Consumption is becoming the new substitute religion. This is certainly progress for former poor countries, but in the long run it dissolves the cohesion of society and is only apparently covered up by aggressive enemy declarations. The newly industrialised nations should take the dissolution of social cohesion in the West as a warning example.
With the triumph of neo-liberalism, all forms of identity worldwide are becoming fluid, uncertain or even dissolved. It is true that it was right to leave behind the binary oppositions of Western modernity to “non-modern” societies, which were associated with static, entrenched forms of identity. But the orientation towards models of consumption does not lead to a real pluralisation, but reproduces ever new rigid identities and thinking in tribal opposites: “us against the others”, whoever the others are. The Chinese dream, New Russia, make America great again, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the USA, the division of Israeli society and the temporary triumph of the extreme religious right there are all reactions to the dissolution of identities through the transformation of citizens into consumers. Consumption is becoming the new substitute religion. This is certainly progress for former poor countries, but in the long run, it dissolves the cohesion of society and is only apparently covered up by aggressive enemy declarations. The newly industrialised nations should take the dissolution of social cohesion in the West as a warning example.
If about 6 people have as much property as 3.6 billion “others or in the near future 1% of the world’s population as much as the “remaining” 99%, then this is an absolutely obscene inequality, which we only accept becauseö the ideology of consumption, capitalism and neo-liberalism has become the new world religion. As Walter Benjamin already pointed out, it serves the same basic need as the monotheistic religions. “Then said the Lord unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Ye have seen that I have spoken unto you from heaven. Ye shall set nothing by my side: silver gods and gold gods ye shall not have.” (Exodus 20:22). “And when the people saw that Moses came not down from the mount so long, they gathered themselves about Aaron, and said unto him, Arise, make us a god to go before us: for we know not what is befallen this man Moses. (…) And Aaron took the gold out of their hand and poured it into a clay mould, and made it a cast calf. Then they said: This is thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” (Ex 32:1) We today may think ourselves exalted at the idea of worshipping a golden figure. But in reality, aren’t we merely replacing it with Wall Street or the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, or even globalisation, which is supposed to lead us to the promised land, i.e. prosperity and wealth? It is true that we do not entrust our wives’ and daughters’ earrings to the stock exchange, but often all our savings, individual fates as well as those of entire countries are determined by the price of coffee, bananas and other commodities. Gunter Henn, the architect of the VW Autostadt, one of the new temples, underlined the claim for the creation of meaning by companies: “Who else offers orientation, where does that leave us with our childlike religiosity? The churches are dead, the state is withdrawing, and the ideologues have lost their power. What remains are the companies.”
This story of the Golden Calf, which was put in the place of God at the very moment when he had revealed his will to the people of Israel in the Ten Commandments, illustrates a fundamental problem of religion, of the religious. For religion is obviously based on a two-way relationship. On the one hand, there is a need for a god or gods to reveal themselves, to show themselves, and on the other hand, there is an ineradicable need, an insatiable human desire for the divine, for the religious. This deep-seated longing can have many different reasons. In the sociology of religion and philosophy, it is described in such a way that religion, the religious, has fundamental functions for individual people as well as human societies, for example, the endurance of the fear of one’s own death, the embedding in communities that outlast death, the giving of meaning to life, the transcending of one’s own boundaries in an ordered whole, the construction of something sacred, untouchable. The problem that arises from this, however, is that this insatiable longing can obviously also refer to something other than the revealing God, precisely to a golden calf, but also to the God of reason, to one’s own nation or race, to the world-historical mission of the proletariat, or even to science and technology. Science and technology may relegate the religious to the very back seats – often with the sole effect of putting themselves in its place. Carl Schmitt, one of the most important as well as most controversial theorists of political theory, emphasised, for example, that at the beginning of the 20th-century religious belief in God was replaced by religious belief in technology and the omnipotence of man. With regard to National Socialism, this has been proven in many cases, as there was a deliberate and purposeful instrumentalisation of religious practices for party congresses and mass marches – incidentally an essential aspect of why this inhuman ideology could nevertheless be so successful. “Führer, our daily bread give us today.”
‘As Walter Benjamin already noted, capitalism is a pure cult religion that has neither a dogma nor a theology’
But let’s move on to the gods of the market, consumerism and cult marketing when brand companies and belonging to this community take on cultic, religious proportions. And let’s put it bluntly: This cult marketing appeals to religious feelings much more simply and directly than a reflected faith ever can, religious feelings that at best come to the fore in community experiences at church conventions. Their religious character is also not always overt, since there is an essential difference between consumption, cult marketing and the Christian understanding of religion. Substitute religions are usually polytheistic, but Christianity is monotheistic. For followers of monotheistic religions, polytheistic ones often do not appear as a religion at all, but as something that one shrugs off or is amazed at, but considers oneself to be superior to this preform of religion. Such a view fails to recognise that these polytheistic forms of religion nevertheless serve religious feelings, without which their success is difficult to explain. Moreover, as Walter Benjamin already noted, capitalism is a pure cult religion that has neither a dogma nor a theology – unless one also wants to understand the currently dominant neoclassicism as a substitute religion. A cult religion, in any case, is directly practically oriented, just like the archetypes of pagan religiosity, which practises its rite without God’s word, without revelation. Pagan is to be defined in such a way that the cult takes precedence over the doctrine, which only appears implicitly. Capitalism is a form of neo-paganism, Benjamin concludes.
