The consumer choice myth
There are many myths about our power as consumers. I want to focus on how we are supposed to have influence over products by consumer choice about which ones we buy. This is framed as positive: we can choose to improve the world buy buying products with certain properties and refusing ones that fail our standards. We might focus on climate change, animal welfare, child slavery, or the domestic economy, for instance.
What does this myth conceal? It slides swiftly over the way any purchase, any engagement with a service, any voting or review even, hands power to someone else — to a corporation or a political party or a movement. And in general, we have no control over how that power is used, and in general it is used in ways that are not in our interest. The most glaring examples are the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples. But it might be P&O.
The myth focuses on the product we are buying and its trajectory over time. The elision is the purpose of the corporations producing those products. Facebook needs to be useful to people but making FB useful to consumers is not the corporation’s mission.
We have a most terrifying example in how our purchase of oil and gas products from Russia are being used to fund a war. A war that might lead to our annihilation. This is still about consumer choice: we didn’t have to become dependent on Russian gas for power and for fertilisers. Any more than bankers were forced to take fees for laundering dirty Russian money in London.
To return to the myth, it should be no surprise that we are told we have agency and options in choosing who supplies our products and services. It suits people who want to exploit us and abuse our trust to have us believe we have some control. There are domestic energy products on the market that promise 100% of the energy delivered is from renewables. Despite this promise, the cost of these products has risen as steeply as any other product despite there being no change in the cost base. We are told that food marketed by food corporations is good for us: buying their products will allow them to invest further in adulterating and reducing the nutritional value of what we buy.
We have written previously of surveillance products created by Google and snapped up by police forces around the world which are obviously and grotesquely racist. I cannot give any money or information to Google without it being used to undermine the society I live in. Similarly with FB destroying electoral accountability. I refuse to have anything to do with FB but I am no expert on the ways in which these companies act directly counter to our interests on the basis that we are customers who can be monetised.
I suppose we are constantly being scammed and taken for fools. But this language doesn’t feel anything like strong enough for funding our own execution.1 We have less than zero control and protest may well exacerbate the risks.
Capitalism of the elite
The model for capitalism is how sugar was grown in Brazil. Land was appropriated and cleared of both indigenous people and vegetation. Slaves were imported who knew nothing of the country and so were not able to flee. Sugar cane, which was entirely foreign to the ecosystem was planted. The sugar was sold back in Europe where it undermined people’s health and was addictive. The enormous profits accrued to wealthy Europeans who knew nothing of what went on or its effects. The model was held in high esteem by all those powerful people who wanted money for nothing.
We are rehearsing the origins of this type of economic activity to make it clear that there is no point of purchase for people who want less bad outcomes. The outcomes have no bearing on how the model works: if things go wrong, like slaves running away, the model twists into greater harms. It is because we don’t accept that the myth of consumer choice is just PR that our assets can be turned against us the way they are.
We live at a time when the pigeons are coming home to roost. Now it is claimed that sugar is indispensable to our diet, that we can’t run society without energy from oil and gas, that high technology will engineer a solution to climate change, that economics trumps social necessities. The emperor’s clothes have never been so transparent but that leaves us with all the work still to do.
Means and ends of course. The food industry uses the same strategies as were successfully used by tobacco companies and oil companies. We are entitled to look at the means used and draw our own conclusions about where purchasing products is likely to take us.
What are we being sold and why?
We are being sold a prolonged proxy war with Russia. The CIA are heavily involved in Ukraine and have been for many years. We know that the CIA should have been closed down decades ago. Why is this being pursued now?
We are being sold electric cars. They are somehow going to affect the course of climate change. The narrative and the scale of action needed don’t add up. Why are electric cars being promoted?
We are being sold “plant-based” food. We know that existing ultra-processed food is making the majority of the population ill. We know that animal-based foods are the route to better health for most people. Why this investment in artificial food?
We are being sold mandatory vaccination against Covid. This is both unethical and illegal when the harms and risks have not been fully disclosed. The logic of the mandates in reducing transmission is not supported by data or indeed by research studies. Why this push to compulsory strategies?
The things we are being sold are not consumer propositions in the way the consumer myth would frame them. They cannot be engaged with as consumer choices. Or indeed as political choices because we are never going to have a democratic chance to change them.
