Who is Victor Lebow?

The above quote is from Victor Lebow in a 1955 article from the Journal of Retailing (PDF here). Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee used it in her 20 minute film The Story of Stuff, which you can watch online Here, Provided that you have never been told what is wrong with the world in, like, a totally Valley-Girl accent before. Not much new in the film, but it fingers Victor Lebow as a mastermind of all evil today, which may or may not actually be so. Her film was written about in the New York Times in 2009, which generated a lot of interest in Victor Lebow, especially since no one else had really ever heard of him.

There exists today a really interesting thread here of bloggers, academics and commentators weighing in to collectively track this quote, and some of its misuses. Turns out Lebow may not have been the devil incarnate, the quote is out of context, and omits a few sentences in the middle. To find this information out though is a great story in itself involving photographing a microfilm screen, fire drills at a library, and third parties on the Internet carefully transcribing to bring out the full PDF.

I actually found Lebow's article quite astute. To put the above quote in context, I clipped what Lebow mentions just before. I have inserted #s and notes in [brackets].

Actually, there are three separate aspects from which competition should be viewed.
From the standpoint of the producer, anything that impedes the movement of goods or
services from his factory to the consumer constitutes competition. On the other hand, to the consumer competition is simply the multiplicity of choices available to him. Whether and how he acts upon these choices depends upon [1] the intensity of the wants that have been generated, [2] upon the limitations of his buying and borrowing powers, and [3] upon the customs, habits, and aspirations of his ethnic, social, or geographical group.

To the producer, competition is an irritant and a source of insecurity. Therefore, his drive is toward monopoly. Since every producer wants to remove the obstacles to the most profitable sale of the largest practical volume of his goods, his instinctive drive is to limit competition. The fact is that the essence of marketing strategy is to establish as many monopoly positions as possible. These may involve patents, trade- marks, style leaderships, exclusive arrangements of all kinds, the size of dominance of advertising and selling efforts, the extent to which the consumer’s emotional attitude towards his consumption can become the captive of the producer.

[Omitted here a paragraph on the importance of advertising, stressing the dominance in 1955 of television ads as a means to apply peer pressure.]

But what the retailer should see is that all of this pressure upon the consumer not only gives him innumerable choices, but actually strengthens his ability to reject the overwhelming proportion of the items proffered by our competitive economy. The total result of the pressure is to change the pattern of living. The persuasive techniques for instilling new wants into the consumer may result, in buying the new Hi-Fi set, or the new refrigerator, or the new car, and result also in displacing or postponing the purchase of clothes, or furniture, or vacation trips.

This leads to the third aspect of competition. It lies in the competition for the consumer’s attention, for his confidence, for his response to new wants.

It seems he is indicating that the peer pressure can be sculpted, and this was the mission of truly evil geniuses such as Edward Bernays, the Father of Public Relations who developed not only the Madison Avenue industry to do just that on TV, but also in politics. For more on Bernays, see my article from the Hairy Prone Companion. As for the competition for the consumer's attention, see Michael Goldhaber who has proposed an entire economy based on attention as possibly the last truly limited resource.

In context or out, misquoted or not, guilty or not, the words describe pretty well a completely manufactured and unnecessary problem most of us face every time we buy something.

Gazelle

Here's a great site for getting rid of old tech- Enter what you have, old computers, cell phones, etc, and straight off they send you a price offer. Apparently they send you a box and all you have to do is fill it and mail it back - postage prepaid. That is easy! http://www.gazelle.com/
I'll follow up when I try this and see how it works compared to the pain-in-the-bottom eBay method.

Desktop

Desk - Music and Sound Design from Aaron Trinder Film:Motion:Music on Vimeo.

interior clutter

I am listening to the audiobook version of Steven Johnson's new book "Where Good Ideas Come From." One of his postulates is that there is a certain amount of chaos required for innovation to happen. He proves this by an inverted Freudian interpretation of dreams; basically saying that our brains fire random synapses and connect things totally randomly, and it is only later in waking life that we connect or attribute meanings there, but all the resources for our dreams are just sitting there in a junk heap. The static noise of sleep juxtaposes unlike things in a surreal way, which can seem like flashes of insight upon waking.

So if chaos is sort of good, what does this mean for housekeeping? Should one live in chaos or order or a good mixture of both? While fixing motorcycles, order is of the utmost importance with regard to finding tools, but it has also become clear to me the value of having a yard full of junk in which one can pull any manor of scrap on hand and adapt it for useful purposes. Thankfully now all the world's junkyards are now connected with eBay, so there isn't so much danger of skulking around places frequented by drunk fat men in wife beaters shooting rats, or free-range spiked collared Rottweiler mixes, but perhaps out of sight may really be out of mind? What I'm after in this blog is simplifying my life by getting rid of some of the internal and external clutter that hampers my pursuit of happiness.

This weekend, I fixed a Ducati Motorcycle that was declared doomed by two authorized shops as not worth the price for a professional repair person to fix. I just took a risk, bought the offending part off some junkyard on ebay, and the thing runs like a top now, better than I have ever know it to. So, now I have to ask myself if I really want to keep it (along with my four other bikes). I'll take a week to ride and feel it out. It is fun but kind of like skydiving probably is fun. I don't need to have that kind of fun in my life on a daily basis, and there are things I need more.

I am in Technolust for a new 13" MacBookPro. I swear to god Macintosh designs are like drugs. Damn you, Johnathan Ive (with fists balled and eyes turned heavenward)! Ever since I allowed myself to fantasize about it I have felt the pull to a mac store like water going down the drain. My heart beats fast just thinking of it. I want to leave work early to buy it, I want to stroke it all night, I want I want I want>>> Desires are inexhaustable. I've got at least four out-of-date or slightly broken computers cluttering the field, but nothing on which to write my November Novel.

More Less

This blog will consist of regular reflections on how we can enjoy more getting by with less. Like it or not, a lifestyle focused less on acquisition and more on appreciating simplicity is in our future. Getting rid of the trash could be just as exciting as buying something new if only we take the right attitude. Rather than defining ourselves by what we own, I want to celebrate the best things in life; which are not as the bumper sticker says, usually things: empty space, quiet, relaxation, generosity, & creativity.
Listen to this podcast from San Fransisco Zen Center titled "The Zen of Going to the Bathroom." for a funny meditation on letting go. Sojun Mel Weitsman describes money like blood: circulation of it in any living system is crucial to good health. If any part of the body is cut off from blood or gets too much of it, the whole body becomes sick. The same goes for a city or a population. Obesity and anorexia are more than an epidemics wreaking our digestion systems. Cleansing can be a huge relief. The more stuff we feel we need, or have to grasp on to, the more we fear loosing what we have or not getting what we want. The more the fear, well, you know what happens.

While cleaning out a second home we could not afford to keep I read the book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. It is full of amazing stories of people whose attachment to things can cripple them. Most amazing is how prevalent but hidden the disorder of hoarding has become in America.
On the other hand, there is the Cult of Less folks who have used digital technology to reduce all their material possessions down to a small backpack. I am too sentimental to become a full on ascetic but some times it sounds like kind of a relief. With moderation, I vow to start simplifying my life.