The Age of Bottled Water

The rise of bottled water as a major consumer product is not just about the clever marketing of a completely wasteful and useless product.

It is about the increasingly totalitarian power of marketing. 

A couple of generations ago, its appearance would have been met by a chorus of derision and mirth.  The product and its brand would have promptly sunk and been seen as a lesson; that if one has half a brain and a desire not to lose money, one doesn't try to 'sell snow to Eskimos'.  Shoppers are not fools.

Over a 60 year period, that has all changed.  During that time, marketing has become more deeply entrenched in the collective consciousness than the Nazi and Soviet propaganda ministries could have ever dreamed of achieving.  The clumsy methods of these earlier totalitarians required back up from a state security apparatus.  Not any more.  The privatized version is extremely user friendly, so its subjects will let it do things that once would have been 'difficult', even with the threat of force.  They are free; i.e., expertly trained to spontaneously respond to market signals, regardless of cost, or how much they have to sacrifice in both present wealth and future income.

Shoppers who once just 'bought stuff'' are now consumers.  These days they seem so very young they glow, smiling with iconic brand satisfaction.  And after three generations of market conditioning, the latest batch are the best trained economic shop troops ever to patrol the planet, constantly searching and 'taking out' opportunities to save money by spending. In the world of Orwellian Doublethink, spending is saving.  Same, same.  Ask anybody.

The capacity of marketing to shape attitudes and change behavior is historically unprecedented.  If Hitler's propaganda minister, the formidable Joseph Goebbels, came back today to try and get a job in advertising and marketing, he would have to go to university to relearn his trade, to even get a sniff at the industry.

The child representatives of the marketing system, the 'Consumerbabelets', have been turned by a protracted multi trillion dollar intensive product placement campaign into a leading edge instrumentality, in a way that the German Hitler Youth and Soviet Young Pioneers never were.  Consumerbabeletism is an incredibly powerful ideological product in front of which everything crumbles.

Unlike the young Chinese Red Guards, whose violence and disruptiveness in the pursuit of adult/child role reversal eventually undid them, Consumerbabelet power has been slowly and quietly built up to define the culture.  It now forces everyone to adopt bright eyed and spontaneous 'Youththink', where there is no yesterday and all your tomorrows come today. This inter-generational reversal of power has happened so subtly, hardly anyone is aware that adult society has been profoundly undermined and turned over to people who never grow up, because for them to do so would be uncool and 'out of touch'.

Of course the real reason they never grow up is that the infrastructure for making that happen has been systematically smashed up and discredited.  Social discipline and duty, a sense of obligation to others before oneself and a sense of shame and moral awareness has been dismissed as repressive consciousness.  It has been replaced by an overwhelming sense of entitlement that is neither earned nor deserved, comprised of a conflation of rights without responsibilities and a belief that the customer is always right.  It is a recipe for turning responsible citizens into spoiled, indulged and very easily manipulated princes and princesses who have to flounder their way through life in a world without boundaries, where anything goes, and frequently does.

The perfect totalitarian product is a society that has been reduced to the maturity level of adolescents.  Each generation then passes this quality onto its own children, like some terrible existential plague.  The progressive loss of adult values and consciousness has had devastating consequences for the social commons and its governance, but been a spectacular victory for the market and its omnipresent propaganda machinery; a spectacular triumph of private interests over reason that keeps mass populations on track to quite literally consume the future of the planet.

And naturally, we drink bottled water at four thousand times the price of tap, because its cool and everyone says it cool; the people in media land; everybody. The bottled water billboards are full of gorgeous young things so enjoying their bottled water that it would be almost impossible to have it any other way.....so you drink the waters of content.....water that doesn't just slake thirst and melt the ice, but cools the spirit....as you raise a little piece of heaven to your lips and say to yourself, "No bubbles. No sugar. Just throwaway refreshment,  Mmmmm".

Only aging losers do tap!