A New Cult of Consumption

Buy everything: sell your soul - the unspoken rules of ‘success’ and ‘lifestyle’ 
exposed.

The rules:

There are two fundamental principles in modern life: ‘Success is money’ and 
‘Lifestyle is consumption’. To explain the connection: the more money you have; 
the more ‘successful’ you are. Money is the most important measure of the 
‘worth’ of an individual in contemporary culture. It defines what you are and 
how people see you. Added to this is the closely linked belief that the more you 
consume, the better your ‘lifestyle’; the higher your status and - supposedly - 
the happier you are as a person. These are the basic rules of our decaying 
civilisation: the Western world on the cusp of a new millennium. 

Power

These two principles have become so powerful, they have destroyed all other 
systems of evaluating the ‘worth’ of an individual. The pursuit of 
self-fulfilment, truth, personal intellectual or spiritual goals - even just 
your personality! - are no-longer deemed to be ‘satisfactory’ measures for 
estimating your value as a human being. Even up to the late seventies, a 
person’s social and individual worth was still measured though the ability to be 
a freethinking, independent, political and social being. This approach has now 
been overthrown.

Fear

The new ideology of consumption has achieved this conquest by employing two very 
old techniques. Used by religious movements for centuries, the threat of mortal 
fear and the promise of happiness - though this time it is not eternal happiness 
but worldly - have helped to install these new rules into the general 
consciousness. Basically, to have is to be happy: to have not is to be outcast. 
For the western world, consumption is the new social order, the new religion. It 
defines your place in the social hierarchy through indicating your public worth.

Slaves

This ideology has created a situation where the majority of individuals become 
so overwhelmed by the strength of these new social beliefs - and the absence of 
other viable and strong life ideologies - that they become slaves to these new 
rules. They fall victim to this new cult of consumption. A cult where a person’s 
defining characteristics depend entirely on their disposable income, number of 
consumer durables and the places where they shop and - in an urban environment - 
work.

This dogma is highly destructive to the individual victim and society at large.

The Victim

I have called this new ideology of consumption a ‘cult’. The reason for the 
employment of such a heavy term is that this new ideology mutates and transforms 
individuals. It infiltrates into every aspect of their lives and strips them of 
their individuality, beliefs, spirituality and dreams, leaving only shells or 
‘clones’ behind. These clones - as do most victims of religious cults - 
perpetuate the myth of the cult’s ideology within themselves. So, the two 
fundamental principles of money equals success and lifestyle equals consumption 
become the only reference points in their lives. As they consume the cult’s 
products and rules: the cult consumes them.

The lies

The problem starts when you consider that the cult’s principles are lies. Money 
and lifestyle do not lead to happiness and financial success does not adequately 
represent personal fulfilment. Essentially, the cult causes its victims to live 
in artificial realities where nothing else exists in real terms apart from money 
and lifestyle. 

The changes

So victims treat social, moral or political issues flippantly as they are not 
part of the climate of the cult. They effectively withdraw from these realms. 
They cast away any previously held ideas, opinions, morals and principles - the 
things that make a person unique - if they conflict with the rules of the cult. 
In essence, they withdraw from real life and withdraw from their individuality. 
Events, occurrences, consequences and mass held opinions go unquestioned. They 
virtually stop thinking for themselves because they are safely cocooned within 
their artificial realities. They affirm everything, saying things like ‘nothing 
is ever going to change’, ‘you have to accept the way things are’ and my 
personal favourite ‘you can’t beat the system’. 

So society consists of a large majority of people whom all have the same goals. 
They allow nothing to jeopardise their consumer objectives and they use up all 
their mental capacity in the pursuit of this elusive consumer happiness. 

Sounds like a Brave New World, doesn’t it? There are thousands of people living 
in little false utopias inside their head, all happy, consuming everything and 
not needing to be concerned about anything. The only price being their 
individuality, which comes under the term of ‘standardisation of the human 
product’- another Huxleyian label to describe the effect of an over-dominant 
consumerist culture.

Yet, this situation has very dangerous repercussions - apart from the blatantly 
obvious - in terms of its effect on social cohesion and the evolution of 
culture. It turns very dark . . .

Neurosis

Neurosis is the key word.

There are two major instances of this neurosis. 

The first is simply obsessive competitiveness towards other victims, that is, ‘I 
am higher in the social order than you because I wear these clothes or have this 
particular consumer durable’. Remember, fashion is a primary indicator of a 
victim’s place in the cult’s social order. It subconsciously shows other victims 
how quickly you can consume and how much disposable income you have, therefore 
stating how much you are ‘worth’ as a person - financially and spiritually. 

