Pioneers of an Awakening Culture
An interview with Duane Elgin by Sarah van Gelder, Editor, in
Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Summer/Spring 1996, Seattle, WA.
SARAH: How did we get to the point where buying and possessing things has become so important to us? What need is it fulfilling in our lives?
DUANE: Since World War II, we’ve seen the most massive experiment that’s ever been undertaken in programming the psyche of a civilization. And it has worked. The advertising culture has succeeded in creating identity consumption — a sense that our meaning in life depends upon the significance of what we consume.
A retail analyst, Victor Lebow, who promoted consumption as necessary to our economy in the post-war period, was very clear about this. He said “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 and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
I think people are having a very tough time separating their sense of spiritual identity from their consumer identity. And, there’s a conscious blending of the two by advertisers to make it seem as though our spiritual or soulful significance is manifest in our consumption.
SARAH: Could you say more about the effects that this reprogramming of our psyche is having on us as individuals and on our culture?
DUANE: The effects are so pervasive that we don’t see them.… Read the rest