Latouche on the Spiritual Dangers of Advertising

Serge Latouche identifies three ingredients necessary to a consumer-driven economy: advertising, credit, and products with built-in or planned obsolescence.  He alerts us to the evil of avarice that is baked into so much advertising:

Advertising makes us want what we do not have and despise what we already have. It creates and re-creates the dissatisfaction and tension of frustrated desire.

A survey of big American companies found that 90 percent of their CEO’s admitted that it would be impossible to sell a new product without an advertising campaign; 85 percent confessed that advertising “often” persuaded people to buy things they did not need; and 51 percent admitted that advertising persuaded people to buy things that they did not really want.  

Advertising is now the “second biggest budget in the world” — the first being weapons for war.  Might advertising itself constitute a kind of war—a war against our souls because it promotes avarice?

Latouche cites American market analyst Victor Lebow, who as early as 1955 warned of the spiritual dangers of making a drug of consumerism. Said Lebow:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. . . . We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

 Warns Latouche:

If growth automatically generated well-being, we would now be living in paradise. We are in fact going down the road to hell.

Latouche endorses the “slow food” movements, the “slow city” movements, and the “new commune” movements of Italy that are springing up around Europe. He sees in them a “laboratory for critical analysis” of how to implement de-growth philosophy into practice.

Like David Korten, he endorses local economies and agriculture wherever possible, and notes that small and organic farming creates many good jobs. Indeed, statistics show that in France the appearance of supermarkets did away with 17 percent of bakers in France, 84 percent of grocers, and 43 percent of hardware dealers; five sustainable jobs in local shops were lost for every one created in mass market stores.  

Says Latouche, citing Ivan Illich: “The recipe lies in doing more, and doing better, with less.”  We can cut the depletion of natural resources by 30 percent by reducing “final” consumption by 50 percent and create an appropriate ecological footprint for our one planet and still “the improvement in our quality of life would be out of all proportion to the measures that are needed.”

Latouche addresses the “massive” failures of so-called “development” policies in developing countries which have “resulted in corruption, incoherence and structural adjustment plans that have turned poverty into misery.” Colonization, development, and globalization, he feels, have interrupted the organic economies of Southern cultures. He cites a Guatemalan peasant leader: “Leave the poor alone and stop talking to them about development.” 

Citations are from Serge LaTouche, Farewell to Growth.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times, pp. 241-244.

Banner Image: Political cartoon “Limite écologique” by Degrowth Movement organization Colectivo Desazkundea (Decrecimiento). The train of Capitalism hurtles toward the planet’s ecological limits while voices inside cry “Slower! You have to go slower!”…”Yes, but the US car (of the train) needs more soda, it’s on the menu”…”Uh … what if we just want to get off the train …?” On Flickr.

Queries for Contemplation

Is it your experience that growth generates well being?  If not, isn’t it time that we inform our economists and politicians about that?  How best to do that?

Recommended Reading

Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time

While Matthew Fox recognizes that Meister Eckhart has influenced thinkers throughout history, he also wants to introduce Eckhart to today’s activists addressing contemporary crises. Toward that end, Fox creates dialogues between Eckhart and Carl Jung, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Heschel, Black Elk, Karl Marx, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, Dorothee Soelle, David Korten, Anita Roddick, Lily Yeh, M.C. Richards, and many others.
“Matthew Fox is perhaps the greatest writer on Meister Eckhart that has ever existed. (He) has successfully bridged a gap between Eckhart as a shamanistic personality and Eckhart as a post-modern mentor to the Inter-faith movement, to reveal just how cosmic Eckhart really is, and how remarkably relevant to today’s religious crisis! ” — Steven Herrmann, Author of Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward

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