Near the beginning of Stone Story, a documentary that straddles Stone’s 70th and 71st years, he addresses the camera: “Close your eyes and pretend that the world does not contain poverty, racism, inequality, injustice,” he says. “If by living the way I do, is taking a step in that direction, then I’m going to go for it.”

If Stone’s story originally epitomized a kind of racial and class privilege—“Look at me, not conforming to middle-class expectations”—by 2016, its meaning has shifted, and his initial choice to eschew normalcy has given way to inescapable familial and economic consequences. Acutely aware of this, filmmaker Jean-André Fourestié centres the film not on Stone, but on the broader family dynamic—what the stone rolled over in its quest to gain no moss. While his ex-wife and daughters own homes in the U.S., where they visit, eat meals, and celebrate together, Stone rents, living paycheque to paycheque, working part-time as an overnight security guard at a soulless condo in the burbs. Stone’s communal lifestyle in Mile End may now have as much to do with economic necessity as a desire to live out hippie precepts.

While she reminisces about meeting—and dancing with— Janis Joplin at Woodstock, Stone’s eldest daughter Debbie seems the most torn when it comes to her father’s choices. She recounts a story on the bus where the group had run out of food and money. They pulled over at a Jack in the Box, and sent Debbie and Jacquie inside to beg for food. When the girls returned with bags of cheeseburgers and fries, the adults gobbled them up—barely remembering to feed the kids who’d secured the meal in the first place. “They treated us like little people living grown-up lives,” Debbie tells us. “But we weren’t adults—we were children.” At one point, Debbie concedes that it may all have been worth it for the memories; at the same time, though, she calls her stepfather Alan Katz “dad” more often than she does Martin.

For his part, Stone asserts that he wanted to show his kids that a different value system was possible. (And, to his credit, according to a short pre-screening introduction Fourestié gave at Cinema Parc in Montreal, Stone wanted his family to feel free to share their unadorned perspectives on his great hippie experiment.) Intentions aside, though, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what comprises Stone’s alternative value system. Communal meals? Jam sessions? Smoking pot on a balcony, surrounded by plants? Stone is open with his friendships, with his home, with his overtures of a better tomorrow—but his friendships seem fleeting, his family relationships, strained. It’s easy to see what Stone has lost—deeper relationships, financial security—but it’s harder to see what he’s gained. Occasionally, his naivete borders on the painful-to-watch—he mentions that he never locks his door, for example, and then proceeds to dox his address in stages over the course of the film.

In the latter third of the film, we learn that Stone’s youngest daughter is struggling with an illness that has threatened her life. Stone, unsure if he can handle seeing her sick, hasn’t visited her in years. Meanwhile, Debbie’s years of hard work have finally paid off, and she’s purchased a rural hobby farm in Canada with a new partner—bringing her physically closer to her father, whom she visits. Martin, who has rented the same apartment for 40 years—along with an estimated one hundred roommates—has just received a notice of lease non-renewal from his landlord. After a quick catch-up, Martin presents Debbie with the notice. She holds it in her hands for a moment, folds it up and gives it back. While she says, later, that she finds her father’s situation “sad,” she isn’t willing to step in and fix his problems. Her father has abdicated his familial responsibilities her whole life, and she’s done picking up the slack.

Stone Story’s pacing is a bit erratic, its conclusion lacking, its parallel storylines meander side by side, interacting only clumsily. It’s not a great film—in fact it’s easy to see how Fourestié could have cut it differently, interposing narration instead of relying on parallels to make narrative points—but it is a profoundly sad film, with a profoundly sad takeaway: the economic realities of capitalism are inescapable, and they catch up to us whether we want them to or not.

A cartoon by Ronnie Ritchie explains this nicely, with the example of feminism. The heading is, “What they mean when they say they’re not a feminist.” One example shows a white girl saying, “I don’t need feminism. Women aren’t oppressed anymore.” The next panel shows what she means: “I don’t realize how privileged I am that my race/nationality/sexuality/assigned sex/gender identity/size/ability minimizes the effects of the Patriarchy to the point I don’t think it exists.”

