Possessed

by Bruce Hood

  We encourage our children to share because that is the right thing to do, but they also develop their own sense of responsibility. During their second year, infants start to become aware of when they have done wrong and experience negative emotions related to their transgressions. It is not clear whether this is a consequence of being told off or being punished, but most children become increasingly concerned about doing wrong. They develop a guilty conscience.

  Guilt is a negative emotion that motivates our behaviour. When we give to the poor, are we really being kind? To what extent is a motive to feel better – or less worse – truly altruistic rather than self-interest? When Abraham Lincoln explained, ‘When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion’, he was stating the common-sense view of morality, which is why we fail to understand others who seem to be cruel. We ask ‘How could you?’ or ‘Have you no shame?’ We may take the moral high ground, but, then, are we any better? Over our childhood, the rules and expectations of society are encoded into our emotional systems, creating everything from the warm glow of giving to the ruminations of guilt in our minds that torment us.

  By internalizing the opinions of others, we become intrinsically motivated. We do things because it feels right, which is why we are suspicious of others who have ulterior motives or who are extrinsically motivated. This is why paying people for their kindness backfires. Take blood donation again. We do this without expectation of reward. In his book The Gift Relationship, comparing blood services in the US and the UK, the sociologist Richard Titmuss concluded that paying blood donors (as happens in the US) was not only dangerous, because it incentivized the wrong individuals and created dubious practices and safety concerns, but that if the practice was introduced in the UK it would remove people’s intrinsic motivation to express altruism, and erode the communal efforts that are the bedrock of the National Health Service.45 To test his claims, Swedish researchers carried out a study where adults were asked to donate blood voluntarily, or received the equivalent of $7 in payment, or could donate this payment to a charity. In line with Titmuss’s prediction, blood donations dropped significantly when donors were offered payment, but not if the money could be donated to a charity.46 This phenomenon, known as ‘crowding out’, sullies the good intentions derived from helping others because it removes the intrinsic value we get, which is why rewarding people financially for acts that are supposed to be morally motivated is considered sordid. When blood donors and non-blood donors were tested with the charitable Dictator Game described above, in which additional financial donations made no difference to the final amount received by the charity, blood donors still gave more relative to non-blood donors for the sheer warm glow they experienced.47

  Where do these good and bad feelings come from? Not from us, but from everyone else. Our pride comes from basking in the imagined praise of the group. Our indignation and rage explode when we feel we have been cheated by others. This is why socialization is so powerful, so ubiquitous everywhere you look. To feel good, we care about what others think. As we develop from young children dependent on the approval of our parents, we turn into adolescents obsessed with the opinions of our peers and, from then on, we lead adult lives seeking the validation of others and spreading the very same values that shaped our lives. Those values include how we acquire stuff and what we do with it when we have it.

  ADIOS HOMO ECONOMICUS

  There is little evidence that Homo Economicus was ever a plausible account for human behaviour as there are many occasions where we do not maximize our self-interest. Although considered one of the first proponents of Homo Economicus, Adam Smith was also well aware that humans often acted out of kindness, when he wrote on the origins of morality:

  How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner … The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.48

  In other words, all of us can recognize the suffering of the less fortunate, and there is something about human nature which makes us want to help. Of course, we can become immune to the suffering of others through familiarity or fatigue, but when we are stirred to act that compassion is often a reflection of our own good fortune. When we see another individual suffering, we put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how bad it would be if we were them. This view, expressed hundreds of years ago, is supported by today’s neuroscience, which shows that our brains emulate and mirror the plight of others such that we can literally feel some component of their suffering which registers in regions associated with pain.49 Under this light, attempts to alleviate another’s suffering that we witness through acts of charity help to reduce our own discomfort. In this sense, charity is not selfless altruism but rather self-interest.

  The competitive instinct should make humans all the more selfish in times of need when resources are low because the consequences of failure are more catastrophic, and yet adversity seems to bring out the best in people. If we work together on a common problem, then we naturally distribute our resources in difficult times. Facing up to a common threat as a group seems to be the solution, rather than as deindividuated bystanders who are more likely to act out of self-interest. Maybe this is why armed conflict seems to generate so many acts of altruism. War is never to be condoned on any grounds, but one can understand why events that threaten the group generate a sense of collective responsibility. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have reached a point yet where the greatest threat to humanity – climate change – is perceived to be imminent enough for all nations to begin working together. It is entirely understandable why developing nations think it is only fair that they get a larger share of the pie because there are rich industrialized nations who have benefitted from the exploitation of natural resources for centuries. It is only fair that each society has the opportunity for each of its members to live in peace and comfort. The trouble is that enough is never enough. In the next chapter we turn to the central question of Possessed: why do we want more than we need?

