I have already indicated some of the ways in which our thinking about the economic side of our lives is less realistic and less rational than we like to believe. In this chapter I shall consider some further ways in which we blur our experience or practice self-delusion about our lives as consumers.
Our economy absolutely requires that we nurture illusions if it is to persist in its present ways. Our image of what things mean to us and the homilies we share and repeat to each other have become increasingly at odds with the realities of our daily lives. We magnify the satisfactions our material pursuits bring, while the sacrifices are either blotted out or reinterpreted in ways that make what we’re doing seem to make sense.
To the psychotherapist, such a dedication by people to precisely the way of life that causes their distress is a familiar phenomenon. Irony and self-deception are abundant in the behavior patterns he studies. The psychotherapist’s perspective is less superficially reassuring than the Panglossian circle of mainstream economics, which defines our real preferences as revealed—conveniently—by precisely what we buy. But there is something to be gained if one persists in the effort to examine experience a bit more closely than one’s grocery list permits—perhaps not only self-knowledge but even the possibility of a kind of liberation considerably more satisfying than simply being “free to choose” what is on the shelves.
The Automobile as Dream Machine
Let us begin our examination of the self-deceptions of the consumer life by looking at the role of automobiles in our lives. Few products have had as powerful a role in shaping the way we live, for both good and ill, and few so strongly define and limit what options appear available to us. Moreover, few products have aroused such a complex of emotions in us or become so utterly indispensable to our way of life. The French semiologist Roland Barthes has even provocatively suggested that “cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals … the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”2
In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood we find one character saying “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” Joyce Carol Oates says about the frame of mind of one of her characters, “As long as he had his own car he was an American and could not die.” And lest one think such statements appear only in fiction, one finds in a New York Times article on the effects of energy shortages on people’s lives the following statement by a social worker who had switched from solo driving to a car pool: “That first week of the car pool, when I knew my car was not out in the parking lot, I felt like I had lost an arm or something.”3
In America cars have been the lifeblood of the society of growth; it is not without reason that roads and highways are referred to as arteries.* Even those who live in cities, where automobiles may seem less of a necessity, depend for their very lives on the flow of automotive traffic. The seductive pull of the automobile-aided by huge government investments in a comprehensive highway system—has led to the atrophy of rail transportation, and since few of us grow our own food, we count on trucks and roads for the necessities of life.
Automobiles have reshaped our landscape, both geographically and culturally. At a time when few of us could see that the genie in the bottle looked very much like a smirking OPEC sheik, and when most of us probably thought that hydrocarbon emissions had something to do with putting bubbles in soft drinks, America took to the open road. Taking full advantage of our vast continent, we pushed ahead toward one last frontier—the relatively open spaces that surrounded our cities even after the Pacific had been reached and settled. The westward push that had dominated America’s consciousness and expressed her vitality for so many years was replaced by an outward push. In every city, East and West, we expressed our expansiveness in this new way, forsaking the clustered way of life that had characterized city life for thousands of years. We created instead a new kind of city, freed from the old constraints imposed by time and distance. The automobile seemed to provide us with a way of keeping in touch, of sustaining the critical mass that is required for a lively culture, and yet enjoying as well the greenery and open space that we have always envisioned as Eden. Now, having tasted of the fruits of OPEC, we are threatened with expulsion from Eden—or perhaps, in the modern case, with house arrest instead of exile: Without the car, how could we get around? The structure of our living, shopping, and working arrangements seems to make the private automobile absolutely indispensable.
Automobiles are the core of our economy as well. Daniel J. Boorstin, historian and Librarian of Congress, asserts, “We cannot understand what we mean in America by competition or by monopoly, by advertising, by industrial leadership, or by know-how, unless we have understood the role of the automobile.”4 One in six jobs in America are directly or indirectly related to the automobile (not just in building them, but in selling, distributing, and servicing them; mining or producing the materials; drilling for, refining, and distributing the fuel for them; and so on).5 Every twenty-four hours we add 10,000 new drivers and 10,000 new cars to our roads.6 Estimates of how much of the average American’s income goes to support his automobile—not just in paying for the car, but in interest payments, insurance, repairs, parking, tolls, fuel, taxes, and so forth—range from one out of ten to almost one out of every four dollars spent.7 Indeed, our social fabric seems to be constructed out of automobile parts.
But automobiles are more than just a necessity to us. They are a way of life. Our involvement with them is more than just a matter of practicality; they serve us as a symbol of freedom, strength, speed, and adventure. Perhaps one of the reasons that solo driving to and from work has continued so persistently in the face of serious impracticalities is that it is so conducive to fantasy. Cars are our personal dream machines, and dreams are private experiences.
In many instances cars have been specifically designed to enhance this kind of fantasy. Interior and exterior design, model names, and the contents of ads all converge toward an image of driving that implies not only great speed but also far greater skill than is really involved. Everyday driving is in fact a rather passive, simple task that most of the time requires a bare minimum of skill. The effort to make cars “exciting,” “sexy,” and “supercharged” has helped to obscure the everyday experience of driving and to encourage us to make of cars a vehicle for our fantasies rather than merely a mode of transportation.
Looking into the not too distant past, even our sexual mores can be seen as intimately related to the automobile. Perhaps now that changes in sexual standards have become more pervasive and acknowledged, now that space and discretion are provided the young for their sexual experimentation, fewer initiate their sexual lives in automobiles. But for a transitional generation, the automobile was a boudoir as much as a mode of transportation. The possibility of young couples disappearing together for a few hours in an automobile did not cause a change in sexual behavior in itself. There had to be a receptive culture for this to be permitted in the first place. But the sense of freedom generated by the automobile did contribute to the background sense that young people were independent of and separate from their parents rather than part of a larger unit with a well-defined and delimited place. And the mobility and privacy provided by the automobile did make possible changes in sexual patterns which society at the time was willing to tolerate (and perhaps even encourage) only if it did not have to see or explicitly acknowledge them.
In return for the freedom, independence, spontaneity, and excitement that cars are felt to give us, we have been willing to pay an enormous price—though we have tended to deny the price we pay. For one thing, riding in cars is one of the most dangerous things we do in our daily lives. The highway accident rates we endure are astonishing—50,000 violent deaths, 4.5 million injuries each year,8 as many casualties each year as we sustained in the entire Vietnam War. Moreover, like war deaths, highway fatalities take their toll disproportionately on the young. More than half of the victims each year are in their twenties or younger. Indeed, if present trends continue, one out of sixty children born in America