It can be easy to deny privilege when it is invisible. We are used to a set of defaults. White people can easily walk through city streets without noticing the sea of white faces on billboards. bell hooks writes about this in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination. She writes that white people are able to think their whiteness is invisible, and that whiteness can exist without knowledge of blackness, while still asserting control. hooks also writes out that white students in her classroom often erupt with rage when their whiteness is looked at, “they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal conviction that it is the assertion of universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that will make racism disappear.”

Excerpt from Ronnie Ritchie’s comic. Read the whole piece here.

Heteronormativity is everywhere and not questioned. We’re presented with only one seemingly acceptable variation, which is if a queer couple acts heteronormative: gets married, buys a house, practices monogamy (this product of heteronormativity is defined as homonormativity). Heteronormativity is still the dominant narrative; it pins down people, labels them, and fits them into heteronormative roles.

On the same note of default settings and Othering people:

An all-male movie cast is normal, an all-female cast gets an automatic “chick flick” label (or worse, a feminist label!) Western culture is “normal” and everything else is “exotic” and “barbaric.”

Pretty much, #capitalism.

It can be hard to realize one’s own privilege, and even harder to accept it. A white person living in poverty, or a male person of colour, for example, still face oppression despite the colour of their skin or performed gender, so how can they be privileged? This is where intersectionality comes into play. Factors like those mentioned in Ritchie’s comic determine certain privileges and oppression. Yes, Patricia Arquette was right when she said sexism needs to be addressed. No, she was not right in alluding that sexism only oppresses white, hetero women.

At risk of showing my keener attitude as a first year undergrad, I’ll link to Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Starting with, “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” She then lists privileges she has a white person, that she may not have noticed before. Privileges like: being able to challenge a situation without being called a credit to her race; knowing her voice will be heard in a group of white people; and knowing her children will learn about their race’s existence in school. These privileges can apply to other privileged and oppressed groups, too.

So, what if you understand that oppression exists, but as a person in a certain place of privilege, you want to be an ally? This can be tricky at times, but there is a solution: shut up and listen. Certainly, stand in solidarity and show your support. But, realize that there are times where those you’re being an ally to do not have the same chances to speak as you, so let them have their chance. This can be hard when you want to show you care or are passionate about equity among people. Remember, in these situations, where you are a member of the dominant group, it isn’t about you. The best thing you can do is listen. That is more important than feel goodism.

But, but, it just doesn’t seem fair! What about men’s day, white history month, a straight pride parade? Well, a straight pride parade is any time a passing heterosexual couple can walk into the store without being harassed. White history is what we are taught right away in school. And since we live in a patriarchy, every day is men’s day. Again, if we are already in the dominant group, we may not notice these things in our lives. And if we are oppressed in other ways, it can be hard to understand that we have any upper hands in life at all.

Excerpt from a comic by Jamie Knapp.

Read the whole comic here.

When we do notice our privilege, it can get pretty yucky feeling. This doesn’t mean we get to run from it, we need to face it and deal with all the nastiness so we can properly understand. Recognizing our own privileges doesn’t demonize us; it doesn’t mean we exploit our privilege purposely. It does mean that we benefit from privilege. It is up to us what we do with it and how we can build an equitable world.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Companies, like Procter and Gamble (P&G), use this time of year to push cause marketing: a for-profit business using a not-for-profit’s cause to market their product. So even though cyclopentasiloxane—an ingredient shown to cause cancerous tumours in test animals—is the first ingredient in P&G’s Secret Scent Expressions deodorant, people can feel good buying their products because they have plans to donate US$100,000 to the American Cancer Society. This is pinkwashing, where companies mask the bad (sometimes cancerous) parts of their products by exploiting women’s vulnerability to breast cancer.