  5

  Possessions, Wealth and Happiness

  CLIMBING THE LADDER OF SUCCESS

  ‘The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world … The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers.’

  Adam Smith1

  In 2010, when Bhisham Singh Yadav, a New Delhi wheat farmer, spent over $8,000 to fly his son just two miles to his wedding by helicopter, it generated so much attention that the story made the pages of the New York Times, 7,300 miles away.2 Bhisham, one of India’s so-called nouveau riche farmers, who had been born into poverty, was now benefitting from the country’s economic boom and appeared to be spending money recklessly. He had just sold three acres of his farm for $109,000 and wanted to put on a lavish wedding for his son. Even without such windfalls, poor families around the world spend disproportionately large amounts of their income on luxuries when they could be buying necessities. The poorer these families are, the greater the percentage of their meagre incomes they spend on things they do not need.3 Why?

  Bhisham was being extravagant. He was not so rich that he could easily afford to spend a tenth of his windfall on a helicopter ride just to impress his wedding guests. He is not alone, however, as many use wealth to send ostentatious signals of importance – even those who should not need to succumb to vanity. When Jennifer Gates first met Donald Trump at a horse show gala he organized in Florida, she was surprised when suddenly he departed, only to return
twenty minutes later by helicopter. Her father, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, concluded that Trump must have been driven away from the event so that he could make a grand return entrance.4 Whether you’re an Indian farmer or an American billionaire, as Adam Smith noted, it is just as important to be seen to be wealthy as it is to be wealthy. We like to show off, and one way we do that is through our wealth.

  We have always had stuff, but we seem to have an unquenchable thirst for more. This is clear from the exponential rise in household consumerism. In his book on the excesses of ownership, Stuffocation,5 James Wallman informs us that the critical flashover point – the time it takes for a domestic fire to reach a temperature that causes house contents to spontaneously combust – used to be around twenty-eight minutes thirty years ago, but has shortened to just three or four minutes today because of the amount of household possessions we now typically accumulate. Yet the passion for accumulating household goods has a long tradition. Just take a look at this picture of a nineteenth-century Victorian parlour room in a country estate close to where I live in Somerset, England.

  Victorian parlour room of Tyntesfield House, North Somerset (Image: author)

  How many different items can you identify? There are carpets, tables, chairs, stools, couches, cabinets, desks, tablecloths, cushions, coverings, mirrors, photographs, paintings, drawings, books, book-cases, candles, candleholders, fireplaces, fireguards, lamps, switches, a hand-bell, a letter opener, plates, bowls, vases, plant holders, jars, statuettes, ornaments, boxes of various sizes and all manner of knick-knacks. I have studied this image and counted over a hundred different items in this one room alone. Each time I look again, I spot something new. Some are exotic items from the far away continents of Asia and the Americas. The room is resplendent with mahogany, ivory and silks that are not native to the British Isles. It is a snapshot of the British Empire at the height of its power and ownership of foreign lands.

  Although this parlour room was in the home of wealthy people, such cluttered rooms were considered the aspirational norm for many middle-class families across the country at the time. This level of wealth contrasted sharply with the abject poverty and the workhouses that Dickens wrote about so vividly in his various tales of social injustice such as Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit and A Christmas Carol. The photograph is also a testament to the industrial revolution. Many of the items were mass-produced in domestic factories. During the nineteenth century, no other country could compete with Great Britain in terms of industrial output. The industrial revolution that had begun with the invention of steam engines and mechanization in the eighteenth century marked the beginning of modernization in the Western world. Before the industrial revolution, most British people lived in the country. They may not have been landowners, but they were relatively self-sufficient, leading simple lives. However, as smallholders grazing their herds on the commons, this meant they were also vulnerable to the vagaries of the seasons, so life was hard and unpredictable. With the promise of regular wages, the country population flooded into the cities to become workers in the new factories. As the cities grew, so did the desire to own.

  THE ESTEEM MACHINE

  Historians have traditionally connected the rise of consumerism to the industrial revolution and the birth of cheap, mass production. Yet people have always wanted to own more stuff, and especially things that were new and difficult to get hold of from foreign lands. In his exhaustive account of consumerism over the last five hundred years, Empire of Things,6 the historian Frank Trentmann argues that consumerism pre-dates the industrial revolution. Concerns over consumption, a term that had previously meant the using up of resources, had been around since antiquity. The Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote of the immaterial world, warned of the dangers for society in pursuing material goals, and these concerns over ownership have been echoed across the centuries by most religions and various political thinkers, including Hobbes, Rousseau and Marx. Their fears were directed at not only the immoral folly of relentless ownership and social inequality, but also the economic consequences of spending money on foreign imports.

