by Bill Moyers
BENJAMIN BARBER
My four-year-old granddaughter Sara and I were watching television—PBS, naturally—when it was time for Word Girl, the animated superheroine (and fifth grader) who fights evil with the vocabulary of a budding acolyte of Will Shortz, the crossword genius. In this episode, Word Girl is up against the villainous Mr. Big, who floods the market with a new product called The Thing, which of course everyone in Preposterocity has to have because ... well, because it’s “The Thing” to have. No one knows or seems to care what it is or does, but the commercials are irresistible, and viewers are seduced into believing they can’t live without it. Enter Word Girl:
WORD GIRL: Everyone stop, you’re being tricked. The Thing doesn’t do anything.
FIRST PERSON: Yes, it does. It does so much stuff.
SECOND PERSON: The commercial says I needed one for my boat!
WORD GIRL: You don’t have a boat!
SECOND PERSON (TO HER MATE): Hon, we need a boat for our Thing.
WORD GIRL: You don’t need a Thing!
SECOND PERSON: But the commercial says ...!
Whoa! Time for political theorist Benjamin Barber, who in real life knows a thing (no pun intended) or two about the culture Word Girl is challenging. After 9/11, Barber’s book on the conflict between consumer capitalism and religious fundamentalism, Jihad vs. McWorld, rocketed onto the international bestseller list. He then scrutinized the global economy for Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. In it, Barber argues that modern capitalism is producing too many goods we don’t need and too few of those we do. In an age when “the needy are without income and the well-heeled are without needs,” he writes, a consumerist society can only be sustained by constantly rekindling childish tastes in grown-ups, creating “rejuveniles” with a permanent mentality of “Gimme!” and “I want it now!”
Not only is childhood perverted by this “ethos of infantilization,” but democracy is deprived of responsible grown-ups capable of functioning as mature citizens, generating, as Publishers Weekly noted, “a ‘civic schizophrenia’ where everybody wants service but nobody wants to serve.” Corporations determine our political choices, Barber writes, citing studies that babies as young as six months can form mental images of corporate logos that are then established as brand loyalty by the age of two. It’s a complex and controversial argument, but not one that would surprise Preposterocity’s Mr. Big. Benjamin Barber knows it well.
—Bill Moyers
You are blunt about it: Capitalism’s in trouble. Why?
Because things are flying off the shelves that we don’t want or need or even understand what they are, but we go on buying them. Because to stay in business capitalism needs us to buy things way beyond the scope of our needs and wants. That’s the bottom line. Capitalism is no longer manufacturing goods to meet real needs and human wants. It’s manufacturing needs to sell us all the goods it’s got to produce.
But on the Friday after Thanksgiving we go to the mall. “Black Friday”—the mall is packed with stuff you say we don’t need.
And do we need to shop at 4:00 A.M.? I keep looking for signs saying, “Please open the stores at 4:00 A.M. so I can go shopping at 4:00 A.M.” I don’t see any. That’s the stores’ idea. That’s the marketers’ idea. That’s the idea to create this hysteria about purchasing. About buying and selling.
But Ben, nobody is forcing them to do that. People are out there looking for bargains. You like a good bargain, don’t you?
I love a good bargain when it’s for something I need and something I want. But here’s the thing. We live in a world where there are real needs and real wants, and capitalism should be addressing those real needs and those real wants.
Example?
Give you a fine example. Here in the United States, the cola companies couldn’t sell enough cola. So they figured out how to persuade people to buy water from a bottle instead of getting it free from a tap. More than $10 billion a year in bottled water. In the third world there are literally billions without potable water, without drinkable, clean water. Now, why shouldn’t capitalism figure out how to clean the water out there and get people something they need and make a buck off it? Because that’s what capitalism does. It makes a profit off taking some chances and meeting real human needs. Instead it’s convincing Americans and Europeans that they shouldn’t drink pure, clean tap water but instead pay two bucks a bottle for it.
Third world people have no money. Why would a company go where people don’t have money and try to sell them something?
In capitalism you don’t expect a profit right away. You make an investment. You create jobs, you create products, you create productivity. That’s the way it works. That’s the way we in the West created our prosperity. But we don’t have the patience any longer to do it in the third world. We don’t want to bring them into the marketplace. We’d rather exploit a finished marketplace. But you’re right. Here’s the paradox: those with the dough don’t have any needs, those with the needs don’t have any dough. And so capitalism has to decide: needs or dough. And their decision has been to go for the dough, regardless of the needs.
The trouble is, we’re looking the wrong way. It’s not what’s wrong with American consumers, it’s what’s wrong with American capitalism, American advertisers, American marketers. It’s what I call push capitalism. It’s supply side. They’ve got to sell all this stuff, and they have to figure out how to get us to want it. So they take adults and they infantilize them. Dumb them down. They get us to want things. And then they start targeting children. Because it’s not enough just to sell to the adults. You’ve got to sell to that wonderful demographic—first it’s twelve-to-eighteen-year-olds, then it’s the ’tweens, the ten-to-twelve-year-olds, then it’s the toddlers.
