Our factory of need

The beliefs we most need to question are generally the ones we don't notice, because they are so embedded in the drone of daily life. Wars and disasters tend to have unforeseen consequences for this very reason. They disrupt the drone, and so prompt questions that wouldn't arise otherwise.

No beliefs are more entrenched in the United States than those regarding the economy. A couple of weeks ago I saw a banner headline in the local paper. "San Francisco Retailers' Plea: Shop 'Til You Drop," it said. "Economy needs holiday spending."

There was nothing exceptional about those statements. For weeks the media have been in worry mode over laggard consumers. Still, the headline was truly strange. The economy is supposed to meet our needs. And we are supposed to be the best judges of those needs, not the government, not corporations, and not the economic experts whom the media quote so dutifully.

So, if we Americans aren't shopping 'til we drop, it just might mean we don't feel like dropping. Just possibly we don't need a lot of stuff right now. Yet that thought is not permitted. In the reigning system of belief called "economics," we Americans are "consumers" by nature and definition. We are genetically programmed with an insatiable desire to consume. Our closets and garages might be bulging, and our waistlines, too. But still we must be driven like the beast in Dante's Inferno, the one that "when she has fed is hungrier than ever."

The theory says the economy serves us. That belief is embedded in the drone. But in practice we end up serving the economy. Shopping has become a duty, a form of service to the state. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the president urged us onward to the malls, the way previous presidents urged the citizenry to join the military or conserve fuel.

This strange inversion didn't happen overnight. It began about a century ago, when the economic problem began turning upside down. For eons the problem had been a scarcity of things; conventional economics is based entirely on that premise. But now, thanks to technology and mass production, the problem increasingly has been the opposite - a scarcity of desire for things. The then-emergent corporations could turn out so much stuff. Who would buy it all?

Before, the nation needed things. Now, it needs a need for things. Step by step, the economy has become a factory of need; and ordinary Americans have become workers in this new factory, as "consumers."

This became a priority of state after World War II. The government spent billions on a highway program and on subsidized mortgages for suburban homes. It kept oil dirt cheap and did a slew of other things to ramp up the consumption curve. Industry embraced an ethos of shoddy products called "planned obsolescence," which kept people returning to the auto showrooms and appliance stores.

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