"Consider the average Cro-Magnon of thirty thousand years ago. She is a healthy thirty-year-old mother of three, living in a close-knit clan of family and friends. She works only twenty hours a week gathering organic fruits and vegetables and flirting with guys who will give her free-range meat. She spends most of her day gossiping with friends, breast-feeding her newest baby, and watching her kids play with their cousins. Most evenings she enjoys story-telling, grooming, dancing, drumming, and singing with people she knows, likes, and trusts. Although she is only averagely intelligent, attractive, and interesting, most her clan mates are too, so they get along just fine. Her boyfriend is also on average, but they often have great sex, since males have evolved wonderful new forms of foreplay: conversation, humor, creativity, and kindness. (About once a month, she hooks up secretly with her enigmatic lover, Serge, who has eleven confirmed Neanderthal kills, but whose touch is like warm rain on Alpine flowers.) Every morning she wakes gently to the sun rising over the six thousand acres of verdant French Riviera coast that her clan holds. It rejuvenates her. Since the mortality rate is very low after infancy, she can look forward to another forty years of life, during which she will grow ever more valued as a woman of wisdom and status.
Now consider the average American worker in the twenty-first-century. She is a single thirty-year-old cashier, who drives a Ford Focus and lives in Rochester. She is averagely intelligent (IQ 100), having gotten Cs in a few classes before dropping out of the local community college. She now has this job in retail, working forty hours a week at the Piercing Pagoda in EastView Mall, fifty miles from her parents and siblings. She is just averagely attractive and interesting, so she has a few friends, but no steady boyfriend. She has to take Ortho Tri-Cyclen pills to avoid getting pregnant from her tipsy sexual encounters with strangers who rarely return her phone calls. Her emotional stability is only average, and because Rochester is dark all winter, she takes Prozac to avoid suicidal despair. Every evening she watches TV alone. Every night she fantasizes about being loved by Johnny Depp and being friends with Gwen Stefani. Every morning she awakens to the alarm clock next to the fake Chinese rubber plant in her six-hundred-square-foot apartment. It wears her out. Thanks to modern medicine, she can look forward to another forty-five years of life, during which she will become ever less valued as an obsolete health-care burden. At least she has an iPod.
By envisioning our current lives through our ancestors' eyes, we can see more clearly what we have given up, and what we have gained, from developing this thing called 'civilization', which nowadays means consumerist capitalism. We can also better distinguish what is historically accidental, cultural arbitrary, or politically oppressive." (S. 6 f.)
Ich hoffe, dass die Leserinnen und Leser die beiden ersten Absätze s o f o r t als Persiflage oder Parodie erkennen.
Der Autor schreibt kurz nach dieser Parodie:
"The notion of returning to an idealized paradise of simple, gentle, small-group living has been advocated by diverse visionaries throughout history: Buddha, Laozi, Epicurus, Thoreau, Engels, Gandhi, Margaret Mead, and the Unabomber. Often these visionaries attract followers, who form religions, political movements, or whole cultures: Taoists, Shakers, Luddites, Marxists, anarchists, hippies, and Emo kids. Even mainstream 'bohemians' support sustainability, voluntary simplicity, intentional living, organic farming, and corporate social responsibilty, and try to smuggle some aspects of eco-communo-primitivism into their gated communities, insofar as local zoning permits them." (S. 9 f.)
Auf derselben Seite betont der Autor: "I would not want to live without civilization's key inventions - trade, currency, literacy, medicine, books, bicycles, films, duct tapes, shipping containers, and computers. Unlike many malcontents, I consider the three best inventions of all time to be money, markets, and media. Each has radically increased the social and material benefits of peaceful human cooperation."
