From an excellent interview with Douglas Rushkoff:
RUSHKOFF: We live in a culture that is obsessed with youth but has lost the ability to think with the elasticity of youth — so we’ve traded in the best and we’ve gotten the worst as a result. We think like grumpy old men, and act out like two-year olds.
Look at Hollywood. Who are our movie stars today? Not men, but boys. Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon, who look even younger than they are. Who are the great adult men of Hollywood? Jack Nicholson, who’s an adult baby. His entire show-biz image is of an overgrown child going to Lakers games in dark glasses. Or Robin Williams  however talented  still a version of the adult child. Our president is a baby. He treats the nation as his scolding parent, from whom he must hide his naughty deeds, and to whom he must occasionally apologize.
Look at what a lot of our Internet heroes do with their money: they buy planes, fighter jets for that matter, or build castles they can live in as if they were wombs — it’s an extension of childhood.
JB: And how do you think we got this way?
RUSHKOFF: By design. In the late 40s after World War II, we needed a way for the economy to expand, so what we did was create a consumer culture. Men returned to the factories and worked, while women returned to the home to take care of the children. Advertising and marketing catered to the needs of women and children. When they couldn’t cater to a need, they created one. By the 1970s, when women went to work themselves, consumer culture became all about kids — rock music and records and toys and electronics  all items and lifestyles that appealed to either children or the child in the man or woman. We’ve succeeded at that. Now when a person becomes successful what they want to do is buy into childhood and get some expensive toys in order to fulfill those same, media-generated childhood urges.
I highly recommend reading this interview. I am actively trying to get Rushkoff to do an interview for us here at Pop Occulture. While you’re waiting for that though, you owe it to yourself to check out the BBC documentary series, Century of the Self, which addresses a lot of the issues Rushkoff goes into above about post-war economic expansion and advertising trends.
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2 Comments
Reminds me of James Hillman’s contention that the focus on the “inner child” in therapy and self-development can be disastrous in terms of political empowerment and active citizenship. He has a good line on why we obsess about the inner child:
To me this would tie in with consumer culture, too. From personal experience I know there is a real, resonant “inner child” archetype, but I guess our literal culture has connected it too much to the actual period of childhood - with all the impotence this implies - and not paid enough attention to its association with what Rushkoff calls the “elasticity of youth”, and the roots of this elasticity in the creative imagination.
My first thought on reading this post is, of course, “Oh no, something else to feel guilty about.” But that’s too dismissive. I like watching, reading, listening to — consuming — various bits of pop culture. I don’t actually buy much of anything in terms of this stuff. I try to be responsible as far as being an adult goes.
Her’s kind of a relevant tangent — I think of the best bits of pop culture in the corporate-controlled world as being kind of like the works of art created by Renaissance artists bankrolled by nobles and merchants. The “purpose” the Mona Lisa was painted was so some rich guy’s wife could have a pretty picture of herself — but this usually doesn’t factor into most of that painting’s “fans’” appreciation of the Mona Lisa. Now, I’m not gonna call FullMetal Alchemist the Mona Lisa by a long shot, but if I think of “art” in the contemporary age kind of like this, I for one feel better about about “consuming” it. Of course, there are ten thousand questions about the rightness of consumer greed in the face of world poverty and all that, but as far as appreciating the art itself, it works for me.
What I meant to say was that one acts like an adult when one has to, and one actually has fun when one doesn’t have to act like an adult — consumer culture or otherwise.