization. Gardening. Traditional food wisdom. Whole food. Raw food. Vegetarianism and veganism.

All of these represent counter-cultural narratives, and they have voice, but that voice is drowning in a sea of metanarrative. The reason for this is simple: the primary medium of our cultural narrative - that pervasive, sometimes overt, often subliminal set of instructions on "how to live" - is commercially controlled. Because it's commercial, a message typically requires capital to rise above the cacophony. In this system, in order to spend capital, we generally expect a return on investment, an income stream tied to the content of the message.

The net effect is a repression of responsible methodology, not only in farming, or even in eating, but in how to live.

That's just the food part. Travel nine inches south for another perspective.

III.

In a late-capitalist society, it is demand itself that's in short supply. Demand is now the product we cultivate, and the field we sow is culture. Just as a flat, sterile field provides the best medium for monocropped economies of scale, creating of society of increasingly homogenous consumers yield the best result in terms of market efficiency.

Of course, a completely uniform market only creates competitive opportunities. On the other hand, a consumer base as diverse as an old growth rain forest - a hodgepodge of insular cultures such as we had when the world was a much bigger place - doesn't provide for economies of scale that compete profitably. So the modern market-driven global society must continuously drive culture into fewer pigeon holes. It does this using the carrot method, access to cheap consumer goods for those who pigeon-hole their desires, and the stick method, smothered alternatives and barriers to meeting our human needs for those who chose to buck the system.

IV.

In today's society, why are monogamous male-female relationships an overwhelmingly de facto condition? As Seinfeld says, "Not that there's anything wrong with that..." I'm not bigoted toward those who freely chose heterosexual monogamy. Honest. Provided it's a choice, or if it were even possible, a free choice. On the personal level, a continuous flow of cultural messages dictating acceptable behavior becomes integral to our self-identity, regardless of how "open" we believe we are. On a public level, homosexual marriage is now almost uniformly illegal, and any formal, legal marriage involving more than two adults is proscribed, at least in the United States.

Why? What is really wrong with it?

One answer to that question (religious morals) and its explanation exceed the scope of this discussion. What's relevant here is that if you choose to live outside the norm, finding a fulfilling relationship is probably going to be difficult.

I almost wish I could go back to my high school self, back to an age when trying on personalities was an educational opportunity as important as social studies. Back then, you could meet your social and sexual needs by changing yourself to meet the expectations of your prospective partner.

For many people, I suspect this remains true throughout adulthood. There are aspects of ourselves that we have effectively compromised in order to meet our own needs. In many cases we changed ourselves to be more normal, because that's what "other people" want. And if you think about it, the more "normal" you are, the larger your universe of potential partners, since the norm is defined by aggregation.

But how do we, as a society, choose where to aggregate? One may wish to say it's a biologically informed - or even divinely inspired - natural order. But I think most modern research suggests our relationships, even as they have changed through history, are based on control rather than biology or morality (though both are clearly used in justification.)

Society is the primary beneficiary of this control. The more consistently individual relationships conform to its dictates, the better organized society becomes. Certainly its not just the fundamentalist churches that preach this; visit almost any think-tank (conservative or liberal) to hear the same sermon. The society we're helping to organize through our conformity, however, is the same one that's selling us 1000 calories of crap or two organic carrots (wrapped in plastic) for a buck. They're selling us the fairytale wedding, happily-never-after marriage, the quiverful of kids. They're also selling us our two-income (and her alimony, too) McMansions, our SUVs, and our kids' multitudinous extracurricular activities. They're selling us the jobs they need us to do to make the money we need to buy the products we make at our jobs in a process that turns natural resources into billionaires. They're selling us the lifestyle of A Good Late-Capitalist Consumer.

Two partner, heterosexual, ostensibly monogamous relationships, broken by a regular patterns of infidelity, divorce, and occasional financial ruin, are preferred. Homosexual relationships modeled closely on the above are encouraged to apply.

I should define the anonymous "they". "They" are us, for as long as we're willing to play that game.

Where do you go to get off that merry-go-round? Can you wander down the block to the local commune? Join up with a neighborhood group marriage? Sit down on a barstool and wait for a poly to ask your sign?

The agricultural revolution started 10,000 years ago, and in our society we can buck that system without tripping over many taboos. I don't know when this sexual revolution began, when we collectively started policing our sexual nature in order to build and control society, but I think the debris of that process are quite deeply embedded.

I don't know where one goes to build sexual relationships according to a different set of rules. I don't know how one finds partners with whom to do it, except by honest communication and a degree of luck.

I do know that honest communication can get a lot of doors slammed in your face. Individually, it's rejection. Collectively it's the postmodern, late-capitalist society's repression of nonconforming members.

V.

Advocates of the system can rightfully claim that it works - it maximizes benefits for the greatest number of participants in a fairly effective way. Currently, the recipients of maximal benefits seem to represent the minimal population, while the benefits to the masses are of questionable value. But it is an economic system, and as such effectively determines who gets what, when and how.

It's only in the long-term that one notices the merry-go-round is spiraling toward oblivion, and even that long-term vision is (1) plausibly deniable, (2) ultimately going to be somebody else's problem, and (3) bound to be solved through technology. In the meantime, everyone gets what they want, if we speak in broad generalities.

Speaking in broad generalities isn't too far off, either. The rewards of conforming are particularly useful for training us as productive members of society - 'productive' meaning 'consumptive' in a late-capitalist society. We don't need continuous reward for conformist acts - Pavlov's prizes stopped coming sometime in adolescence, and we still salivate when his bell is rung. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us are trustworthy spokespeople for the system.

VI.

This is not a complete analysis, for certain - from food and sex, we can expand to shelter and wellness, getting to exploitation and the basis of poverty, which couches the most obvious flaws of capitalism. Even without branching out, we can conclude that it's time to question whether an economic system is really the best organizational method for society.

VII.

In looking at the dictionary definition of repression, I like the psycoanalytical version: the rejection from consciousness of painful or disagreeable ideas, memories, feelings, or impulses. Given the visceral tools used in this analysis, rejection from consciousness may be an entirely appropriate way of looking at repression on a cultural level.

What is culture? I wonder if it's not the consciousness of humankind, the early stages of an intelligent, self-directing, multi-member entity acting on its own behalf - independent of, though symbiotically with, its individual members.

If that's the case, I suspect our culture is a bullying adolescent with an unhealthy self-image, a serious eating disorder, and some deep-rooted issues with sex.