The second is the darker, more serious instance. It is the victim’s neurosis 
towards the stability of their little artificial realities, produced under the 
narcotic influence of the cult. 

You see, however intoxicated victims are with the cult of consumption, there is 
always that niggly feeling that it has not delivered its promises. Sometimes, 
they feel there is some sort of void in their lives or they do not feel truly 
happy. So, as they see no other ‘feasible’- read that as ‘easy and secure’ - 
path in life, they try to protect their false realities and ignore their state 
of mind.

They do this in three distinct ways.

Obsession

Primarily, a victim’s first reaction is to throw themselves deeper into the 
cult’s way of thinking. Under the impression that the more committed they are, 
the more the rewards of happiness and personal fulfilment will come; victims 
grow manic about consuming more and more. The consequences of this action evolve 
into an addiction to fashion, style and the supposed ‘cutting edge’. As a 
result, the inability to purchase a particular desirable object often creates 
feelings of high anxiety - or a flood of tears if the victim is female.

They also become obsessed with status and incomes, considering those lesser down 
the scale with pity and endowing those higher with a devoted and respectful 
gaze. Promotion becomes the highlight and happiness of their lives, functioning 
as a kind of reward for their devotion to the cult. 

Hedonism

Yet if the above technique does not have the desired effect, victims then turn 
to the pursuit of unadulterated hedonism. They try and prove to themselves that 
they are happy through constantly seeking diversional entertainment. The most 
evident manifestation of this is the phenomenon of ‘the weekend’. Younger 
victims direct their entire focus on two days - Friday and Saturday - when they 
spend their entire disposable income on drugs, drink and expensive clothing. 
Remember, the cult and its social forces only tolerate this phenomenon because 
it acts as a holiday, a weekly ‘happiness’ reward. 

However, the high consumption of alcohol and narcotics points to the need for a 
‘buffer’ that softens the sense of a void. It also allows victims to pretend 
that they live good, happy and successful lives. Apparently, they con themselves 
that to have a good time means that they have everything that they could want or 
desire. In this way, the above compares to the infamous ‘soma’ of Huxley’s Brave 
New World - the idea that drugs act as a pacifier for socially controlled lives. 
They prevent rebellion. 

It is obvious that all the things discussed above affect the evolution of 
culture. How can any evolution occur when large chunks of the population have no 
personality or any new ideas, just insisting on living an overtly hedonistic 
lifestyle? Society at large suffers because of this repression of individuality. 
It creates a state of stasis where the only movement forward is the push of mass 
marketing - again, a tool of the cult of consumption.

However it is another attitude, which runs concurrently with the above 
reactions, that dangerously jeopardises social cohesion.

Hatred

The presence of a void in victims’ lives provokes a third reaction. When the 
promises of the cult appear to be lies, they retaliate by desperately trying to 
pretend that the cult is the only possible ideology for contemporary life. So 
victims protect themselves by ignoring and rejecting any other cultural 
ideologies and attacking the people who express them. 

Victims hate none-victims: those who ‘think different’. 

It begins with victims treating any person with alternative ideas or new 
approaches - that appear to fight against the flow - as weird, insane or 
dangerous. Even if these people have previously been close friends or 
acquaintances, the victim will start to talk over their conversations, throw 
strange sarcastic looks towards them and eventually through feelings of inner 
discomfort, leave the room whenever that particular non-victim enters.

They start to distance themselves from these non-victims and refuse to associate 
with any of these people socially. Another telling sign is when a victim 
immediately labels anyone who has an alternative philosophy of life - or that 
notices the negative aspects of the cult - as a ‘communist’, ‘anarchist’, 
‘socialist’ or ‘hippie’ regardless of what their ideology may be. In this way, 
it becomes apparent that victims treat none-victims like heretics, posing a 
threat to the stability of the cult and the stability of the victim’s mental 
state.

It is at this point, with a culmination of all the above, where social cohesion 
falls apart and an ideological war will cunningly take hold.

Mass destruction

The fact is that the number of victims in the new cult of consumption 
drastically outweighs the free-thinking none-victims. The attitudes of hatred, 
fear and anxiety directed ‘en masse’ towards free-thinkers causes a split within 
the general social fabric, forcing free-thinkers to become exiles, dispossessed 
from society. 

Sick of being treated as ideological lepers, these exiles will react. Since they 
tend to be the more intelligent examples of the homo-sapien species, the result 
could possibly be an evolution - or revision - of the ideological framework 
supporting contemporary life.

On the other hand, free-thinkers could declare a state of ideological social 
war. Invisible and marginalised, they will fight against the cult of consumption 
by levelling their propaganda guns at the heads of ‘consumer clones’.

Whatever happens, it’s going to hurt . . . .

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