When people get aerated about how businesses are there to turn a profit, the subtext is that the profit is almost never the real reason for doing something, never the strategic motivation. People would not get worked up if businesses were simply doing what they were there for, if profit was not a smokescreen for something you are not supposed to see.
Graeber and Wengrow
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow remark on how the eloquence of native Americans rankled with the European elite. Kandiaronk, for instance, said clearly and persuasively that he would not want to live in a society like that of France at the time. He showed how notions of property and of rank destroyed the quality of life that Americans enjoyed.
I think there is a parallel with Jeremy Corbyn who mobilised the vote and significant funds in small donations. He was pulled down because of the threat he posed to corporate manipulation of politics. We are not allowed to have that level of political control over our own lives, and of course that cannot be said, the myth has to be maintained that we can vote for our future in a meaningful way.
Today it has been announced that the government in the UK will be taken to the European Court of Human Rights for its failure to allow fair elections. But that is about Russian interference, not about the UK establishment.
There are two points here. One is that it is possible to embody in your person the possibilities that powerful people would like to exclude, partly by promoting the myths we are dismissing. The second is that these other possibilities are real, real enough to be threatening to those who want to exclude them. We don’t have to live in these destructive and oppressive systems. Indeed, that is the point of the Graeber book, to demonstrate that the alternatives have been viable many times through history.
It is hardly surprising that if you are determined to do one covert thing while averring that you are doing something else incompatible with that thing then life is going to get complicated. There is going to be misinformation and there is going to be fact checking and there is going to be fact checking that isn’t, in potentially infinite regress. Don’t blame people for being confused and for getting cynical.
Remember too David Bohm in Thought as a System. Even passionately well-meaning people can get into monstrous mistakes when their assumptions are mistaken. And the less well-meaning purveyors of misinformation and myths know how to exploit that. Discovering mistaken assumptions in ourselves and our colleagues is a deep and deeply social process requiring time and trust over months and years.
The Eisenhower panic
I was reminded the other day that the start of the public health mistakes that have destroyed population health essentially worldwide now with President Eisenhower’s heart attack while playing golf. That was 1955, the year of my birth.
There was a classic panic: how can we stop the great and the good (white) (US) men from having heart attacks? The search was on for a culprit and of course one was found, saturated fats. This was wrong then and is wrong now and never had decent evidence behind it, but a panic does not require evidence. Now perhaps the majority of people round the world think that saturated fats and red meat are bad for health. And the agenda is still being energetically pushed. After my entire life.
It was possible of course to learn the other lesson: panics are bad for everyone. The next panic on a similar scale was about climate change, also coming out of the US. There were two possibilities for modelling what was driving climate change: carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect and the nested water cycles that cool the planet. Since the latter is too complex to model well, the former was chosen to address the problem. Panic.
Interestingly the water cycle modelling is much closer to available individual and local social action. We can make a difference to climate cooling where we are and it can only contribute positively to wider and more effective cooling. Rather than blame cow farts for warming the planet we can use cows to demonstrate local cooling. We can cut through the web of lies and myths spun for us and build action that works. We can defuse the mindless panic set loose in society and literally ground our work and our beliefs. Walter Jehne calculates that carbon dioxide is 4% of the problem and the water cycle is the rest.
Work on the water cycle can be summarised as getting the water that falls on the land to be cycled back through the air and back onto the land again as many times as possible before it finally runs off. It is not hard to understand that this is both cooling and carbon capture through growth. It requires us to understand how plants create weather, and I find that salutary, to stop thinking that a drought or a flood is beyond our control. For instance, the heat domes on the West Coast of the US show that the Central Valley must become a wetland again, as it was prior to intensive agriculture.
Myths and panics
It should not surprise us that myths and panics are closely linked. When the bottom falls out of our world because a myth is shaken, panic is a likely result. And the manipulators or myths will use panics to maintain their control — the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn is a good case study. We cannot afford to panic: there are alternatives that are being hidden from us, and they are likely to be the socially sane responses that we need.
1 Turkeys voting for Christmas, as they say — or for the leopards-eating-people’s-faces party.