“Raising money has become the priority,” says Dr. Samantha King in Pink Ribbons, Inc. “Regardless of the consequences.” Distributed by the National Film Board, and directed by Lea Pool, the 2011 Canadian documentary is based off of King’s book of the same title. In it people such as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer and breast cancer survivor, talk about how the capitalism of breast cancer awareness is serving as a distraction from how the movement originally started, with a sisterhood critically looking at the health care system.

“To expect you to add social purpose to your business just because it’s a good thing to do, is foolish,” writes Olivia Khalili of Cause Capitalism.  “You have a bottom-line and other obligations to meet.  You don’t have extra resources to allocate to ‘doing good.’”

Obviously businesses have a bottom line that doesn’t include helping others for the goodness of it. But where is this money really going? Walks and parties are fun—I’ve done fundraising for cancer research efforts myself—but after the high of solidarity wears off, and the hype dies down, we must ask: what progress health care wise has been made?

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Illustration by Matt Daley.

When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China.

In fact, almost 200 years ago, the British government also stood up for its beliefs. After they had expended countless resources developing an opium industry, China shut down its borders to the drug, claiming that addiction was taking its toll on Chinese society. The Raj, seeing not only its business threatened, but also its ideals of free trade and capitalism, twice sent its navy to war to force China to open its borders. Britain won, and China had to relent.

Of course, comparing an enforced opium trade with online free speech may slip into exaggeration. But when Google indignantly left China, an important point was lost in the sanctimonious chatter: to many in China, the difference between the Google of today and the Empire of yesterday isn’t as clear as we might like to think. And as the web increasingly becomes a battleground for cultural and political exchange, it’s worth remembering that history is never as far in the past as we might hope.

In the aftermath of Google’s departure, the chorus of satisfied approval was overwhelming. Though Google itself treaded with the kind of care any profit-minded company might, the press was less tactful. When Google launched a chart that tracked which services China had blocked, prominent tech journalist Steven Levy called it an “Evil Meter.” Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff suggested that China was simply a bully, and that Google had “beat an honourable retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Post and the Globe and Mail did their best to cast the decision in moral rather than economic terms. The complexities of geopolitics and culture were reduced to a tired old approach: “Western values good; China bad.”

One might say “fair enough”: we are talking about a totalitarian regime here. But a few hundred years of Western global domination means there’s just no way to get around the optics of a massive American multinational saying its moral views are the right ones. In light of history, that kind of ideological dogmatism comes off as more than a little paternalistic.

But Google is not a parent and places like China, with their own histories, cultures and practices, are not children. To make matters worse, Google’s business model is essentially a paragon of Western democratic capitalism: disseminate information without restriction and then find a way to make money off the ways people access it. This may seem neutral, but it isn’t. It relies on the idea that spreading knowledge and information is an inherent good because an effective social system empowers individuals to find out things for themselves, and change their lives accordingly. For us, the sovereign individual is everything.

By contrast, even in contemporary Chinese thought, what still reigns is the idea that the community gives people their place in life, and the structures of ritual and authority give life order. The individualism that underpins Google’s business model is frequently seen as both arrogance and selfishness because it seems to prioritize the individual over the knowledge of the state and its rulers. The questions Google raised in China weren’t simply a matter of “repression,” but of how people locate themselves in reality. This fact seemed to be lost on most Western journalists. (About the only dissent in the technology press came from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, himself the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, who wrote a piece titled “Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders.”)

Is it a noble goal to try to spread values and ideals that seem to have benefited the societies that have adopted them? Sure. But principles like democracy and freedom of speech don’t simply float down from the sky into open arms below. They are borne out of centuries-long processes rooted in social, material, and intellectual change. To assume their universal good—as Google and the Western press seemed to—is to deny their historical and cultural specificity. And at a certain point, it ceases to matter what is “objectively” right when such presumptuousness and arrogance only serve to galvanize people against you.