  According to Trentmann, it was not the industrial revolution but rather increased trading that fuelled the rise in consumerism over the last half millennium. The opening of new trade routes and the growth of imperialism provided opportunities for consumers to buy more stuff. As trade expanded, most states enacted ‘sumptuary laws’ to prohibit the purchase of goods from abroad. The rationale was that any wealth spent on foreign goods was not being spent on domestic produce – a concern that still resonates today, with many countries introducing global trade restrictions as a form of protectionism. However, there were also social reasons for sumptuary laws. Imported goods were typically more expensive and so became status symbols of the elite. Sumptuary laws were enacted to prevent commoners being mistaken as gentry. In England at one point, commoners were forbidden from wearing silk, eating red meat or having more than a certain number of guests at their weddings. By the time the industrial revolution arrived in the eighteenth century, almost all sumptuary laws had disappeared. What the industrial revolution did was simply feed an insatiable appetite for ownership that was already well-established. There was no need to persuade the general public to want more things in life even if they did not need them: it seems to be a basic desire.

  Wealthy people had always been capable of purchasing, but the industrial revolution created a new class of consumers who also wanted to own as much as possible. Prior to the eighteenth century, products were largely made by hand and were costly in terms of the number of labour hours that went into making them. For example, before automation in the textile industry, an individual working with a spinning wheel could only produce one spindle of thread at a time. When the Spinning Jenny was invented in England in 1764, and then later powered by a waterwheel, it could spin a hundred reels at a time. Mechanization and the invention of steam engines to drive the machinery not only sped up the process but also reduced the number of worker hours required.

  Production costs plummeted and output escalated. In her historical analysis of the rise of consumerism,7 the Australian engineer Sharon Beder points out that while the US population increased three-fold between 1860 and 1920, manufacturing output increased twelve- to fourteen-fold, which created a substantial problem of over-production. Across the industrialized West, the same picture emerged. Falling production costs meant that fewer labour hours were required, but rather than shortening the working week, business leaders decided to raise wages in order to increase the buying power of households to sustain the demand for goods.

  During the boom years of 1910–29 in the US, salaries increased by 40 per cent. Workers were spending more on products and money was pouring into stocks and shares, which created an unsustainable prosperity bubble based on market speculation. This would eventually burst in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, triggering the Great Depression and the subsequent world recession that would last for another ten years. After the Second World War and the years of austerity, consumption continued to rise as workers sought higher salaries rather than shorter working hours. The standard of living became defined by what people could buy.

  Increasing numbers of women entered the workforce as provision for childcare increased during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of prosperity during the 1950s and 60s, when ownership triumphed over job satisfaction as workers opted for higher salaries to spend on more consumables.8 Previously, workers had been encouraged by what they could make; now they were incentivized by what they could own. In the 1970s and 80s, Western politics fuelled this desire to own more. Leaders such Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan encouraged ordinary citizens to take control of their lives rather than rely on others. In 1914, only one in ten homes were privately owned in the UK. One hundred years later, two-thirds of homes were owned.9 Private ownership replaced public housing and public services as societies shifted towards increased personal independence.

  In the West, we witnessed the rise of
the ‘Greed is good’ ‘yuppies’ of the 1980s, as personified by the character of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s iconic depiction of corporate corruption in the film Wall Street (1987). The political policies of the day actively encouraged consumption and, just like in the lead-up to the Great Depression, history repeated itself with widespread speculation and the subsequent financial crisis of 2008. The US subprime mortgage crisis that began a year earlier was a direct consequence of an inflated housing bubble; ordinary people got swept up in the rising tide of house prices and the financiers were all too happy to profit from the commissions they were earning from lending money. Rather than renting, people wanted to own their homes because ownership, they were told, was a mark of success. People borrowed more so that they could buy more, but when the banks called in the loans, the financial system crashed. Each boom–bust economic cycle has been fuelled by our human obsession to own more and more stuff that we don’t really need.

  THE PEACOCK’S TALE

  The rapid rise of consumerism enabled by industrialization was not without its critics. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen observed that silver spoons and corsets were markers of elite social position. His critique of the excesses of consumerism introduced the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe the willingness of people to buy more expensive goods over cheaper, yet functionally equivalent goods. As he wrote, ‘The motive is emulation – the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves.’10 In other words, consumers spend money on luxuries to show how much more affluent they are in comparison to others around them. Why do people do this? The reason is rooted in evolutionary biology.