Mammon's False Promise

Cadbury Chocolate needed to make a profit to survive, and its owners enjoyed doing so. But profit played its role as one among many other values important to the family.

Today any profitable company valuing anything other than money enough to reduce its profit would be a prime target for a takeover by a company with no other values. Indeed, Cadbury was taken over by Kraft after it went public. First-generation firms like Starbucks or Tesla still often exemplify their founders' complex human values, but if they become joint stock corporations over time they will subordinate all other values to making money.

Fair Use

For corporations valuing only the bottom line, selling sexual fantasy is fine if it helps sell chocolate. In the Godiva ad, above, the sexual imagery and terminology says nothing about chocolate, but seeks to engage other desires and fears to make money. American society has increasingly shifted from one where values other than profit often influenced businesses to one where the only value is profit. Businesses with more complex values are penalized, as Cadbury was.

Creating consumers

Traditional peoples are not much attracted by consumerism. From Europe to Africa and other colonies, taxes payable only in money and levied against necessities forced people to engage in wage labor even as their access to other ways of making a living were eliminated. Government allied with business to remove those alternative opportunities.

As people become enmeshed within an ever more monetized economy, where money is needed for ever more necessities, they begin to identify success with what money can buy. Corporations are only too happy to oblige.

Businesses hire psychologists and advertising experts to better manipulate people, preying upon their hopes and fears to get them to buy their product. Of course this has always happened to some extent, but the degree of focus and sophistication today is unprecedented. Consider those two chocolate ads. I think the worst example is advertising directed at children.

Efforts to manipulate people into eternal debt through encouraging over spending are little better. Yes, children are often foolish and people can make stupid choices, but the context in which we act influences how many such choices are made, and the world of corporate manipulation seeks to shape that context to its advantage and our loss. It often succeeds.

Today we witness corporations undermining Thanksgiving as a family holiday because they have not been able to turn it into a profit center. No sooner did the Halloween decorations disappear than the Christmas ones began to appear. Large corporations engaged in consumer sales are often forcing their employees to work on Thanksgiving, seeking to convert it into the beginning of the Christmas season and nothing more. Target, perhaps the most soulless, first opened at 9pm on Thanksgiving in 2012, then 8pm on 2013, and 6pm last year. Other stores responded in kind. For the moment Target is stopping at 6pm, but only because enough people care about the holiday to reduce its profit.

Large corporations continually argue "the consumer" should never be subordinated to other values, including values most all human beings share. As we are seeing today with EXXON's ignoring its own scientists' reports on global warming while funding groups attacking other scientists, even future generations' well-being is of no concern. This behavior also characterized tobacco, DDT, and the current Volkswagen scandal. Always "the consumer" is held up as trumping addressing the harm done, and always "the consumer" is less than a genuine human being.

The world of the market immersed in thick human relationships and serving people who are consumers and citizens and community members has become the world of capitalism treating and manipulating people as only consumers.

Consumer society does not simply reflect our desire to have good things. It is a pathological parasite on that desire, a parasite characterized by companies manipulating our hopes and fears to magnify our belief that possessing one more of something or a bigger something will finally end a fear. I may feel powerless in the rest of my life, but I can exercise power over something I own. I may feel personally inadequate, but people will admire me because of what I own. Fears like these will never be fulfilled by consuming but acquiring and controlling something temporarily takes our minds off these fears.

Like King Midas, too many Americans believe having more gold, more to consume, is the end all and be all of life. In their foolishness they are sacrificing the well being of future generations, and even of their own children.

Corporations and banks are the holy places of Mammon, economists His high priests, and capitalism His sacred creed. As Midas discovered with his golden touch, worshiping this deity will destroy us.