A Consumer by any other Name is still a Consumer

I recently watched the first part of the Century of the Self. RW libertarians seem to be victims of decades of brainwashing by commercial advertising, which has its roots in Freudian psychology, Edward Bernays, et al. What is funny is pushing these ideas of “Rational Self-interest” and hyper-individualism as some bizarre state of nature and by extension capitalist. But they use appeals to emotion and fear tactics to persuade people. Some of them openly disdain democracy itself as a form of collectivism. They recognize that people often organize and act in groups for social change rather than pursue their own “rational self-interest.” They have to devise ways of forcing people to become selfish and prevent collectivization of any kind. Their luminaries Friedman and Hayek recognized as much and found the authoritarian governments under Pinochet and Thatcher as instructive for “freeing markets” and preventing people from organizing and collectivizing. Yet when people do practice their own “rational self-interest” in denying RW libertarianism as a fantasy and right-wing libertarians as naive and delusional to a fault, they blame their skeptics for being duped into the “liberal conspiracy” and call them irrational and illogical, even though they just said that human beings by their very nature form markets because of “rational self-interest.” They have no idea that the only thing they truly stand for is more rampant consumerism and less direct action. In other words, they support more of the status quo, not some fantastical revolution. It was the same with Ayn Rand, another luminary. When justifying her reasoning for smoking, she nearly quoted verbatim the tobacco industry’s ads towards women and men. “Independent, free-thinking women always smoke Lucky Strikes!”

“ I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind–and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.” — Ayn Rand/Alissa Rosenbaum

Her books were basically a culmination of highly concentrated industry propaganda tying democracy, passive consumerism, unfettered industrialism and capitalism as natural, desirable, and inevitable in a “rational,” free society. This is what RW libertarians base their philosophy on industrial propaganda, consumerism, and commercials. Those are some of the reasons why they are so loopy and fail at organizing. It is reason enough to never take them seriously. For all their talk of individualism and “rational self-interest,” they have all the hallmarks collectively of an irrational cult obsessed with creating a mediocre world forever safe for buying and selling things in.