For all that, it’s worth noting that when Google did leave China, many there weren’t too affected. They had Baidu—a Chinese search engine, albeit heavily censored, that is the sixth most-visited website in the world and is still growing. And this is the thing, really: a Western navy can no longer force “our” way of thinking on the world, because power is no longer centralized in the West.

But history rattles noisily still, and the values of an open, democratic web aren’t universal or even necessarily right. And some, presented with the image of Google getting up on its moral high horse, find it hard to forget an armada of ships, their holds stocked with opium, barging their way into the Canton harbour.

Noam Chomsky in "Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy"

If ever there was a conspiracy theory that had every likelihood of being true, it’s that a shadowy cabal of billionaires are meeting at some remote location in the Swiss Alps (perhaps the Hotel Mont Pelerin, or the latest Bilderberg stronghold) to plot how to most effectively screw the rest of the world. Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story may have garnered the most attention this season for taking aim at the secret practices and predations of the super wealthy, but recently, an entire swathe of films has appeared that shine the light on the moneyed elite and their economic empire.

Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money, Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino, Renzo Martens’ Episode 3—Enjoy Poverty, Kevin Stocklin’s We All Fall Down, and Richard Brouillette’s three hour epic Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy have all been released within the past year, and have popped up at film festivals around the globe.

Although this glut might appear to be a reaction to the current global money meltdown, many of the films were many years in the making—especially Brouillette’s, which took more than 12 years to create. That they should all should emerge roughly at the same time is serendipitous. (Or maybe it speaks to some even larger invisible hand at work.)

The one percent (or less) of the population that comprise the wealthiest demographic on the planet are different from the rest of us. Perhaps, much like the poor, they’ve always been with us, but never before in the history of human society has the entire collected wealth of the world, been so densely concentrated. How exactly did it come to be?

It may a simple enough question, but the answers are Byzantine in their complexity. There is simply too much to know, too many details filling the air with smoke and flying pieces of paper.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Brouillette’s film Encirclement, which is not even really so much a film as a lecture series. Even the title sounds like a treatise. All the same, if you can keep your eyes propped open, it may be one of the most chilling films in recent memory.

The film is divided into chapters, which is actually the best way to watch it. Take in some information, then go have a cup of tea before you dive back into dense stuff like “Chapter 8: Neo-Liberalism or Neo-Colonialism? Strong-Arm Tactics of the Financial Markets,” in which Noam Chomsky demonstrates the ability of financial power brokers to make global political decisions.

As the varied talking heads lay out exactly how neo-liberalism sacrificed public good for private profit and economic meltdown resulted, a shadow world is revealed in which real power, pooled in liquidities and off-shore reserves, is massaged and manipulated by an army of financiers, analysts, and grey-suited think-tanks. This shadow government surpasses all borders and agencies, and ultimately serves only one master. If you were about to say Satan, you’re not far wrong. It’s the bottom line.

The one thing watching all of these films en masse can do is at least clear up any residual or lingering uncertainty about “us” and “them.” The rich are definitely out to get us, and they have the means (be it private security firms, or the entire American army) and the methodology (untaxable offshore bank accounts housed in the Isle of Guernsey) to do it.

But against such a gargantuan world-eating monstrosity, what can one possibly do, except—as in a bear attack—roll over and play dead?

I wish I had better answers, but after plowing through three hours of Encirclement, I felt utterly outflanked, outgunned and outmaneuvered. I’m sure most people would feel the same. The film does not end on an upbeat note; rather, the completeness of its argument squelches hope of resistance.

But before we collectively offer up our soft underbellies to the devouring maw, stop and think. Brouillette’s own stated intent for his documentary was to make “A film about mind-control, brainwashing, ideological conformism; about the omnipresent irrefutability of a new monotheism, with its engraved commandments, burning bushes and golden calves.”

