Caveat Emptor

I’m troubled by the ease at which we’ve come to identify ourselves primarily as consumers. To be sure it’s a role we all play, an inescapable one given the capitalist system we live in – the world is our market place and we love to see ourselves perusing the aisles picking up deals and indulgences. We like to express our opinions with our buying power, and even the Supreme Court has ruled that money is a form of speech.

I get the seductive appeal of being a consumer; it allows us to fantasize great wealth and shopping sprees. When we think of ourselves as consumers we naturally think of ourselves as wealthy. On the flip side it makes us resent any restrictions on how we might extend the power of our wealth. “I don’t want MY tax dollars spent on: the homeless, health care, the military, farm subsidies, etc.” We stop thinking about our relationship with others as anything but something transactional, and commoditized.

But consumer is but one identity we share. Most of us are also workers – a role far drearier to be excited about or identify with. It usually causes us to think about ourselves on a lower rung of a hierarchy. Indeed, perhaps one of the only pleasure we indulge ourselves in as workers, is in complaining about our bosses and our jobs. Being a consumer allows one to think of being an entrepreneur, being one’s own boss, having a side hustle where you monetize your hobbies.

An unfortunate victim of the primacy of our consumer identity, seems to be our identity as a citizen. We’d rather not think about what our obligations might be to our community. If anything we start to redefine our communities in terms of our socioeconomic status and try to find ways to exclude others from the shared role a citizen.

At its core to be a citizen is to have a vote, an equal say in how our society should be run. But it is also a call to think outside ourselves, to think about what is best for all of us, the kind of place we want to live in.

As citizens we are the government, as consumers the government is just another provider of products and services. As citizens we are part of a greater good, as a consumer our selfishness is a primary virtue.

As we swap out thinking of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens we start to pervert notions of democracy. We talk of voting with our pocketbooks seldom acknowledging the inequality in the distribution of dollars to vote with. As consumers we are not equals.

Information itself becomes distorted. We talk of the market place of ideas and have this notion of the efficiency of the market place to root out bad ideas and misinformation. And yet marketing and advertising have made information “free” and truth has become more costly than fiction. As consumers we don’t consider the impact of bad information – caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Perhaps that is the lesson we need to heed, as we become consumers instead of citizens. We need to scrutinize this product and understand exactly what we are buying into. Because, as a consumer, no one is looking out for you except yourself.