Adbusters (The Media Foundation) is a global network of artists, activists, writers, educators and pranksters who want to ‘advance the new social activist movement of the information age’. The magazine has always fascinated me for their dedicated alternative design counter-culture supporters and their equally passionate critics who believe the ads which Adbusters claim to be subverting through artistic modification often end up doing quite the opposite. Their anti-consumerist ‘anti-ad’ campaigns such as the Blackspot shoe campaign and Turn-off TV week are a reaction to the increase in branding and materialism in our western society.

Over the last two thousand years we have made extraordinary increases in wealth, food supply, scientific knowledge, consumer goods, life expectancy and economic opportunity. Yet we, as a western society are extremely discontented and desiring more, to the point that families will work long hours for possessions that they have little or no time in which to indulge. There has been a decrease in actual deprivation accompanied by an increased ’sense’ of deprivation.

In Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton, De Botton suggests that it is the act of trying to create an egalitarian society which is driving personal anxiety which is manifest in consumerism and ultimately forging a deeper gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

It follows that the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy. In so far as the great political and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to psychological anguish even as they vastly improved the material lot of mankind, it is because of an extraordinary new ideal around which they were founded; a practical belief in the innate equality of all humans and in the unlimited power of anyone to achieve anything.

Not being very educated in the ways of governance, I was surprised to see a link made between democracy and consumerism.

One of the first thinkers to dwell on this connection was Alexis de Tocqueville. In his book Democracy in America (1835) he observed:

In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures.

A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.

It is possible to conceive of men arrived at a degree of freedom that should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete equality of position, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of God, will forever escape the laws of man. However democratic, then, the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of the community will always find out several points about him which overlook his own position; and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. When inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.

It is the first time that I have had to consider the idea that equality has it’s trade offs.