Futurehype: The Genesis of Greed

Compliments of Stefan Morrell @ coolvibe.com

During this winter of their discontent, the "Occupy" movement might do well to consider the genesis of the myth that progress was preordained and inexhaustible.  While that may be so, total surrender to the myth made us vulnerable to futurehype, the subtext of life.

 

Prophecy's classical roots have been evident in every age and in every culture since before the Exodus.  A most resistant line of thought, the practise has shaped the outlook of every major society and belief system.  Prophecy has been as constant as humanity itself, ingrained in the way all civilizations think and act. In the East as well as in the West, prophecy  has influenced the way cultures have viewed themselves, their prospects and their attitudes toward other kinds of human experience.   A series of Darwinian adaptations have enabled the  prophetic heritage to be adjusted to new cultures, each with its distinct social structures and beliefs. From a mythological to a religious and then from a secular to a post-modern motif, mainstream followers of the prophetic tradition have adapted their ancient  liturgy to new challenges and changing horizons.  Each time,  the practise  has assumed added influence, as  early empiricists followed ancient philosophic pathways in the development of their own schools of thought. 

Since the middle of the 20th century, with the advent of mass communication techniques, prophecy  has expanded its reach and penetration of post-modern societies.  In this latest transition, its potential to influence human interaction has also been magnified.  The influence of prophecy as a theme in postwar mass communications has nowhere been greater than in North America, where journalism,advertising and the entertainment media have saturated the public sub-consciousness with visions of the future.  These commercial visions have been economic manifestos for the world’s leading capitalist economy.  By definition, they have been uniformly optimistic and uplifting.  They have inspired individuals to great achievement and motivated North American society to reach the pinnacle of world economic ascension.

 America’s modern mythology of progress through technological  achievement  and material reward has been conceived in the mass media as a series of word-pictures and burnished  images of home and hearth, of entertainment and relaxation, of family,  of companionship and of material comfort.    For the past 60 years, life in America has been mostly about  trying to close the gap between one’s personal circumstances and images of the progress ideal.   In the typical depiction of this ideal, figures in each frame are slightly out-of-focus, portraying an objective that is just far enough out of reach to require constant effort for attainment.   There are  no harsh outlines to jar our senses or to draw us back to the present.  The ideal has been articulated in terms of what life will yield just over the horizon, around the next corner, or in the next suburban pasture.  Architects of the late 20th Century experience  manipulated these images to emphasize the lustre of this ideal.  They conjugated the tenses of America’s greatest screenplay in a manner designed to ensure that attentions were always fixed on the not-too-distant future.  This meant that people would not be satisfied with the conditions of the present, but always striving for some incomplete concept of prosperity in the future.  It guaranteed that people would never be satisfied with what they had.   Never content, they would always be reaching for a future goal, perennially demanding more, and in so doing, creating the markets that made the economy thrive.                 

This constant striving for Utopia  has help produced great commercial empires and the skyscrapers required to accommodate their legions.  As the popular science and technology journals once envisioned, some of these monuments to progress have been connected by subterranean malls and elevated walkways.  In every city in  America, steel and glass structures reflect the prideful self-images of nations on the move.  Cantilevered  thoroughfares and communications towers define the proud skylines of cities all across the continent.  Where two-lane blacktop once ambled between cities and towns, massive transportation and utility corridors now tie them together.   Airliners capable of carrying the population of middle-American subdivisions shuttle back and forth among the cities.    A few population centers have even approached the dimensions that postwar urban planners imagined for the megalopolis -- a metropolitan cluster that on the Eastern Seaboard unites Boston, New York and Washington into one continuous marketplace.  The progress ideal has created enough material wealth to encircle every city and town with a ring of suburban activity.  These incubators have raised generations both to create the demand for consumables and to produce them.

 A dependency on consumption and growth has been programmed into the collective psyche in the pursuit of the progress ideal.   In the postwar economic boom period, investors could fret over their stock selections.  People were anxious about occasional recessionary phases of the economic cycle.  But even though the Great Depression had been a difficult chapter in the annals of most families, few people seriously thought that there would be another cataclysmic slump during their lifetimes.  Even fewer acted in a way that would protect them if it did.   Instead, they cheerfully acquired all the material benefits that fulfilled the vision of the progress ideal, described by the media and social commentators as the American Dream.  Hand-in-hand  with their belief in the economic potential of the future, Canadians and Americans both acquired an unshakable faith in technology.   A majority of subjects in a 1952 U.S. national Gallup survey said they expected life to get better in the future.  Nearly half of the respondents to a Gallup poll two years earlier thought the number of working hours would be cut down to 30 hours a week.  Testifying to the power of wishful thinking, 88 per cent believed that a cure for cancer would be found by the end of the millenium.  Sixty-three per cent thought trains and planes would be run by atomic power in the same time frame.  Paradoxically, only 15 per cent thought rockets would be able to reach the moon in the same period, indicating the fallibility of the general public in matters of technological prophecy.   

  

Expectations of personal reward were constant sub-themes in the American dreamscape.  No stronger   urges stirred the collective will of a people since humanity’s sights were raised from the level of agrarian subsistence.  Wartime production capacity unleashed on the peacetime marketplace a flood of new goods that were claimed at the turnstiles in unprecedented quantities by a populace for whom acquisition of consumer goods became an end in itself instead of a welcome diversion from the main purposes in life.  Luxuries became necessities for the majority of wage-earners and their families.