Which all sounds rather biblical, but in the war against Mammon, perhaps, the symbolism is apt. The sense of religious convergence is similar to that of the conspiracy theory. The moment when you step over from denial to acceptance, and begin to believe that there is a bigger truth out there, everything shifts. In this guerrilla campaign, information is a weapon.

Documentaries, bless their stubborn contrary hearts, continue to be one of the few media forms that still squeak and squawk. Everything else has pretty much been bought up, silenced or infantilized into blithering stupidity (yes, I’m looking at you, mainstream media). Arm yourself with facts and arguments. Don’t trust anyone, especially not a man in a suit. Bankers, brokers, or real estate agents, are all in on it.

There’s a reason they call it free thinking. It may be the last free thing around.

Do you hate consumer culture?

Angry about all that packaging? Irritated by all those commercials? Worried about the quality of the “mental environment”? Well, join the club. Anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces in millennial North American life, across every social class and demographic.

This might seem at odds with the economic facts of the 1990s—a decade that gave us the “extreme shopping” channel, the dot-com bubble, and an absurd orgy of indulgence in ever more luxurious consumer goods. But look at the non-fiction bestseller lists. For years they’ve been dominated by books that are deeply critical of consumerism: No Logo, Culture Jam, Luxury Fever and Fast Food Nation. You can now buy Adbusters at your neighbourhood music or clothing store. Two of the most popular and critically successful films in recent memory were Fight Club and American Beauty, which offer almost identical indictments of modern consumer society.

What can we conclude from all this? For one thing, the market obviously does an extremely good job at responding to consumer demand for anti-consumerist products and literature. But isn’t that a contradiction? Doesn’t it suggest that we are in the grip of some massive, society-wide, bipolar disorder? How can we all denounce consumerism, and yet still find ourselves living in a consumer society?

The answer is simple. What we see in films like American Beauty and Fight Club is not actually a critique of consumerism; it’s merely a restatement of the “critique of mass society” that has been around since the 1950s. The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years.

That last sentence is worth reading again. The idea is so foreign, so completely the opposite of what we are used to being told, that many people simply can’t get their head around it. It is a position that Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, has been trying to communicate for years. Strangely, all the authors of anti-consumerism books have read Frank—most even cite him approvingly—and yet not one of them seems to get the point. So here is Frank’s claim, simply put: books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters, and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it.

This isn’t because the authors, directors or editors are hypocrites. It’s because they’ve failed to understand the true nature of consumer society.

One of the most talked-about cinematic set-pieces in recent memory is the scene in Fight Club where the nameless narrator (Ed Norton) pans his empty apartment, furnishing it piece by piece with Ikea furniture. The scene shimmers and pulses with prices, model numbers and product names, as if Norton’s gaze was drag-and-dropping straight out of a virtual catalogue. It is a great scene, driving the point home: the furniture of his world is mass-produced, branded, sterile. If we are what we buy, then the narrator is an Allen-key-wielding corporate-conformist drone.

In many ways, this scene is just a cgi-driven update of the opening pages of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. After yet another numbing day selling the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler, Harry Angstrom comes home to his pregnant and half-drunk wife whom he no longer loves. Harry takes off in his car, driving aimlessly south. As he tries to sort out his life, the music on the radio, the sports reports, the ads, the billboards, all merge in his consciousness into one monotonous, monolithic brandscape.

It may give us pause to consider that while Fight Club was hailed as “edgy” and “subversive” when it appeared in 1999, Rabbit, Run enjoyed enormous commercial success when it was first published—in 1960. If social criticism came with a “sell by” date, this one would have been removed from the shelf a long time ago. The fact that it is still around, and still provokes awe and acclaim, makes one wonder if it is really a criticism or, rather, a piece of modern mythology.

What Fight Club and Rabbit, Run present, in a user-friendly fashion, is the critique of mass society, which was developed in the late 1950s in classic works like William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) and Paul Goodman’s Growing up Absurd (1960). The central idea is quite simple. Capitalism requires conformity to function correctly. As a result, the system is based upon a generalized system of repression. Individuals who resist the pressure to conform therefore subvert the system, and aid in its overthrow.