Just as religion tries to help life succeed by conveying a meaningful way of living, so advertising tries to do by suggesting to customers that they can only live fulfilled lives or belong to the in-group by buying, owning and using a certain product. It is striking that in many cases advertising no longer presents the real advantages of a product, but values such as friendship. Advertising instrumentalises religious motifs to turn people into customers and customers into brand believers. In doing so, it builds on the religious basis still dormant in the hidden human being, tries to appeal to this sacral subconscious and therefore creates new forms of cult marketing, through which modern man is supposed to find cosy, warm places for his longings. In the spiritual desert of modernity, marketing strategies fill the vacant position of religion with advertising in general and the positions previously held by God and the sacred with products in particular and everything connected with the use of such a product: instead of religious practice, consumption; instead of gods, idols of consumption; instead of churches, temples of consumption; instead of religious faith communities, those of consumption. In this context, belonging to the ingroup is considered constitutive in the choice of brand and ex-communication is threatened in an equally consistent manner if the wrong brand is chosen. The myth created around a brand gives its products a spiritual added value that is supposed to set them apart from the mass of competing products of the same quality.
Consumerism was aggressively propagated as an alternative and implicitly as a substitute for religion vis-à-vis traditional religions by the media theorist Norbert Bolz in his Consumerist Manifesto. For him, consumerism is the immune system of world society against the virus of fanatical religions. Consumerism promises neither the goal nor the end of history, but “only the ever-new”. Independent of the implicit and recurring criticism of monotheism, the question arises as to the price that must be paid for the production of the ever-new.
Not only are quite normal products being elevated far beyond their utility value to cult brands, to a substitute for religion. In the new marketing, the customer is not only king, as it used to be called, but god-like. In largely saturated markets, it is mainly about creating ever-new desires. Customers are told that, compared to whatever they may already have, there are still many, many more possibilities, infinitely new possibilities. This amusement park has not yet been visited, that trip has not yet been taken, this hair shampoo could be cheaper or even better than that one, you can shop better in Frankfurt than in Kassel or vice versa or somewhere else. In the meantime, you can also fly to London in one day to go shopping, “how have you not yet been to Paris to go shopping?”
The decisive factor is not whether one actually uses this or that offer, but that there are always even better, even fancier POTENTIAL possibilities that one has not yet realised…. “Anything goes” used to be a slogan of resistance against repressive social structures – today it is the symbol for the market of limitless possibilities. Due to this limitlessness of possibilities of consumption, a constant depressive feeling arises in MANY people that they have not yet exhausted any consumption possibilities – and if one were to devote one’s whole life to consumption, there would still be something that would have to be done without.
This pressure of seemingly limitless possibilities to live like “God in France” is exacerbated for those whose financial possibilities are limited, such as in the case of unemployment, because here the tension between the real limited and the potentially infinite consumption possibilities is particularly great.
From this tension follows a clinical picture that characterises modern capitalism, our market society, and depression as an awareness of what is potentially possible and what is actually possible. Depression threatens the individual who only resembles himself, just as sin pursues the soul turned towards God or guilt pursues the human being torn apart in conflict. It arises both when the awareness of potential possibilities far exceeds that of the real ones and in those cases where the consumer is called upon to constantly reinvent himself.
This last problem can be illustrated by a cigarette advertisement that virtually signals the reversal of traditional advertising promises because it boldly states that this particular brand of cigarettes does not taste good to everyone – and that is portrayed as a good thing, according to the slogan. At the same time, of course, this advertising is aimed at the largest possible group of buyers, the more the better. This gives rise to the deliberate paradox that one is all the more an absolutely unique individual if one consumes exactly what everyone is buying.
The individual here is not something self-evident, born or given by nature, but a laboriously constructed social role. As an individual, man makes himself the cult centre of a religion of uniqueness. That’s why Buddhism is often in vogue today – as a doctrine of self-redemption without a saviour god. And for those who find that too spiritual, self-excitement and self-challenge remain. You take drugs, get high on the body’s own endorphins – or best of all: on the drug “I”. But it would be a misunderstanding to believe that the cult of the ego is a step towards liberating the individual from the shackles of society. In the cult of the ego, the human being is less a sovereign individual than an unhappy prosthetic god. He surrounds himself with auxiliary constructions from the world of fashions, drugs and distractions.
The emancipation of the sixties and seventies has often freed us from the dramas of guilt and obedience, but it has brought us new dramas of responsibility and action in an uncertain and conflicting world.
In this invention of a seemingly unique individuality through the consumption of branded products, individuals are overburdened without limits – the customer is no longer king, but god-like in marketing strategies – we fulfil their most secret wishes, everything they desire, there are no limits to their desires. But people remain humans, they are not gods and often break down at this imposition of being equal only to themselves. Only God, who in the Old Testament logically demands that there should be no gods beside Him, is equal only to Himself. The emancipation of the sixties and seventies has often freed us from the dramas of guilt and obedience, but it has brought us new dramas of responsibility and action in an uncertain and conflicting world. Thus, through human self-empowerment and the marketing strategy of the individual responsible only to himself, depressive exhaustion accompanies neurotic anxiety not only on an individual level but could be also witnessed in Western societies as a whole. The alternative to rigid forms of identity and political systems is not consumerism, which only leads to new forms of such ideologies. What is needed is a floating balance of the individual and the community.
