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“The New Consumers”

Introduction

George Santayana famously warned that those who fail to learn the lessons of
history are doomed to repeat it, and in a very real sense this book came about in
the closing months of 2008, when I realized the global economic melt-down
brought into focus many of the problems we’ve faced in the past.

A friend suggested I might still have something to say again in light of the 2008-
2009 economic collapse, and the obvious dilemmas of an expanding industrial
society once again facing the limits to growth, so I decided to follow her advice
and come out of retirement to research and write this book.

Apart from my growing doubts about the future of our industrial society, and the
years of reading and watching disaster brewing, I began to realize Santayana’s
theory was true: we have failed to learn the lessons of history and we are once
again being doomed to repeat it.

I started my research by re-reading a series of articles I wrote for Marketing

magazine in the late 1970s. I called my articles “The New Consumers”, and in a
five-part series I examined the role of advertising and marketing in an age of
scarcity brought about by the limits to growth inherent in an ever-expanding
industrial society, but I ranged widely over a number of areas linking that to
everyday life.
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I also re-read my original copy of “The Limits To Growth”

by Donella and Dennis Meadows. I first met this couple when they invited me to
their home in Vermont in the spring of 1974 for a weekend research trip. I was
preparing a television series based on their subject and it was an intellectually
stimulating weekend. They kindly autographed a copy of their book for me and it
had a profound influence on my approach to the our industrial society.

Of necessity, my series was aimed at a narrow, specialized audience, but as I re-

read them I was struck by how little we have learned from the lessons of the last
thirty years. Our dominant social paradigm still prevails, in spite of thirty years of
doomsday books, articles, television documentaries and movies.

The word “paradigm” means literally “a model, pattern, or example”, but in the
context of a social paradigm it has deeper significance. In the social sciences there
are no paradigms, and all the relevant facts are open to a wide variety of
interpretations depending on the researcher’s bias or world view. For the purposes
of clarity I propose to refer to our current social and cultural system as a dominant
social paradigm. It is a method of production and distribution of capitalist origins,
which in turn has generated the belief that growth of any kind, in any section of
our culture is a social norm, and probably a good thing.

With that dominant social paradigm has come a technological pre-occupation with
efficiency, time, an economic value on everything as a standard measuring tool
(quality and quantity), the externalizing of many social costs, and an incredible rise
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in living standards in purely quantitative terms. This is obviously a gross over-
simplification of our society and culture, but I don’t want to get bogged down in
ideological definitions before we get started.

One of my concerns is that the paradoxes and anomalies now appearing in the
paradigm I describe may bring about a rather sudden social paradigm shift, which
may be too compressed for our society to cope with without serious social
consequences: read violence, civil strife and disorder.

I’m acutely aware that as I write this introduction, events are overtaking me as our
industrial society tries to cope with a world-wide economic collapse, and it’s
apparent there is a growing debate (again) over the feasibility of our culture to
sustain the steady rate of economic expansion which makes this dominant social
paradigm possible.

Who would have predicted, thirty years ago, that General Motors and Chrysler
would go bankrupt? That major banks and insurance giants such as AIG would be
all but nationalized in the U.S., that pre-eminent bastion of free enterprise and the
very epitome of capitalism. Who would have predicted that by the summer of
2008, oil would be at US$147 per barrel? Predicting the future is truly a mug’s
game and I have no crystal ball, but as I look back over a lifetime of participating
in the longest period of economic expansion in human history, I’m aware that
many warning signs were there. Many of us sounded the alarm in one way or

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another, but somehow we were persuaded our moment in the sun could be
extended indefinitely.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century it will finally dawn on most of us
that the party is over. The slow and painful process of de-industrialization will be
underway, hastened by dwindling non-renewable resources, world-wide conflicts
over land, water, food and over-population. This, coupled with the environmental
effects of global warming and climate change making the perfect storm an apt
cliche.

None of this will happen overnight in some cataclysmic burst of violence neatly
captured by CNN in prime time, but will proceed slowly over several decades as
the anomalies in our dominant social paradigm become impossible to resolve.
Global trade, with its fragile lines of transportation wrecked by $200+ barrel oil,
will give way to de-centralization. Our industrial society is built on the production
of goods and services using cheap and abundant resources, mostly fossil fuels, and
will be unrecognizable in another 30 years. The new consumers I write about will
be different too.

They will have much lower standard of living although their air and water might be
a trifle cleaner. They will look back on us as they read archival copies of
newspapers, magazines and television programs and ask: “What was wrong with
those people? Couldn’t they see what was happening? Why didn’t they do
something?”.
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Why indeed. Unfortunately there is little we can do individually. These are
collective problems requiring collective solutions, and our culture encourages only
individual solutions to collective problems. Before we can proceed to bring about
change we must first define the problems. We must first educate ourselves, as the
the enormously complex problems we face defy simplistic ideological slogans or
short-term political solutions. In an effort to help understand how we got here and
what we might do to get out of this mess, I will examine some major aspects of our
daily lives and try to suggest some collective solutions we might consider.

We don’t have the luxury of another thirty years to extend our moment in the sun.
Somehow, we must summon the will to voluntarily change our society by
collective action, or events will force us to change with disastrous consequences
for our descendants. Either course will be a long and painful journey, but for the
sake of those descendants, we must take that first step. I sometimes have grave
doubts we will take those steps in time, but I hope you prove me wrong.

John Fisher,
Uxbridge, Ontario
April, 2009