This theory acquired such a powerful grip on the imagination of the left during the 1960s that many people still have difficulty seeing it for what it is—a theory. Here are a few of its central postulates:

1. Capitalism requires conformity in the workers. Capitalism is one big machine; the workers are just parts. These parts need to be as simple, predictable, and interchangeable as possible. One need only look at an assembly line to see why. Like bees or ants, capitalist workers need to be organized into a limited number of homogeneous castes.

2. Capitalism requires conformity of education. Training these corporate drones begins in the schools, where their independence and creativity is beaten out of them—literally and figuratively. Call this the Pink Floyd theory of education.

3. Capitalism requires sexual repression. In its drive to stamp out individuality, capitalism denies the full range of human expression, which includes sexual freedom. Because sexuality is erratic and unpredictable, it is a threat to the established order. This is why some people thought the sexual revolution would undermine capitalism.

4. Capitalism requires conformity of consumption. The overriding goal of capitalism is to achieve ever-increasing profits through economies of scale. These are best achieved by having everyone consume the same limited range of standardized goods. Enter advertising, which tries to inculcate false or inauthentic desires. Consumerism is what emerges when we are duped into having desires that we would not normally have.

Both Fight Club and American Beauty are thoroughly soaked in the critique of mass society. Let’s look at Fight Club.

Here’s the narrator’s alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), explaining the third thesis: “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that social emasculation this everyman is created.” And the fourth: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.” And here he is giving the narrator a scatological summary of the whole critique: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

Fight Club is entirely orthodox in its Rousseauian rejection of the modern order. Less orthodox is its proffered solution, which in the middle and final acts moves swiftly from Iron John to the Trenchcoat Mafia.

A more conventional narrative arc, combined with a more didactic presentation of the critique, can be found in American Beauty, the Oscar-winning companion piece to Fight Club. The two films offer identical takes on
the homogenizing and emasculating effects of mass society, though the heroes differ in their strategies of resistance. Fight Club suggests that the only solution is to blow up the whole machine; in American Beauty, Lester (Kevin Spacey) decides to subvert it from within.

When Lester first starts to rebel against his grey-scale, cookie-cutter life, he begins by mocking his wife’s (Annette Bening) Martha Stewart materialism. Here’s Lester in a voice-over: “That’s my wife, Carolyn. See the way the handle on her pruning shears matches her gardening clogs? That’s not an accident.”

Later, Carolyn halts Lester’s sexual advances in order to prevent him from spilling beer on the couch. They fight. “It’s just a couch,” Lester says. Carolyn: “This is a $4,000 sofa upholstered in Italian silk. It is not just a couch.” Lester: “It’s just a couch!” Capitalism offers us consumer goods as a substitute for sexual gratification. Lester strains at the bit.

The relationship between sexual frustration and mass society is a general theme of the movie. Here is Lester giving his family theses one and three over dinner:

Carolyn: Your father and I were just discussing his day at work. Why don’t you tell our daughter about it, honey?

Lester: Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus.

Carolyn: Your father seems to think this type of behaviour is something to be proud of.

Lester: And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.

So what does Lester do to reassert his individuality, his masculinity? He takes a new job. He starts working out. He lusts after, then seduces, his daughter’s friend. He starts smoking pot in the afternoon. In short, he rejects all of the demands that society makes on a man of his age. But does he stop consuming? Of course not. Consider the scene in which he buys a new car. Carolyn comes home and asks Lester whose car that is in the driveway. Lester: “Mine. 1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I’ve always wanted and now I have it. I rule!”

