September
6
CONSUMERBORG – 2
Is, then, resistance futile?
Walt Disney was a fierce advocate of the idea that the best means for controlling the masses was not through ideology, political machinations, or use of force, but through the capitalistic and creative use of entertainment. Disney was always concerned about the “long-term.” For this reason, he knew that his project required a way to influence generations to come. That meant starting with children. And that meant providing families with “wholesome” entertainment. There was precious little in Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s that could serve this function. Out of this desire, Disneyland was born and opened in the summer of 1955. From the beginning, Disney developed the idea of a three-dimensional immersive experience that would build on the attractions of Disney films. Since opening day, nearly one billion visitors have been entertained, the most successful venture of this type in history. Children of each succeeding generation want to go to Disneyland.[1]
These entertainment effects are now ubiquitous through the impact of film, Internet, television, smartphones, media in various forms, and all the other devices to which we have become tethered through a miasma of desire. This is the state envisioned by Walt Disney: “control through entertainment.” Beneath this seeming valorization of choice, we are witnessing and becoming ever more willing victims of the commodification of desire. A significant cost of this is the loss of connection to the interior and especially to the deeper purpose of dreams. This is crucial because, as I have argued many times, the dream is one source of experience that is fundamentally subversive to this enterprise of controlling the public mind.
For this reason, the dream has become an object of focus by the “unseen mechanism,” in a deliberate effort to bring the dream under the control of “the small number of persons” Bernays refers to. In contemporary parlance, this small number of persons is referred to as “the 1%” and identified as the very few who control the vast majority of wealth. It is well to keep in mind that the desire for wealth in itself is not what drives this mechanism; it is the desire for what such wealth makes possible: control and power.
Is, then, resistance futile?
One of the great 20th century philosophers, Theodore Adorno, focused his mind on what was “wrong” with what Bernays and Disney had engendered. He articulated the idea that what people did in their spare time was crucial to the preservation of democracy and freedom. This was the time to reflect and think and consider issues deeply, to expose oneself to values, to recruit the necessary energies to work against the “captured mind,” the consumerist mind, the mind captured by entertainment. It was out of his concern for what was happening that he described Walt Disney as the “most dangerous man in America. His insights remain bittersweet, not only because of their veracity but because they have fallen on a deaf and blind public.
Is, then, resistance futile?
One thing to notice is that becoming a Consumerborg is not something forced or coerced. Nearly everyone is participating in this process willfully, even joyfully. This is a significant triumph of Bernays’ and Disney’s legacy. Look at your tee shirts. You have become unpaid advertisers for some brand of whatever type. You have even paid to host such ads on your person. This is an incredible accomplishment of those “pulling the wires.” Most everyone is eager to participate and anticipating with desire the “next” thing to come along.
One might conclude there is no resistance at all.
No one will pay for a dream. I like this. The dream itself is not easily commodified. I like this as well. Sure, we can pay good money to others to seek out the meaning of the dream, but in this, the dream falls under the sway not only of money but what money is becoming. The increasing valorization of money should be clear to all. God may be dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but money is not. Money is alive and well and proliferating madly while concentrating intensely (that is how the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer).
Money has become the god. This god’s church is everywhere. This god’s parishioners include everyone. This god’s only commandment is “Thou shall want (desire); thou shall buy (pay up).” All else follows from this singularity of our condition.
Dreams, like stories, come freely and can be given freely. In this, there is a deep secret. To give freely to one another can be expressed in a singular word: community. Money does not make for community, but for exclusion, or a desperate desire for inclusion. But not community. Dreams and stories and their fictive purpose—that is the secret we need now because out of this secret may come what we need to save ourselves from what seems like an ever-increasing likelihood of a sad end.
Do not let yourselves be entertained to inaction. Tell a story. Write a poem and give it to a stranger. Ask the beggar on the street if she’s had a dream and give her one in return. Try it.
More on resistance through the dream in the next post.
[1] I was at the preview opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955. Me and my teenage friends, like a lot of other kids that day, entered the park by climbing over a fence that led us to the interior façade of “The Matterhorn” a decidedly unattractive structure of timbers and trash and rubble. That struck me in a very deep way, though at that time I had no particular conceptual understanding of what seeing the “false” interior of the mountain meant.
