Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 8
The Market Personality Today:
The Further Transformation of Human Beings Into Things
(page 4)
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The need to accumulate more and more commodities to feel “good” derives from the person’s role in the marketplace. When the exchange of commodities in the marketplace expresses the essence of the culture, people lose the ability to distinguish between their human potential and their relationship to commodities and property. Fromm gives this excellent summary of the psychological features of the market personality and its connection to the culture of capitalism:
“What is the relationship of man toward himself? I have described elsewhere this relationship as ‘marketing orientation.’ In this orientation, man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. His aim is to sell himself successfully on the market. His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from his socio-economic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question ‘Who are you?’ by saying ‘I am a typewriter,’ and an automobile, by saying ‘I am an automobile,’ or more specifically by saying, ‘I am a Ford,’ or ‘a Buick,’ or ‘a Cadillac.’ If you ask a man ‘Who are you?’ he answers, ‘I am a manufacturer,’ ‘I am a clerk,’ ‘I am a doctor’ — or ‘I am a married man,’ ‘I am the father of two kids,’ and his answer has pretty much the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have.”[4]
“Man’s happiness today consists in ‘having fun.’ Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and ‘taking in’ commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies — all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones — and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption.”[5]
In sum, we can compare the market personality to the produce sold in a typical American supermarket. American produce is bred for its appearance. For instance, the apples look big, beautiful and uniform. But those who are accustomed to fresh produce from the farmers’ market know that supermarket apples taste like cardboard. So it is with the market personality, who directs all of his or her attention to superficial social interactions in order to further his or her material comfort. To achieve this comfort, the market personality must mold his/her identity to what comes across as most appealing on the personality exchange market. But inside, the apple is bland and characterless.
In this social system we treat friends as social commodities. We “like” people when their package personality is useful for our social advancement, and we discard them after they have outlived their usefulness. We feel compelled to dress and behave in the socially accepted way in order to maintain our friendships and to be liked; we must speak, think and feel in a certain way to be approved of under the current standards of conformity. Unless we do this, we feel that we are failures who cannot advance to a higher social status. In this sense, the market personality behaves like a package for sale, always trying to sell itself as a slightly higher valued commodity than its competitors.
Underneath, however, the real person seethes with terrifying insecurities. We cannot be completely lifeless beings. Deep in the unconscious, we suffer tremendously from our failure to unite with others on a fully human basis. A few layers beneath the façade of the market personality sit deep feelings of loneliness, anxiety and guilt — the feelings of embarrassment and anxiety of those who cannot overcome human separateness. This is one reason that so many people cannot sleep well at night and feel anxious or depressed if left alone during the day: they sense the acute feelings of helplessness that result from their failure to connect lovingly with others. Modern people live in a vicious circle alternating between anxiety, depression, and the numbness of being a mere thing in the marketplace.
Perhaps the best illustration of the life of the market personality is in the movie American Beauty. The main character, Lester Burnham, realizes the falseness and shallowness of his alienated existence and rebels against it. But his wife Carolyn does not, and she tries to cling to the façade of the market personality. She is driven by the desire to be a success in the real estate business. In one scene, she shows a house to potential buyers. After first spending hours cleaning the house and making it look “perfect” — imitating the façade of her own life — she puts on the typical show of the market personality as potential buyers come into the house. But all of her forced smiles and attempts to show the positive features of the house fail to generate a buyer. After the people leave, the façade disappears and her face is filled with deep agony and desperate sadness — her real feelings, all these years. But like a typical market personality, she is too afraid to experience these feelings. She cries frantically as she hits her body, screaming “Stop it, stop it.” Eventually she suppresses these feelings, pulls herself back together, and walks away; she manages to put the alienated veneer back on her face. Like many people, she lives for the illusions of the marketplace and confuses happiness with financial success — that is, until the next crisis propels her real feelings to the surface.
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[4] Eric Fromm, The Sane Society, page 129.
[5] Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving, pages 72-73.