Ends and Means

Happened across this video. I'm already familiar with Adbusters (am now considering them a topic to discuss, with the likes of GOOD magazine) as well as their annual Buy Nothing Day. What I find of note in relation to my thesis is the opening discussion and the reporter's questioning of Kalle Lasn's form in addressing the problem: calling Americans pigs may not be the best way to persuade them to cut consumption. Sugar coat it instead and they'll eat anything, right?



If the ultimate necessary goal is to cut consumption, and the means of getting people to change their habits do not matter (within reasonable limits, i.e. homicide is probably not the best means) then why call people names when it could be more effective to build a new positive cultural trait which encourages consumption reduction out of reverence for the religious or family oriented blessings of the season? I find this to be an excellent point that anyone who wishes for an end to be achieved to take into consideration. My thought would be that it is important for people to understand why they need to cut consumption (because it is throwing us in to an increasingly unstable ecological and political environment) as opposed to treating them as near-sighted sheep who need to be prodded with the prospects of delicious treats and happy days. What could overturn my opinion is an accurate understanding of the psychological workings of our people; that they may really be so dumb as to not be able to or not want to understand realities. This is something that also has an interesting connection to graphic design, in that the modern consumer's disconnect from where the stuff they consume actually comes from is a void that design was originally birthed to span. In the pursuit of helping out the fledgling industrial economy we have over 100 years later actually encouraged our society to be blindly faithful of what we as designers inform them about what they consume.

Its rather gutsy of them to put it on black friday weekend, but I think that putting it on any other date would already admit defeat. In this way, they get more publicity for being contrarian, but ultimately if they didn't think that our true need as humans to drastically reduce consumption was valid enough to take on black friday, then they shouldn't be championing it at all. But they are, and they dare to question the biggest event in the arena.