Marketing The Decline

It was too serendipitous to tackle a topic and then see an amazing example of the very issue be blasted across the media landscape. Lower your expectations, folks, and stop complaining about bare store shelves, skeleton staffs and bad customer service that you enjoyed as recently as February 2020. The media will be marketing a poorer standard of living as the American system spirals downward.

This is a steady phenomenon as media messaging talks about the evil of air conditioning or the positives of communal living. It’s not living in a flophouse. It’s communal living. It’s not being too poor to be a one room lodger. It’s sharing space. It’s a sales pitch. All of our media is propaganda, and this is selling you on a crappier lifestyle as morally superior or higher status.

This is where a very culturally important segment of America plays a critical role. The left’s articulate class can fill paper jobs that pay well but there is an overproduction issue. There are many downwardly mobile, educated members of the left’s coalition that get nothing from the system or voting for the left except status points. These people have status within the system but are poor. What we get is a corps of people who can use interesting vocabulary and phrases to cover up their poverty. The PhD baristas sell the system’s garbage and spew its lines to influence everyone else.

These people do not live in trailers. They live in tiny homes. A tiny home is a small dwelling on wheels that is green living and minimalist. Good little white urbanites can have a home to call their own in the city. A tiny home is also cope. These white urbanites cannot afford a single family dwelling or condo in the city but still want the status bump of being a homeowner and urbanite. They want it all but fail miserably. Their rationalization is that the trailer they live in is part of a new, hip movement.

The marketing of a lower standard of living for Americans will get a boost from the climate change cult. Comparisons to the prosperous past will come with the qualification that it was bad for the environment. This is present in the tiny home messaging, and consuming less, living without air conditioning and not owning a car all fit into the lower carbon footprint push. It is embarrassing that the environmental movement allowed itself to become CO2 focused only, but we are talking about the same people who now see any political and economic policy only through a racial lens.

“You‘ll own nothing and you’ll be happy,” was not just a throwaway line from a World Economic Forum’s video. That was a scripted line for a video with high production values for an elite audience. It was a focus group tested marketing pitch to sell being a serf to poor but systemically high status people. Not everyone, just the people who mold and shape opinions and culture. They won’t just live in the pod and eat the bug, they’ll love it, and they’ll tell you to love it, too.