Lester has thrown off the shackles of conformist culture. He’s grown a dick, become a man again. All because he bought a car. Carolyn’s couch may be “just a couch,” but his car is much more than “just a car.” Lester has become the ultimate consumer. Like a teenager, he consumes without guilt, without foresight, and without responsibility. Meanwhile, Carolyn’s questions about how he intends to make the mortgage payments are dismissed as merely one more symptom of her alienated existence. Lester is beyond all that. He is now what Thomas Frank calls “the rebel consumer.”

What American Beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana—$2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).

The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”

Many people who are, in their own minds, opposed to consumerism nevertheless actively participate in the sort of behaviour that drives it. Consider Naomi Klein. She starts out No Logo by decrying the recent conversion of factory buildings in her Toronto neighbourhood into “loft living” condominiums. She makes it absolutely clear to the reader that her place is the real deal, a genuine factory loft, steeped in working-class authenticity, yet throbbing with urban street culture and a “rock-video aesthetic.”

Now of course anyone who has a feel for how social class in this country works knows that, at the time Klein was writing, a genuine factory loft in the King-Spadina area was possibly the single most exclusive and desirable piece of real estate in Canada. Unlike merely expensive neighbourhoods in Toronto, like Rosedale and Forest Hill, where it is possible to buy your way in, genuine lofts could only be acquired by people with superior social connections. This is because they contravened zoning regulations and could not be bought on the open market. Only the most exclusive segment of the cultural elite could get access to them.

Unfortunately for Klein, zoning changes in Toronto (changes that were part of a very enlightened and successful strategy to slow urban sprawl) allowed yuppies to buy their way into her neighbourhood. This led to an erosion of her social status. Her complaints about commercialization are nothing but an expression of this loss of distinction. What she fails to observe is that this distinction is precisely what drives the real estate market, what creates the value in these dwellings. People buy these lofts because they want a piece of Klein’s social status. Naturally, she is not amused. They are, after all, her inferiors—an inferiority that they demonstrate through their willingness to accept mass-produced, commercialized facsimiles of the “genuine” article.

Klein claims these newcomers bring “a painful new self-consciousness” to the neighbourhood. But as the rest of her introduction demonstrates, she is also conscious—painfully so—of her surroundings. Her neighbourhood is one where “in the twenties and thirties Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the international ladies’ garment workers’ union.” Emma Goldman, we are told, “the famed anarchist and labour organizer,” lived on her street! How exciting for Klein! What a tremendous source of distinction that must be.

Klein suggests that she may be forced to move out of her loft when the landlord decides to convert the building to condominiums. But wait a minute. If that happens, why doesn’t she just buy her loft? The problem, of course, is that a loft-living condominium doesn’t have quite the cachet of a “genuine” loft. It becomes, as Klein puts it, merely an apartment with “exceptionally high ceilings.” It is not her landlord, but her fear of losing social status that threatens to drive Klein from her neighbourhood.

Here we can see the forces driving competitive consumption in their purest and most unadulterated form.

Once we acknowledge the role that distinction plays in structuring consumption, it’s easy to see why people care about brands so much. Brands don’t bring us together, they set us apart. Of course, most sophisticated people claim that they don’t care about brands—a transparent falsehood. Most people who consider themselves “anti-consumerist” are extremely brand-conscious. They are able to fool themselves into believing that they don’t care because their preferences are primarily negative. They would never be caught dead driving a Chrysler or listening to Celine Dion. It is precisely by not buying these uncool items that they establish their social superiority. (It is also why, when they do consume “mass society” products, they must do so “ironically”—so as to preserve their distinction.)

As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, taste is first and foremost distaste—disgust and “visceral intolerance” of the taste of others. This makes it easy to see how the critique of mass society could help drive consumerism. Take, for example, Volkswagen and Volvo advertising from the early 1960s. Both automakers used the critique of “planned obsolescence” quite prominently in their advertising campaigns. The message was clear: buy from the big Detroit automakers and show everyone that you’re a dupe, a victim of consumerism; buy our car and show people that you’re too smart to be duped by advertising, that you’re wise to the game.

