ELITE CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION 1

Running head: ELITE AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Elite and Conspicuous Consumption.

David "Toby" Meyers

American Popular Culture

University of Phoenix

July 19, 2009

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Elite and Conspicuous Consumption.

Popular American culture is dominated by elite culture and conspicuous consumption

which creates social dysfunction and destabilizes the economy. Popular American culture is

basically how different groups of people communicate their interests socially, in the majority, in

America. Culture is literally how people identify themselves through the way they express

themselves. In America, with, it being a capitalist country, this usually means purchasing

something to show your interest; people identify themselves with purchases to assert their social

rank. Interest and worth is often cliché’, as it often defines conspicuous consumption, in as much

as it is defined by what you purchased and how much it cost. The upper twelve percent of the

tax base, who do no labor, make most of the decisions about our consumables and media, as this

is the leisure class, the class of excess.

“Personal culture is defined by things I create or things that others create that I find pleasing.

This could be said by anyone; however, my culture is not defined by the media or by my

interest in social values, I am a social deviant. I do not watch TV. I play video games,

read comic books and spend lots of money at the movie theater. I hosted a radio show on

Berkley Liberation Radio last year during April called “How to win the Class War with

Toby Nixon.” I have been known to go out and follow cops around with video cameras,

as weird as that may seem. (Copwatch, 2008) I also go out to the Rainbow Gathering

every year and get one with nature, my fellow man and abstract consensus based social

order. (Hawk, 2008) I wear non-descript clothes from Goodwill, steel toed logging boots

to blank black cap on top of my head. My father often wore a black baseball cap like

mine with his jump wings, black t-shirt with khaki shorts and black shoes. If you saw him

standing next to me you would understand why I cannot say my look is original. Not only

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should people have the right to free expression, I believe that it is cheaper to express

yourself instead of wearing an Abercrombie and Fitch or Chanel lack of expression. I

watch people go into the stores and pay exorbitant prices for new clothes that frankly

would do better as a tag on a bathroom wall. I do not understand the obsession with rich

people and their habits. Exemplified by this obsessive behavior of going out and buying

cloth with some autistic screen printers name on it for more than most people make in a

week here in America? I value personal responsibility, the necessity of the individual, to

be in control of his world and not the other way around; instead of taking direction from

questionable sources do what logic would have you do, be more proactive. Do not trust

the world to go the way you want it to, change it yourself.” (Meyers, 2008)

Conspicuous consumption is when one essentially purchases things to prove their status.

Habits and customs in modern life have solidified atavistic cultural survivals in that the

institution of the Leisure Class arose during a predatory stage of barbarism or feudalism, in

conjunction with the institution of property rights and concepts. Our class competition is

verisimilitude of the feudal lords and monarchy of Europe's age old caste system. A form of

narcissism spurned by the current culture whose leisure time is spent being feed media by a small

class of executive elites. “Entrance to this class is by pecuniary fitness, which is exhibited by

conspicuously wasteful consumption, setting standards according to canons of taste determined

by wealth. This class, by force of mutual interest, instinct, by precept and proscriptive example,

not only perpetuates the existing maladjustment of institutions, but even favors a reversion to a

somewhat more archaic scheme of life” (Oxford Reference Online, 1995). Images of elevated

social class by non-celebrities dominate the current media, TV. i.e. My Sweet Sixteen (M.T.V.,

2008) which is about this totally spoiled little brat’s 16th birthday. She got a Lexus a couple of

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days before her party and pitched like this fit of rotten, spoiled and I am a little rich girl,

everything has to be the way I want it. ‘I do not have to work for it, so I am just going to cry

until it is exactly the way I want it.’ Which is teaching little girls to cry until you get what you

want. Does anyone besides me feel like this the wrong message to send to children? That you do

not have to work for what you get. As well as the ‘help’ are not really entitled to anything but to

get the breadcrums from the table; as the dancers had to literally wait on her and put up with her

whiny, ‘I am so much better than you, because I have more money than you’ attitude. “Sick,

Sick, Sick,” (Queens of the Stone Age, 2007)!

