by Al Gore
THE ORIGINS OF MASS MARKETING
The rising rate of consumption in the world is a relatively new phenomenon, less than a century old, and is also a trend that started in the United States. Although mass advertising began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most historians date the true beginning of consumer culture to the 1920s, when the first mass electronic medium, radio, was introduced in the United States, along with the first national circulation magazines and the first silent films shown in theaters. Significantly, consumer credit also became more widely available during the Roaring Twenties to help buyers finance the purchase of relatively expensive new products like automobiles and radios.
Electricity, which was available in less than one percent of American households at the beginning of the twentieth century, rose to almost 70 percent of U.S. homes by the end of the 1920s. The technology of mass production with interchangeable parts and early forms of automation (all forerunners of today’s Earth Inc.) began to decouple productivity from increased employment and produced a cornucopia of consumer goods that stimulated a keen interest among manufacturers and merchants in the emerging science of mass marketing. The advertising industry entered a new and distinctly different role in the marketplace.
It was at precisely this moment in history that the ideas of Sigmund Freud became popular in the United States. Freud’s first trip to America was in 1909, to deliver a series of five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an audience that included William James (whose young protégé, Walter Lippmann, was greatly influenced by Freud) and many of the other most prominent intellectuals in America. Throughout the following decade, ideas popularized by Freud—like the role of the subconscious in understanding human motivation, psychological transference, and other insights from psychoanalysis—spread, particularly on the East Coast, where the advertising industry was and is located. The American Psychoanalytic Society was founded two years after Freud’s visit.
By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, these psychological concepts had been adapted into techniques of mass persuasion that were used during the war effort. Woodrow Wilson established a Committee on Public Information. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, served on the committee, alongside Walter Lippmann, only two years his elder, whose influence on Bernays almost rivaled that of his uncle Sigmund. After the war, Bernays pronounced himself astonished at the effectiveness of mass propaganda and set out to introduce the techniques into mass marketing.
Known as the “father of public relations,” Bernays actually coined the phrase “public relations” in order to avoid using the word “propaganda,” which had acquired a negative connotation in the U.S. due to its frequent use by Germany to describe its mass communications strategy during the war. Bernays revolutionized the field of marketing research by discarding the then standard technique of asking consumers what they liked and disliked about various products. Instead, Bernays spent time with psychoanalysts and conducted deep interviews with people designed to uncover the associations they made in their subconscious minds that might be relevant to the marketing of products and brands. Bernays’s business partner, Paul Mazur, said, “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture.… People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
As Bernays later wrote, in 1928,
the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
In one of his early successes, Bernays tackled a problem for his client, the American Tobacco Company: how could he break down the social taboo against women smoking cigarettes? He hired a group of women to dress as suffragettes and march in formation in a parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1929. When they reached the section of elevated seats reserved for the press, the faux suffragettes all pulled out cigarettes, lit them up, and proclaimed them to be “freedom torches.” Decades later, the iconic cigarette advertisement aimed at women—“You’ve come a long way baby”—was still using Bernays’s innovative but sinister association of smoking with women’s rights.
In 1927, a prominent American business advisor, Edward Cowdrick, wrote that stimulating consumption had become more important than production: “the worker has come to be more important as a consumer than he is as a producer … not to manufacture and mine and raise enough goods, but to find enough people who will buy them—this is the vital problem of business.” He described this fresh macroeconomic conventional wisdom as the “new economic gospel of consumption.”
His use of the word “gospel” was not as casual as it may sound today. The struggle between capitalism and communism had taken on a new significance in the wake of Lenin’s successful revolution in Russia ten years earlier and the establishment of the USSR. During the long struggle between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century, unlimited growth was the one assumption built into both ideologies that neither questioned.
In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge in a speech to advertisers ventured into the same sacred territory that Cowdrick had described as a new economic gospel: “Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind.”
Three years later, two months before the stock market crash of 1929, Coolidge’s successor as president, Herbert Hoover, issued the report of his Committee on Recent Economic Changes, which took note of the newly recognized power of psychology in mass marketing: “The survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically, we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants that will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied … by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific fact finding, by a carefully predeveloped consumption a measurable pull on production has been created … it would seem that we can go on with increasing activity.”