This sort of “anti-advertising” was enormously successful in the 1960s, transforming the VW bug from a Nazi car into the symbol of the hippie counterculture and making the Volvo the car of choice for an entire generation of leftist academics. Similar advertising strategies are just as successful today, and are used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to clothing. Thus the kind of ad parodies that we find in Adbusters, far from being subversive, are indistinguishable from many genuine ad campaigns. Flipping through the magazine, one cannot avoid thinking back to Frank’s observation that “business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching.”

We find ourselves in an untenable situation  On the one hand, we criticize conformity and encourage individuality and rebellion. On the other hand, we lament the fact that our ever-increasing standard of material consumption is failing to generate any lasting increase in happiness. This is because it is rebellion, not conformity, that generates the competitive structure that drives the wedge between consumption and happiness. As long as we continue to prize individuality, and as long as we express that individuality through what we own and where we live, we can expect to live in a consumerist society.

It is tempting to think that we could just drop out of the race, become what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls “downshifters.” That way we could avoid competitive consumption entirely. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. We can walk away from some competitions, take steps to mitigate the effects of others, but many more simply cannot be avoided.

In many cases, competition is an intrinsic feature of the goods that we consume. Economists call these “positional goods”—goods that one person can have only if many others do not. Examples include not only penthouse apartments, but also wilderness hikes and underground music. It is often claimed that a growing economy is like the rising tide that lifts all boats. But a growing economy does not create more antiques, more rare art, or more downtown real estate, it just makes them more expensive. Many of us fail to recognize how much of our consumption is devoted to these positional goods.

Furthermore, we are often forced into competitive consumption, just to defend ourselves against the nuisances generated by other people’s consumption. It is unreasonable, for example, for anyone living in a Canadian city to own anything other than a small, fuel-efficient car. At the same time, in many parts of the North America, the number of big SUVs on the road has reached the point where people are forced to think twice before buying a small car. The SUVs make the roads so dangerous for other drivers that everyone has to consider buying a larger car just to protect themselves.

This is why expecting people to opt out is often unrealistic; the cost to the individual is just too high. It’s all well and good to say that SUVs are a danger and shouldn’t be on the road. But saying so doesn’t change anything. The fact is that SUVs are on the road, and they’re not about to disappear anytime soon. So are you willing to endanger your children’s lives by buying a subcompact?

Because so much of our competitive consumption is defensive in nature, people feel justified in their choices. Unfortunately, everyone who participates contributes just as much to the problem, regardless of his or her intentions. It doesn’t matter that you bought the SUV to protect yourself and your children, you still bought it, and you still made it harder for other drivers to opt out of the automotive arms race. When it comes to consumerism, intentions are irrelevant. It is only consequences that count.

This is why a society-wide solution to the problem of consumerism is not going to occur through personal or cultural politics. At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action. If we were really worried about advertising, for example, it would be easy to strike a devastating blow against the “brand bullies” with a simple change in the tax code. The government could stop treating advertising expenditures as a fully tax-deductible business expense (much as it did with entertainment expenses several years ago). Advertising is already a separately itemized expense category, so the change wouldn’t even generate any additional paperwork. But this little tweak to the tax code would have a greater impact than all of the culture jamming in the world.

Of course, tweaking the tax code is not quite as exciting as dropping a “meme bomb” into the world of advertising or heading off to the latest riot in all that cool mec gear. It may, however, prove to be a lot more useful. What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another, and that we will continue to do as long as we have no incentive to stop. Rather than just posturing, we should start thinking a bit more carefully about how we’re going to provide those incentives.

The Rebel Sell will appear in book-length this September from HarperCollins. Click here to order a copy from Amazon.ca

You can also order this book from Amazon.com. The American title is Nation of Rebels.

Joseph Heath is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as it Gets, published by Penguin Canada in 2001.

Andrew Potter has taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and at Trent University in Peterborough. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique at the Universite de Montreal.