Friday, August 3, 2007

Substantial

Everyone has the shared misfortune of being surrounded by people that believe personality is something that can be acquired or collected through material goods; but do we understand the consequences and influences these people have on our daily lives?

You know the type of person I'm referring to: they're the ones that feel their record collections, toy collections, television size, or clothing brand make them either more interesting or (even worse) more significant than other people. It's a notion that by means of acquisition we become the people we want to be and create for ourselves an image that is significant and outstanding if only for the reason that the brands we subscribe to have tag lines that tell us as much.

This is a dangerous breed of person. The attitude they take from their willingness to be branded and subscribe to things that demand brand recognition is one of false tension. They believe that all things outside of their brand of livelihood or lifestyle is inferior and therefore deserves less recognition, less respect, and less consideration. These are the same kinds of people that believe their military, their party, their faith and their media are all the strongest (morally, physically, intellectually) just because those things tell them what they want to hear.

They are dangerous because they make their method of interpersonal relationship one of brand association and that leads to exclusion, enmity, and inevitably assault by some measure or another. A good example of brand association and its consequences can be found in the American political system, in which belonging to one party makes you less of an American, and thus less of a person, than you would be belonging in the other party (this is a good example of that mentality). This attack on ideology inevitably leads to great rifts between people - polarizaton and division that manifests itself in physical and mental forms, with people moving to different states and communities to avoid people of different ideological brands, refusing to eat at restaurants frequented by those people, etc.

They're dangerous because their obsession with acquisition and branding betrays a darker tendency that is rooted in basic childishness but inevitably sprouts into belligerence. Their desperation to acquire things leads to a school ground atmosphere of "It's mine and you can't have it" that appears in everything personal, political, and business related; and while that mentality is unattractive and discouraged in children, it's fucking terrifying in the hands of, say, a president. If you want to believe there's no connection between this mentality - specifically the desire to acquire as much as humanly possible - and the American propensity towards war for profit, substandard health care under the banner of "privatized is better", inaction on global warming, and the continuously growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest in this country, then be my guest to make that argument but don't expect me to swallow it.

Only when we seek to acquire the experience and consequences of our choices will we lay off this insensible desire to acquire who we are through material gain. Americans believe in personality via acquisition because they want personality to be as easy as a trip to the store: they want to pay for who they want to be and in that, the world the way they want it, without the consequences (or, dare I say, taxes) of what it takes to really be what they're buying.

All of this, of course, ties neatly into what has become the driving intent of the present administration and the reason they get away with so much: the ownership society. While polls may show President Bush at all-time low approval ratings, most Americans couldn't bear the thought of him being impeached or removed from office, nor do you see a convincing demand for American withdrawal from Iraq. The reason for that is that George W. Bush is good at selling the idea that all you have to do to be American is buy more and sit blithely by while others fight on the "real" front of this war.

Therein lies the tragedy of our time: consumer escapism. I am loathe to see the day America wakes up and realizes that before we can buy our way into what we want to be we will have to pay for who we are.

And what's more: we will have to pay for what we've done.