In the 1930s, another Freudian psychoanalyst from Vienna, Ernest Dichter, immigrated to the U.S. and began working on mass marketing. Fully aware of the popularity of Freudian concepts in the advertising business, he told potential customers on Madison Avenue and Wall Street that he was not only a “psychologist from Vienna” but that he had lived on the very same street as Sigmund Freud. He promised them that he could help them “sell more and communicate better.” And, like President Coolidge, he saw the importance of stimulating more mass consumption as a means of strengthening America’s economy in the struggle to ensure the triumph of capitalism. “To some extent the needs and wants of people have to be continuously stirred up,” Dichter said.
Inevitably, the new power of psychology-based mass electronic marketing had an enormous impact on the democracy sphere as well as the market sphere. Bernays and Lippmann had both always predicted it would. But in the desperate and dangerous interwar period in Europe, these new powers were put in the service of totalitarianism. In 1922, Joseph Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR and Benito Mussolini became the fascist
prime minister of a coalition government in Italy. Six months earlier, Adolf Hitler had become the chairman of the National Socialist Party in Germany.
Fifteen years later, after the Nuremburg Laws and the opening of the first concentration camps, Edward Bernays was dismayed by the eyewitness report of a recent visitor to Berlin who told him that Joseph Goebbels was making intensive use of Bernays’s book Propaganda in organizing Hitler’s genocide.
In the U.S., also in 1922, Bernays’s friend and former wartime propaganda colleague, Walter Lippmann, wrote:
The manufacture of consent … was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique. As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.… The knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise.… It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy.
As noted in the previous chapter, the combination of unlimited secret campaign contributions and extremely expensive but devastatingly effective psychology-based mass electronic marketing is indeed posing a deadly threat to the continued vibrancy and good health of participatory democracy. If the current assault on the integrity of democracy is allowed to continue, Lippmann’s dark prophecy may yet come to pass; if elites can use money, power, and mass persuasion to control the policies of the United States, the average person may eventually come to a point where it seems, in Lippmann’s words, “no longer reasonable” to believe that America is a democracy.
In the market sphere, the amount of money spent to “manufacture wants” and stimulate increased consumption has continued to rise year by year. The appeal of Freudian-based mass marketing began to wane later in the twentieth century, but more recently the invention of more sophisticated techniques such as brain scans has reinvigorated the use of subconscious analysis in the field of neuromarketing. Mass marketing to promote increased consumption is now so pervasive that we almost consider it to be a normal part of our environment. The average person living in a city used to see an average of 2,000 commercial messages per day thirty-five years ago. According to The New York Times, the average city dweller now sees 5,000 commercial messages per day.
WASTE AND POLLUTION
Increased per capita consumption by a larger and larger global population is pressing against the limits of some resources. As both human population and the global economy grow in size, we are not only consuming more natural resources to make products, we are also producing larger and larger streams of waste. According to a recent report from the World Bank, the per capita production of garbage alone from urban residents in the world is now 2.6 pounds per person every day; and the total volume is projected to increase by 70 percent in a dozen years.
The cost of managing the garbage will almost double over the same period to $375 billion per year—with most of the increase in developing countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, each one percent increase in national income produces a .69 percent increase in municipal solid waste in developed countries.
And that’s just the garbage. When the waste associated with energy production, the making of chemicals, manufacturing, electronic goods, agricultural waste, and waste from the paper products industries are apportioned on a per capita basis among the seven billion people who consume the results of all these processes, the actual amount of waste produced each day is more than the body weight of all seven billion people.
There is a thriving black market in the illegal disposal of waste—particularly shipments from developed countries to poor countries. In the European Union, exports of plastic waste—almost 90 percent of it to China—increased by more than 250 percent in the last decade. The news media has focused on the enormous “garbage patch” in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—made up mostly of plastic—but much larger volumes are on land in millions of waste dumps.
Although there have been some laudable efforts by many companies and cities to increase the recycling of waste, the total volumes are overwhelming the current capacity for responsible disposal practices. For example, organic waste can be used to produce valuable methane, but due to inertia and an absence of leadership, so much organic waste is simply dumped in unimproved landfills that it decomposes to produce 4 percent of all the global warming pollution each year.