Infantilize? There’s that word again.
What I mean is that part of being grown-up is getting ahold of yourself and saying, “I’ve got to be a gatekeeper for my kid. I want to live in a pluralistic world where, yes, I shop, but I also pray and play and do art and make love and do lots of different things. And shopping’s just one part of that.” As an adult, we know that. But if you live in a capitalist society that needs to sell us all the time, they’ve got to turn that prudent, thoughtful adult back into a child who says, “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want, I want, I want.” Just like the kid in the candy store.
But isn’t all of this part of what keeps the hamster running?
It is. But part of the problem here is that the capitalist companies have figured out that the best way to do their job is to privatize profit but socialize risk. The banks that have just screwed up so big, not one of them is going to go under because they’ll be bailed out by the feds. ’Cause the feds, the federal government, will say we can’t afford to let this gigantic multibillion-dollar bank go under. Now, the whole point of profit is to reward risk. But what we’ve done today is socialize risk. You and I, and all of your listeners out there, pay when companies like subprime market mortgage companies and the banks go bad. We pay for it.
The other day I heard a commercial by a big bank—a multinational bank—that said, in effect, “Okay, we’re coming into the season where you want a lot of things, and you don’t have any money. What do you do? You call us. Whatever you want, we’ll make it happen.”
Yes. And this is after the crisis and crash. This is not before. This is after.
So what’s at stake? What’s at stake in this for democracy?
There are two things at stake here. First of all, capitalism itself is at stake, because capitalism cannot stay indefinitely in business trying to manufacture needs for people in the middle class and the developed world who have most of what they need. It has to figure out how to address the real needs of people. And it’s not just in the third world. We have real needs here for alternative energy. And I would want to reward corporations that invest in alternative energy. Not just biofuels and so on, but that also look at geothermal, that look
at wind, that look at tidal. Tidal is an amazing new field where you use the motions of the tides. It’s expensive, difficult right now. But that’s what you get the profits for, by investing in that. So there are lots of things we can do. With global warming, sea levels at coastlines around this country are rising. We need housing that can withstand flooding. Big thing: you could make a lot of money figuring out how to build inexpensive housing that withstands hurricanes, withstands flooding. Very few people are doing it. That’s the way capitalism ought to be working.
So capitalism itself is in trouble. But, second of all, capitalism has put democracy at risk. Because capitalism has tried to persuade us that being a private consumer is enough, that a citizen is nothing more than a consumer. That voting means spreading your dollars around your private prejudices, your private preferences. Not reaching public judgments. Not finding common ground. Not making decisions about the social consequences of private judgments, but just making the private judgments. And letting consequences fall where they will.
We were in Vermont one Thanksgiving. In this little town there’s a town square, there’s a police station, there’s a fire station. There’s a city hall, a school just a block off the town square. There are the shops around the square. It reminded me of Marshall, Texas, where I grew up.
Any one of those towns is an exemplar of the variety and diversity of American life. Now compare that town to a mall. You walk through the mall, nothing there but shops. You could walk for miles and think that the whole world is constituted by retail shopping and nothing else.
But there are jobs there. People are working there. And people say, “Barber, Moyers, get with it. This is the twenty-first century, not the first half of the twentieth century.” The world has changed.
Yes, but there are jobs in the drugs industry. There are jobs in the penitentiaries. You know, you could say, “Gee, the prison expansions are good. More jobs for guards.” Sure, anything provides jobs. The question is, at what price? Where do we want the jobs to be? Do we want our jobs to be in education? Do we want our jobs to be in the arts? Do we want our jobs to be in general services? Do we want our jobs to be in health care? Or do we want our jobs to be in selling gadgets, selling salt/sugar laden food that makes half the country obese? Where do we want the jobs? And, again, that’s a social decision. The market puts the jobs wherever the marketers push them. What we need to do as citizens is say, “Where do we want the jobs to be? What kinds of jobs do we want our young people to have?”
So there’s a role for possible intervention?
Shhh, say that very quietly.
Wherever he is, Milton Friedman is whirling.
Well, wherever Milton Friedman is right now, he’s at the soul of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. And the reality is, here there is a powerful role for small “d” democratic parties, for citizens, for participatory institutions. They include our townships. They include our PTAs. They include our NGOs and our philanthropies. There’s a whole civil society that is a whole lot more than just the government, where we act not as private consumers or selfish individuals but as neighbors. We act as citizens. We act as friends to establish the social character of the world we live in. You know, as a consumer, everyone loves Walmart. So do I. Lots of goods, cheap prices. But it has social consequences that, as consumers, we don’t think about. We know it means low wages, it means low wages without pensions. It means wage earners who don’t have proper health care. But worse than that, it means the destruction of mom-and-pop stores. The destruction of local retail. The destruction of those very little shops that are at the heart of America’s villages and towns.
