One of the most accepted measures of a nations growth in its standard of living is GNP. The ‘equation’ is one where growth in SOL equals growth in productivity equals growth in GNP. So it follows that to increase GNP you have to buy more stuff. Doesn’t matter how – more debt if you will. But if you buy more stuff, you add to the GNP and your SOL. This idea is propagated through the use of advertising and merchandising by companies who therefore make more money for their owners and employees who can – yes – buy more stuff.
The buying of more satisfaction doesn’t just take place in the hard goods categories, but also in expendables. Even down to the locals buying more burgers and larger fries from Burger Kingdom. Tastes good, feels filling, buy more tomorrow. The thoughts of frugality and non-wastefulness be damned! We buy more for our kids, too, and they learn from that.
After all, isn’t it important to have more? Having less is looked down upon. Do cats and dogs refuse food at some point or do most just start to get fat? Does a child refuse a new toy? What would the answer be if you offer a trade for an old toy or she could keep both? Does the great male lion see the lessor lion and feel bad for it? Does he say ‘See that lion, he is smaller and weaker than I and has no Pride. I have twenty six in my Pride. Let me send him a few so that he may have a better standard of living.’?
So where does this end, and if it ends bad, how do we manage it so it does not? The essential nature of the animal is to take more. Eat more, reproduce more, propagate the species. There are over 7 billion humans right now, most of them just wishing for more than they have now and many with good cause for thinking that way.
The optimists among you will say we will come up with ways to be more productive and get more out of the earth, fixing what we damage along the way with our limitless ingenuity. We will populate other planets! Certainly we have so many good things that have come from optimism, creativity and hard work. iPads and airplanes and air conditioning. Medical advances and Mercedes Benz and Botox and Roundup. Coke and Pepsi and nuclear bombs. Ok, maybe not the last one.
The human condition is such that we are the lion or the great ape, but with a brain that is maybe infinitely more powerful. The way we use it and what we use it for has become the most critical question of our age. Of humanity’s continuity and quite possibly the planet’s, also. For all of the above to change, we need a change in our nature. We need to start thinking of standard of living as being equal to a more holistically good existence. And we need to do this across the nations and populations. This is what we should be marketing. We need to become more ‘human’, less animal. This is what our advertising should be concerned with. And we need to do it now.
Leave being a lion to the lions. They really can’t hurt anything being that way.