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Read the article. Three paragraphs have been removed. Insert them from the paragraphs (A-C) following the text.






Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure - Thorstein Veblen

 

January sales, or perhaps the avid shoppers rummaging among them, offer an arresting spectacle of consumerism at its nakedest. Sociological orthodoxy says that consumerism is oppression; skilful marketing people have manipulated us into a state of passive victimhood, endlessly and aimlessly consuming ever-increasing amounts at the behest of an advertising industry which creates false desires in us by making us believe that to purchase an object is to purchase paradise. Studies of consumerism and what it involves - marketing, brand names, fashion, shopping, packaging, rubbish, pollution, social rivalry, the throw-away ethos and the commodification of value - therefore make mortifying reading, not least for those just home from the high street.

 

1.  

 

But the evidence in support of this orthodoxy is equivocal. Quite different data suggest that consumers are smart, and that shopping is a profound source of meaning in the modern world. The orthodoxy seems to imply that if only advertisers would leave us alone, we would all begin reading Wittgenstein and listening to Mahler. But we would not. We want Things; we want Stuff; we want to buy and to own. And as the laws of supply and demand suggest, it is the consumers who lead, while the producers and advertisers scamper after them, supplying the consolations and salvations (religious language springs naturally to mind) that brand names and the joys of ownership provide.

 

2.  

 

Logos and advertisements are the cultural emblems of our time, signposts that help us navigate our world and evaluate what we meet in it. Both the language and the images offer what religion once did - a common structure. But as a community bond it is, says Twitchell, more democratic and equitable. For consumers are not fools, not victims of dogmas taught by a priesthood. They are their own priests; they know what they want, and they are getting it.

 

3.  

 

The argument that consumption is not oppression - that consumers are happy, that consumption is satisfying and gives life meaning - is exhilaratingly robust. But it is hard to suppress the thought that, if happiness is what matters, you could achieve the same degree of it more swiftly and economically by putting heroin in the water supply. And it leaves out of account an insight so familiar that it has long been the very cliché of cliché s: that of all the things worth having in life, such as kindness, wisdom, and the human affections, none is on offer in the January sales.

 

A Perhaps, therefore, consumers' love of consuming is not so contemptible. There is a theory, amusingly and cogently offered by James Twitchell of Columbia University, that consuming is the passion and the creativity of contemporary life. Through the possession of Things, he says, we define ourselves, interpret our society, and give our lives coherence. We do not wish to drive a car, but a Ferrari; we do not wish to drink champagne, but Veuve Cliquot; we do not wish to wear a suit, but an Armani suit. Owning them gives us meaning. The language of products and services is the shared language of our community.

B Consider the logic of brand names. Why do people buy and wear expensive, recognisable brands? Because it gives them - it really does give them - a claim to social place, prestige, confidence, purpose. That is the key to consumerism: ownership of precisely these intangibles is what purchase of their tangible vehicles buys.

 

C The orthodoxy tells us that marketing executives turn us into anxious, docile creatures falsely made to believe that the way to find happiness is to buy stuff. A chorus of distinguished commentators, among them Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Vance Packard, Ralph Nader, and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, all condemn the waste, folly, false consciousness and victimhood of consumerist society, which they describe as a conspiracy to force us to labour so that we can purchase the crumbs of pleasure that the system lets fall from the tables of those whose unnecessary products we buy. And in the meantime we are engulfed in waste and pollution as we sit in the blue flicker of television advertisements, eating our unhealthy microwaved TV dinners.

 


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