In Millers Sicht gibt es zwei falsche Theorien oder Modelle des Consumerism:
1. "The Wrong Conservative Model":
human nature + free markets = consumerist capitalism
2. "The Wrong Radical Model":
the blank slate + oppressive institutions + invidious ideologies = consumerist capitalism
Miller schlägt das "Sensible Model" vor:
"human instincts for trying unconsciously to display certain desirable personal traits + current social norms for displaying those mental traits through certain kinds of credentials, jobs, goods, and services + current technological abilities and constraints + certain social institutions and ideologies + historical accidents and cultural inertia = early twenty-first-century consumerist capitalism" (S. 9)
Das erste Modell wird - in Millers Sicht - vertreten von manchen Sozialdarwinisten, Ökonomen der Österreichischen Schule (Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Ökonomen der Chicago School (George Stigler, Milton Friedman und Gary S. Becker), darwinistischen Libertären, Globalisierungsanhängern, Management-Gurus und Marketingfachleuten, das zweite Modell von Marxisten, (romantischen) Anarchisten, Hippies, Utopisten, New-Age-Sentimentalisten, Gender-Feministen, Kulturanthropologen, Soziologen, Postmodernisten und Anti-Globalisierungsaktivisten.
Obwohl er Märkte sehr zu schätzen weiß, ist er keineswegs davon überzeugt, dass a l l e s , was dort angeboten wird, auch sein Geld wert ist. Dazu zählt er u. a. "marine phytoplankton, the ultimate nutrogenomic, supercharged with high-vibration crystal scalar energy healing frequencies", das zum Pfundpreis von $1525 beim Internethändler ascendedhealth gekauft werden kann. (S. 2)
Die Idee, die dem Buch zugrundeliegt, besteht darin, dass Personen, durch das, was sie kaufen und konsumieren, anderen mitteilen (und oft auch mitteilen wollen), welche Eigenschaften sie haben. (Eine Idee übrigens, die auf Charles Darwins Buch
The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex (Penguin Classics) zurückgeht und die in Thorstein Veblens Buch
The Theory of the Leisure Class (Dover Thrift Editions) unter dem Namen "conspicuous consumption" weitergeführt wurde.) Konsum ist ein Signalement. Männer mit viel Geld behängen sich selbst mit teuren Anzügen und fahren teure Autos, um Frauen für sich zu gewinnen, die darauf Wert legen, mit einem reichen Mann liiert zu sein und dies wiederum durch teure Kleidung und teuren Schmuck signalisieren zu können.
Aber auch Leute mit weniger Geld signalisieren durch ihre Art des Konsums: Wer z. B. anspruchsvolle Bücher oder CDs mit anspruchsvoller Musik besitzt, zeigt damit, wie klug, geschmackvoll und gebildet er ist.
In den USA gibt es Bumper Stickers, die Auskunft über die Fahrerin/den Fahrer eines Autos geben sollen:
"If it fits on a bumper sticker, it's not philosophy",
"Mommy says I'm special",
"Eschew Obfuscation",
"TV is gooder than books",
Sofort ist klar, wen man vor oder hinter sich hat.
Anhängern von Buddha, Laotse, Epikur, Thoreau, Marx, Engels, Gandhi, Margret Mead, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse etc. bescheinigt Miller - völlig respektlos - "eco-communo-primitivism".
Aber Anhänger einer Weltanschauung durch Argumente und Diskussionen von ihrem Glauben abbringen zu wollen, ist in Millers Sicht in aller Regel kein Erfolg beschieden:
"political arguments are usually a waste of time. Trying to convince someone to switch from Green to Libertarian [oder umgekehrt; HWB] on the basis of rational arguments and empirical evidence is as futile as trying to change someone's inherited personality type by these means. Likewise, regardless of abstract political principles, anxious introverts won't favor legalizing Ecstacy, and chaste wifes won't favor legalizing prostitution." (S. 251)
Hier das Inhaltsverzeichnis dieses sehr gehaltvollen, sehr intelligenten und sehr gut geschriebenen Buches:
1. Darwin Goes to the Mall
2. The Genius of Marketing
3. Why Marketing is Central to Culture
4. This Is Your Brain on Money
5. The Fundamental Consumerist Delusion
6. Flaunting Fitness
7. Conspicuous Waste, Precision and Reputation
8. Self-Branding Bodies, Self-Marketing Minds
9. The Central Six
10. Traits That Consumers Flaunt and Marketers Ignore
11. General Intelligence
12. Openness
13. Conscientiousness
14. Agreeableness
15. The Centrifugal Soul
16. The Will to Display
17. Legalizing Freedom
Exercises for the Reader
Further Reading and Viewing
Ein Buch, in dem etliche der hier vorgestellten Ideen schon vorkommen, ist Millers
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (dt. Übersetzung:
Die sexuelle Evolution. Partnerwahl und die Entstehung des Geistes).