The free market economists say that’s creative destruction, the heart of capitalism.
But you know what? Democracy has a simple rule. The social conscience of citizens trumps the consumer. But with Milton Friedman’s help, we’ve inverted that. Now the consumer trumps the citizen. And we’re getting a society that manifests the trumping by the consumer of civics, which means a selfish, privatized, and ultimately corrupt society. Who really wants their own children to grow up in that society?
How is it—and this is not original to me—how is it that when politics permeates everything we call it totalitarianism, when religion permeates everything we call it theocracy, but when commerce pervades everything, we call it liberty?
Well, that is the central paradox of our times. As Americans, I would think we understand that, above all, democracy means pluralism. If everything’s religion, we rightly distrust it. If everything’s politics, even “good” politics, we rightly distrust it. But when everything’s marketing and everything’s retail and everything’s shopping, we somehow think that enhances our freedom. Well, it doesn’t. It has the same corrupting effect on the fundamental diversity and variety that are our lives, that make us human, that make us happy. And, in that sense, focusing on shopping and the fulfillment of private consumer desires actually undermines our happiness.
Many people will tell you choice is joy.
And they are right. But the question is, what kind of choice? You go to Los Angeles today, you can rent or buy two hundred different kinds of automobile. And then, in those automobiles, you can sit, no matter which one you’re in, for five hours not moving on the freeway system there. The one choice you don’t have is genuine, efficient, cheap, accessible, public transportation. There’s nothing as a consumer you can do to get it. Because the choice for public transportation is a social choice. A civic choice.
I can’t go out and buy a subway for my private use.
Exactly. You can’t do that. And no choice that’s available to you allows you to do that. So many of our choices today are trivial. We feel that we’re expanding and enhancing our choice, but the big choices—a green environment, a safe city for our kids, good education—simply are not available through private consumer choices. That’s the problem with vouchers for schools. You know, we think that with vouchers we can all find a good school. But if education itself is going under and is not supported as a social good, no amount of private choice is going to give any of our kids in public or private schools appropriate education.
We are now spending more than we are saving. We have become a true significant debtor nation. What does that mean in the long run?
It means a couple of things. And, by the way, this is a devastating economic fact. Here the economists will agree with me, a political scientist and a political theorist, it’s no good for a country to do that. A country that stops saving becomes a debtor nation in every way. That’s why we’re in hock to China and the others who own dollars. That’s why the dollar has collapsed abroad. But it also means that we are no longer in a position to create the forms of industry, capitalism, and social consciousness that come from saving. Saving is how we invest in the future. Saving means that we’re putting money aside, deferring our own gratification, to create a future that our children can be part of. When we spend it all on ourselves and then more than we have, we put ourselves and, more importantly, we put the future itself in hock. We’re really selling our kids and grandkids when we do that.
How do we encourage capitalism to do what it does best, to meet real human needs?
There are three things we can do. First of all we, as consumers, have to be tougher. We are the gatekeepers for our kids and our families. We have to take a stand. Again I ask anyone out there, “Who needs to go out at 2:00 A.M. to go shopping?” For God’s sake, wait till Monday afternoon. Second thing, capitalism has to begin to earn the profits to which it has a right by taking real risks on behalf of addressing real needs. There’s a company in Denmark that’s gotten very rich very fast making something called the LifeStraw. It’s a thing about nine inches long containing about nine filters that filter out all the contaminants and germs that you find in third world cesspool water. You can buy one of these for a couple bucks, and a woman in the third world and her family can drink through it for eighteen months, and it doesn’t matter what water they have
available. The LifeStraw cleanses that water. A little firm in Denmark that makes it is making out like a “capitalist bandit,” we’d say, but properly so. They’re being rewarded for taking a risk.
Inventing something that is needed. Folks working in alternative energy, some of them are also going to make real money. And that’s a good thing. That’s what they ought to be doing.
Creative capitalism and tough consumers. Third?
And, number three, we’ve got to retrieve our citizenship. A cliché perhaps but our toughest task. We can’t buy the line that government is our enemy and the market is our friend. We used to say government can do everything, the market can do nothing. That was a mistake. But now we seem to say the market can do everything and government can do nothing. But government is us. Government is our institutions. Government is how we make social and public choices working together to forge common ground. So, number three, toughest of all, we’ve got to retrieve our citizenship.
MARGARET FLOWERS
“Make me an offer I can’t refuse,” President Obama said when he talked about health care reform during his 2010 State of the Union address. “If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know ... I’m eager to see it.”
Dr. Margaret Flowers took him at his word. The very next day she was outside the White House with a letter urging the president to revive the idea of single-payer health care—Medicare for all. The Secret Service turned her away, but she didn’t give up. She followed President Obama to Baltimore, where he once again made his offer to hear ideas on health reform.