The growing volumes of e-waste (waste associated with electronic products) have been the focus of increasing attention because of the presence of highly toxic materials in the waste stream. And once again, even though recycling efforts are under way, the problem is still growing faster than the solution.
Toxic chemical and biological waste poses a particular challenge. During the 1970s and 1980s, I chaired and participated in a large number of congressional hearings on the dangers of toxic chemical waste. The tough laws that were enacted in the wake of those and other hearings have since been severely weakened by chemical industry lobbying of the U.S. Congress and executive branch. A recent U.S. study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified traces of 212 chemical wastes in the average American, including pesticides, arsenic, cadmium, and flame retardants.
Flame retardants? Their presence in the tissues of Americans has an interesting backstory that provides another example of the imbalance of power in U.S. decision making and the dominance of corporate interests over the public interest. An exhaustive examination by the Chicago Tribune in 2012 demonstrated in detail how the cigarette industry corruptly influenced policymakers to legally compel the addition of toxic flame retardants to the foam inside most furniture in order to save lives that were being lost in thousands of fires started each year by smokers who fall asleep and drop their lit cigarettes on a couch or chair.
A far more logical and less dangerous solution—one that had been proposed since the early part of the twentieth century—would have been to require the cigarette manufacturers to remove the chemicals they routinely add to cigarettes to keep them burning even when they are not being puffed. But the tobacco industry did not want to be blamed for the fires, and they worried that any inconvenience for smokers might hurt sales. So they came up with a corrupt scheme to buy enough influence to require the addition of dangerous chemicals to most all furniture instead.
When the companies manufacturing the flame retardant chemicals began to understand how they benefited from this ruse, they joined in providing more money to support the tobacco companies’ scheme. The same lobbyist represented state fire officials and the chemical manufacturers—and remained secretly on the payroll of the tobacco industry. Meanwhile, children continue to breathe in the dust from the decaying flame retardants and scientists continue to link their exposure with evidence of cancer, reproductive disorders, and damage to fetuses. And, by the way, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently found that the flame retardants added to the foam in the furniture didn’t work to cut down on house fires.
A few particularly dangerous chemicals, such as Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates (which are chemically similar to flame retardants), have been singled out for special attention by health experts, but the law enacted in 1976 to deal with such chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act, has never been truly implemented. An estimated 83,000 chemicals are listed in the inventory of substances that should be tested, but the Environmental Protection Agency has required testing for only 200 of them, and has restricted usage of only 5. The chemical manufacturers are allowed to withhold most of the medically relevant information about these chemicals from regulators, by claiming they are trade secrets.
THE SURGE IN the development of agricultural and industrial chemicals following World War II was based in significant part on leftover stockpiles of unused nerve gas and munitions. (The inventor of poison gas in World War I was also the inventor
of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.) These new kinds of chemical compounds introduced more toxic forms of water pollution than in the past. In prior periods, water pollution had been dominated by fecal contamination causing typhoid and cholera. Although the latter problems have been largely solved in developed countries, waterborne diseases are still among the leading causes of death in developing countries, especially in South Asia, Africa, and portions of the Middle East.
Indeed, pollution of rivers, streams, and groundwater aquifers is a serious problem contributing to water shortages in many areas of the world. The World Commission on Water for the Twenty-First Century, in which multiple United Nations agencies participate, reported in 1999 that “More than one-half of the world’s major rivers are being seriously depleted and polluted.” One of the reasons for this global tragedy is that neither depletion nor pollution is included in the world’s prevailing system for measuring national income and productivity—GDP. As economist Herman Daly points out, “We do not subtract the cost of pollution as a bad, yet we add the value of pollution cleanup as a good. This is asymmetric accounting.” As a result, decisions to clean up the environment are routinely—and inaccurately—described as hurtful to prosperity. For example, in Guangzhou, China, the vice director of the city’s planning agency felt forced to defend a decision to limit automobile traffic as a means of reducing dangerous levels of air pollution by saying, “Of course from the government’s point of view, we give up some growth, but to achieve better health for all citizens, it’s worth it.”
Recently, an investigation by The New York Times collected hundreds of thousands of state and federal records of water pollution under the Freedom of Information Act that showed that approximately one out of every ten Americans has been exposed to chemical waste or other health threats in their drinking water.
