My Turn

I wrote the following essay in 1981 when I was a young stay-at-home mom. I had been puzzling for some time over what seemed to me to be a lack of quality, and lack of reverence for quality, in the modern world. I did extensive research, tracing the problem back to where it seemed to have begun; reading books that led me to other books; reading old magazine articles on microfilm. This essay is the result. I originally intended to submit it to Newsweek magazine for the "My Turn" feature, which is why I used that title for this entry.


The Antichrist is here. He has been among us for over twenty years, and he has poisoned our lives by indoctrinating us with the message that money and possessions are more important than people. He has robbed us of our pride in our work, given us high crime and unemployment and inflation. He kills thousands of us outright every year. He has destroyed the quality of American life, and convinced us that no other way of life is possible. He is too big, too pervasive, too powerful to be killed by any one person. The Antichrist is not a man but a theory which became dogma, then was elevated to godhead. The Antichrist is here, and his name is Planned Obsolescence.

As frequently happens, a good idea not thought through was found too late to have disastrous and far-reaching consequences. Planned obsolescence was an attempt to continue the wartime economic boom in peacetime. In wartime, goods are produced in mass quantities to be used and destroyed and replaced in an endless cycle. What if we could create that cycle artificially, by convincing consumers to replace the things they bought on a yearly basis? Smaller goods could be constructed shoddily, made to break or wear out; then they would cost little to produce and last just long enough to become indispensible. For big-ticket items, an artificial style snobbery could be cultivated by making subtle changes every year so the difference between last year's model and this one would be obvious. Consumers would trade in a perfectly good item on a new one, simply because the new model had arrived. It could work...

I grew up believing that everything I saw advertised on TV was my birthright. Is this some aberration of mine, or have other people labored under this delusion? And if the latter -- was it just chance, or were we meant to feel that way? Is this why so many looters and burglars and armed robbers, when questioned, state that they took the merchandise or the money because they felt they had a right to it?

When you sell an entire population the notion that quality is meaningless in one segment of life, it is inevitable that that notion will spread to other segments. They told the consumer quality is meaningless in his possessions; what matters is that they be brand new. Nothing lasts, everything falls apart long before you get your money's worth, but when that happens you throw it away and replace it. For the industrial worker this message was reiterated and reinforced on the assembly line: Don't worry about doing it right. Do it well enough to get by -- and do it fast, or we'll get someone in here who can. Thousands of industrial workers have been replaced by machines, and thousands more saw their jobs reduced to a mechanical level, so that goods could be turned out quickly enough to meet the demand. It's hard to take pride in your work when even what little craftsmanship is left to you is denied by foreman and factory managers -- who in turn suffer from the low standards forced upon them.

The lack of meaning, of quality in work, leaves a vast hole in the human psyche which advertisers use to their clients' advantage. In the 50s and 60s everybody either kept up with the Joneses or broke their backs (and their hearts) trying. Why? Because psychological studies told advertisers how to play on this formless yearning caused by the expulsion of craftsmanship from the workplace. Ever-increasing mechanization didn't just make planned obsolescence possible, it fed and nurtured it by what it did to the workers. Fill that empty hole with things! Brand new things, with style changes every year so the whole world will know they're brand new! Of course some people couldn't afford to replace their goods that often -- but when they fall apart, as they're designed and constructed to do, you must either repair, replace, or do without.

Repair becomes ever more difficult as more and more products are built not just to fall apart but to be irreparable. For example, my son received a toy for his second birthday which was broken by the time I cut his birthday cake. I dried his tears, fetched my trusty screwdriver -- and discovered that the case had been molded together at the factory. Now I'm not suggesting that that toy was programmed to self-destruct within one day's normal use by a child for whose age group it was intended. But neither do I delude myself that it was meant to last until he outgrew it. Among my son's toys are a few that survived from my own childhood, brought out of storage after twenty-five years and put into service again. I couldn't break them, and neither can he. However, the best toys I can find for him from today's selection don't even last long enough to be passed on to a younger sibling, let alone preserved for his own children.

How can I teach my son that there is quality in life, when everything in life falls apart all around him from lack of quality? His toys break, my kitchen appliances break, the family car breaks. Soon he'll be old enough to read the newspapers. He'll read about people who died in cars whose manufacturer knew they were defective but decided lawsuits would be cheaper than recall. He'll read about people who die when nearly-new buildings collapse, walkways fall, roofs cave in; because corners were cut to save money. He'll read about corporations that routinely poison, maim, and kill their industrial workers and swear that they don't do it, while at the same time they maintain that protection safeguards are too expensive anyway. He'll read about people who die in hotel fires because somebody decided it was cheaper to pay off the fire inspector than to comply with fire codes. He'll read about innocent Americans killed by foreign terrorists who bought their knowhow from former US government agents. He'll read about all these victims of planned obsolescence and see a dangerous world. He'll see a world in which no one except his nearest and dearest values his life at all. Perhaps he'll even ask me why these crimes go unpunished when an individual who commits the same crime -- hurts or kills another person for money -- goes to jail.

"We value our own lives with a desperation born of the certainty that nobody else values them at all."

Saddest of all, it is the most numerous generation in American history -- my own, the Baby Boom generation -- who grew up indoctrinated with planned obsolescence. Grew up surrounded by proof that American products are inferior to foreign-made ones. Grew up believing the industrialists and builders who say "We can't afford to do it any better". Grew up accepting planned obsolescence as a given, an immutable fact; rather than what it really is: an artificial economic stimulant that became an addiction. Like any drug addict, America suffers not only from the dependency but also from the damaging effects of the drug itself. In these areas we've been treating the symptoms instead of the disease. The "Me Decade" with its spate of self-help books was a band-aid to put over the gaping hole left in our lives when the quality was stolen away. Now we're demanding tougher laws and bigger jails to deal with the shocking rise in the crime rate.

Rehabilitation seems not to work anymore -- but is that really surprising, when the society to which we return the criminal believes wholeheartedly that wealth matters more than human life? That's the very assumption he was acting upon when he committed his crime! Planned obsolescence taught him that, it taught all of us that. We value our own lives with a desperation born of the certainty that nobody else values them at all. We lament the scarcity of heroes without realizing that the prevailing societal attitude discourages heroism. There has always been crime, and there probably always will be, but we should at least retool our society so that it does not foster sociopathic ideas.

American producers gave, and continue to give, no choice to the consumer: Planned obsolescence or nothing. The choice finally came from foreign automakers who built cars to last; cut their corners on styling and frills rather than quality. The results of this choice can be seen in closed factories and long unemployment lines all across America. But the message was clear in 1955 when the first Volkswagens arrived in this country and were snapped up as fast as the quality-conscious Germans could build them. American automakers responded by making their cars even bigger, flashier, and more costly, and leaning even harder on the message that last year's model is no good. But enough of us kept right on voting against planned obsolescence, voting with our dollars, that now our tax dollars must go to bail out the very industries that refused to hear our message. The factory worker lost his pride in his work, saw it sacrificed on the altar of planned obsolescence, and now he faces loss of the job itself -- sacrificed on that same altar, to that same false god.

The Antichrist is here, he's been among us since the 1950s, and his first commandment is "What's good for General Motors is good for the country". Planned obsolescence is no longer a theory, it's our way of life. It's killing us all, and nobody cares because it's taught us not to care.


Okay, so that was My Turn. A bit overheated, to be sure, but supported by the facts as I knew them and applicable to the world in which I lived. Do I still believe it? Pretty much. I think planned obsolescence was a bad decision, and that we're still living with the adverse results of that decision. I'd be interesed to hear what you think.