American culture seems very healthy and diverse when you look at the plethora of media

outlets and individual freedom that seems to be normative. It is not however heaven. There is no

American Pie, no White Picket Fence or Big Rock Candy Mountain, at least for the majority of

us. Conspicuous consumption is advertised and marketed so that sales of products in the media

outlet or partner can benefit. This is not healthy economic process. Most television programs are

geared to show people living in the lap of luxury, even if they are having financial troubles. This

is to advertise conspicuous consumption. Advertisers and marketers have ultimate control over a

hefty majority of our information intake; by funding the media the elite corporate culture has

complete artistic control; there are but a few mega corporations that own a majority of the media

outlets. News programs and informational programs being the most closely censored and bias

oriented. Often these programs are highly attuned to the needs of elite often grafting their

opinion to the bias of the program by getting written reports straight from marketers or corporate

agent funding such program, to be followed explicitly.

Elite social culture overwhelms popular American culture. American Pie, Big Rock

Candy Mountain and the White Picket Fence are all social myths; however you can walk right

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down the street and notice that there is someone living there that is not in those previously

mentioned cultural motifs, the corporate person. The corporate person protects the elite class

from retribution from the lower class. As corporations are not owned by individuals of all

demographics evenly and there is a sharp turn toward the twelve percent of the tax base that own

the majority of the property in the U.S. and the world, who have stakes in the major corporations.

You can in some places see the direct link between the excesses of wealth and the down ward

economic spiral of our decreasing dollar value, for when the minority own the majority of

property, the majority pays for the lavish lifestyles of the rich and famous. You have played

monopoly before; going around the board purchasing properties in hopes that others would land

on your owned properties and pay you rent according to the value of the property. The most

distinguishing features of the difference in real estate price are the lavish nature of the elites who

developed the property. In real life, here in San Francisco individuals pay outrageously for places

with expensive names, just like the tee-shirt in the store that has someone’s brand name on it.

The property is not bigger, does not have more intrinsic value; it is purely a behavior that gets

less for more money, because this income is in turn, is spent on perpetually more expensive low

quality materials and that, is a cycle of destructive consumption. Paying more for less devalues

the dollar. I do not care what the economists say. Scraps from the table of one of these elite

households could feed any one of millions of starving villages around the world. Then you have

those people of meager means using credit and good looks to provide a fake image of elite social

posterity. In a sense, they have to; which is essentially the product of the elites programming the

public, to sell their lifestyle. Which is also destructive to the economy with the results of just

such in our foreground these days with aggressive lending agents selling houses to those with the

inability to pay the exorbitant monthly payment? All of these things are connected to the media’s

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display and provocation of conspicuous consumption. In summary: Through relentless marketing

and lying to consumers and the public to sell products, funding biased news programs,

consumers, as we are called now, instead of slave, peasant or serf, the elite sell us their lifestyle

to pay for their own.

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References:

Adbusters Media Foundation. (2008, December 22). Adbusters Magazine.

Retrieved December 22, 2008, from Adbusters Magazine:

http://www.adbusters.org.

Copwatch. (2008). Policing the Police.

Retrieved December 18, 2008,

from Copwatch.com: http://copwatch.com/AAAindex.html.

Hawk, S. (2008). Rainbow Family of Living Light Unofficial Home Page.

Retrieved December 18, 2008, from Welcome Home:

http://www.starsrainbowrideboard.org/welcomehome_mirror/rainbow.

Mencken, H. L. (1919 ). Professor Veblen. Prejudices, pp. 59-83.

Meyers, D. (1993, october 27). Toby Nixon's Pagan Power.

Retrieved October 12, 2003, from Toby Nixon's Pagan Power:

http://geocities.com/tobynixon.

M.T.V. (Director). (2008). My Sweet Sixteen [Motion Picture]

Oxford Reference Online. (1995). The Oxford Companion to American Literature.

Retrieved December 18, 2008, from Oxford Reference Online:

http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t123.e4738

Oxford University Press. Apollo Group.

Queens of the Stone Age. (2007, May 21). Sick, Sick, Sick.

Retrieved December 22, 2008,

from Queens of the Stone Age: http://qotsa.com/player/default.aspx?mid=310.

Veblen, T. (1899). Theory of the Leisure Class. Chicago: University of Chicago.