Parsing Out Dystopia: Hottest Years, Death by Marketing

The 2020 United Nations Human Development Report states that humanity is at "an unprecedented moment" in terms of the damage we are doing to the planet.  Although much of our recent attention has been focused on politics and the pandemic, the biggest issue confronting the human race at this time is global warming.  Indeed, one recent study states that we will "blow past" our best climate goals in the next few decades.  

Global warming is bad enough, but when you combine it with accelerating biodiversity loss, seemingly insatiable human consumption, and relentless population growth we could have a recipe for "the collapse of civilization as we know it."  That is the conclusion a team of scientists reached earlier this month.  

Among them is Stanford University's Paul R. Ehrlich, a particularly gloomy guy that has said sensational stuff like this forever.  Way back in 1968, Dr. Ehrlich and his wife authored The Population Bomb where he predicted mass famine and other consequences due to overpopulation of the Earth would transpire before 1990.  

Almost nothing in the book actually came to pass.  While the Earth's population continued to grow exponentially, the rate of famine and mass starvation went down, not up, in the proceeding decades.  Ehrlich was widely seen as an alarmist    and, (at the ripe old-age of 88) he still sounds that way to me.  So, I take this sort of "collapse of civilization" stuff with a proverbial grain of salt.  

While Ehrlich is probably wrong again about the severity of what is about to happen to humanity on the planet, we do have plenty to worry us.  Beyond our tortured politics, culture wars, and the pandemic, we have the rapid destruction of biodiversity directly due to human development which, in turn, is due to the ever-growing number of humans. This is the epitome of the Anthropocene. 

2020 tied 2016 for the hottest year ever recorded.  That makes Ehrlich's crazy "chicken little" imitation seem a bit more legit.  But I'm thinking this is going to be more of a strange and sad unfolding rather than an obvious "collapse."  I think my little patch of 10 acres is going to see hotter and drier weather over the next 30 years.  I'm thinking if I live long enough I will see my property in decline.  Maybe it has already started. 

Human consumption is driving the destruction of the planet at an unprecedented rate.  There are many factors to consider when you look at the modern human consumer fetish.  But one of the most fundamental is marketing.  I successfully worked in marketing for different companies during most of my career.  I know how marketing works and what it does.

Marketing is the most devastating force on this planet because the natural consequence of marketing is consumerism.  People did not used to be considered consumers but, thanks to marketing, now they are.  They see themselves that way.  They define who they are by what they buy.  Shopping is no longer a necessity.  It is a leisure activity.    

Marketing has changed the entire planet and no one much even notices how insidious it is.  A fantastic article in Salon reads, in part: "The roots of consumer offer the first hints of trouble. It traces back to the Latin consumere, meaning to destroy, devour, waste, or squander. From there, it's only a slight leap to today's definition: 'a person who uses up a commodity; a purchaser of goods or services,' according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

"In 2013, the British writer Owen Hatherley wrote that English had become a "peculiarly capitalist" language. That same year, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used Google Ngram — a tool that catalogues words and phrases in millions of books — to see how the language had changed over time. They found that the last two centuries had brought a remarkable increase in the use of words related to acquisition, like get, self, and choose. Meanwhile, people were using community-focused words like give less often.

"This reflects a long history of regarding humans as homo economicus, rational beings in pursuit of their own selfish needs. Nineteenth-century thinkers like John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons sought to simplify the complex behavior of people into what one critic called the 'dollar-hunting animal.'" 

Consumer culture was born out of the leisure time that came about by shorter working hours for laborers.  In our ignorance, we felt that endless consumer desire would equate to "progress."  Leading, via the power of marketing, to the almost complete objectification of human Being.  

From the previous link: "The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, 'people recognize themselves in their commodities.' Marcuse’s critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be 'a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with.'"

I don't think any such restoration will happen.  I do not think the commodification will end.  In fact, it is far worse than Marcuse could ever have imagined.  We are now drowning in "hyper-consumerism" which is basically the engine that actually drives our warming of the Earth. 

Marketing is more powerful now than ever before.  Using neuroscience, today's marketers are beginning to not only attract consumer behavior but to hold it prisoner by taking more control over the human brain.  The results of marketing and its use of neuroscience to control consumer behavior, the results of such human objectification, occurring without anyone particularly bothering to point out how harmful all this is, goes beyond buying things, producing things to be bought, and devastating the planet with our apparent "wealth" and consumption in the process.  

It creates marketing cults that result in us no longer seeing the world as it really is.  Instead, the world has become hyper-commodified and happiness is your next car or home or video game platform.  This resulting "cognitive dissonance" is the cornerstone of a world that is growing ever hotter year after year. 

I mentioned previously how, for the first time in history, the sheer weight of consumer products and human construction along with the resulting waste of consumer culture now outweighs the natural biomass of the Earth.  The amount of plastic dumped into our oceans will triple in the next 20 years.  This is the surest sign that consumerism is just getting started and marketing will continue to relentlessly drive it onward at an accelerated pace.

I'm sure some innovation will come along or some consumer behavior might change at some point in the future.  This is what happened the last time Ehrlich shouted "fire!"  When humans are really pressed for survival they discover new things that help them survive.  Or, at least, that's been the story of evolution so far.  Crisis breeds innovation in humans.  It is what we do - create crises and innovate.  The current trajectory is not inevitable.  If humans are causing all this harm to themselves and the planet then humans can also take steps to mitigate the harm.  

But, despite all our crisis innovation, our record on global change of human habits is not a positive one.  Our species has always been a destructive one.  We have already wiped out 60% of all animal life on the planet since 1970.   We Beings have never before faced the challenge changing our collective habits in the Anthropocene.  So far, I'm not impressed. 

The habit of consumerism, controlled by marketing, will be a tough one to rein-in.  We have become so immersed in what we buy.  We don't know who we are if we are not buying something.  Which is why the UN report on our "unprecedented" times is so troubling.  The globe is going to warm beyond anything known for hundreds of thousands of years.  The fire is our insatiable desire for convenience and consumption.

Maybe this time Ehrlich will be right.  If so, such a collapse might be just what we need to break the phenomenal, unquestioned hold marketing has on us all.  But if Ehrlich is wrong again (things are bad but not apocalyptic) I don't see any way to stop this Karma of convenience and consumption.  

At a certain point in the next few decades, the heat will get too hot, the winds too strong, the rain too heavy, the cold biting too far south for people to let it continue.  I see that Omega Point coming.  When I am old I will be witness to its beginning.  The only trouble is, people will suddenly realize that they cannot stop any of it.  It is too late to stop any of it.  We screwed ourselves.

And that will be an existentially shattering experience for many people.  That will be when they realize this is the Anthropocene, we are as gods and have the future of Earth in our hands.  Then we will save what we can.  Most of it will never come back.  And we will learn to live with it in our brave new world as a new humanity.