If there is one thing that drives America today it’s our personal need for validation. It permeates everything we do. Our advertising, our everyday relationships, our politics, how we choose what we buy, and, more than we care to admit, whom we choose to spend our life with are all influenced by our need for validation.
All you have to do to check this out is ask yourself this simple question. If I choose this action will it make me look good or do I risk ridicule? Most of us will react by saying “I never think of these things when I make a decision.” Or do you?
The simple truth is we have been conditioned for years to be part of the herd, and ironic as it seems, part of the process for selling us this concept is to create the need to be an individual. As contradictory as this sounds, you cannot get a person to accept a herd mentality unless you first convince them they are not part of the herd.
Advertising is a good example of this process. A product is bought because it will make us feel good or enhance our feeling of well-being. While not necessary, it helps if it performs some useful function. I am making a distinction here between what we need and what we want.
We certainly don’t buy a product to make us feel bad or look bad. Our ads convince us that by buying their product we will be better off than we were before. Included as part of every ad is the implied message that by buying and using this product we are being an individual, exercising our personhood in a unique way. In other words, we have separated ourselves from the herd by buying this product.
And if this were true, the product being purchased would be a flop, since it is not attracting a mass following. The trick is to have the buyer be part of the herd and an individual as well. This is the stamp of validation.
Nothing demonstrates this more than our new cell phones or personal digital devices. You need to buy the phone that everyone has to be part of the group, but the device also creates the illusion you are acting as a unique individual, even though you are doing the same thing that millions of others are doing.
For a society that creates an economic system that demands growth every year, it begs the question: How is it going to do this? Every thirty years or so our economy must create new industries for products still unknown. In the meanwhile, before that time arrives, our economy demands we create the need to buy the same old stuff over and over again.
To so this we must satisfy the created desire for individuality and validation. We have to part of the herd and individuals at the same time.
Nice work if you can get it. And, indirectly it is our work. The irony of it all is, that for most of us, we only have work because this process works.
Brother Giovanni,