by Geoff Olson

Greed drives the desire for profit at any cost. Envy is a mainstay of the fashion industry, and marketing as a whole. Anger is subtly exploited in the Army of One fantasies of video games and recruitment advertisements. Pride fuels the “high self-esteem” bandwagon. In the era of hypercapitalism, these and most of the other so-called deadly sins have been rehabilitated by the market as positive, even praiseworthy, states of mind. “Sin” has been spun. Hence, what I call The Deadly Spins.

Every time a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
– Gore Vidal

A teacher friend once told me he discovered that 30-some students at the high school where he taught had a regular cocaine habit. The surprising aspect: the female users were primarily taking the drug to keep thin, rather than get high.
Bizarre, but not a total mystery. Many healthy young women find their bodies spectacularly shabby in comparison to the skeletal standard offered by Hollywood starlets, magazine models and runway wraiths. They envy the professional anorexic’s life-negating perfection, which has been cross-referenced with all sorts of media-mediated baggage: wealth, style, status and power.
Gluttony, sloth, lust, greed, anger, envy, pride: of the seven “deadly spins,” the most self-corrosive is envy.
“It is certain that envy is the worst sin that is, for all other sins are sins only against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness,” wrote Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. “For envy is bitter about all the good things that belong to another, and in this way, it is different from all other sins. For almost all other sins give some sort of pleasure in themselves, save only envy, which always has in itself anguish and sorrow.”
Envy has probably been with humanity at least since the emergence of consciousness itself; the difference today is its cultural scale. It’s become more than Chaucer’s bitterness “about all the good things that belong to another.” Envy is turbocharged by the consumer market’s capacity to traffic in images, in a manner far beyond the grainy black-and-white halftones of only half a century ago. “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages,” writes art critic John Berger. The visual landscape is the hook for the forces of publicity:
“Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves or our lives by buying something more. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour, and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. The publicity image steals our love of ourselves as we are and offers it back to us for the price of the product.”
Most adults have some intellectual defences against this paper-thin paradigm. But children and adolescents have few or none, and today face a marketing onslaught sharpened like stilettos by focus groups, psychographics and all the other dark arts of spin. (In fact, with the exception of items such as cars and dwellings, many advertisers no longer flog product to the over-35 demographic. Studies show you can only build “brand loyalty” by targeting the five to 15 set.)
Envy compels the young consumer of pop-culture towards the camera’s eye, in search of envy’s Holy Grail: fame. So-called reality TV shows trade on this mostly empty promise, with young unknowns hoodwinked into thinking they can be “famous for being famous.”
Even for those who aren’t actively seeking celebrity, the camera-conscious zeitgeist compels them to think of themselves, if only subliminally, as starring in their own productions. In Life: The Movie, movie critic Neil Gabler of The New Yorker claims the US entertainment industry has democratized the idea of celebrity, extending the idea of performance into daily life:
“Over the years our movie going and television watching has been impregnating the American consciousness with the contentions and esthetics of entertainment, until we have become performers ourselves, performing our own lives out of the shards of movies. One might even think of American life, including quotidian American life, as a vast production in which virtually every object is a prop, every space is a set, every person is an actor and every experience is a scene in a continuing narrative.”
Nearly 50 years ago, sociologist David Riesman identified the emergence of a new type of social character in the US that he called “other-directed” – by which he meant, essentially, that one’s goals were directed toward satisfying the expectations of others. In other words, an audience. By definition, other-directed Americans were conscious of performance – a self-consciousness that led another sociologist, Erving Goffman, to conclude that in the 20th century, “life itself is a dramatically enacted thing.”
Place the cultural DNA of “other-directness” into the petri dish of the US entertainment industry, and voila: you have the cult of celebrity, with envy fueling a continually frustrated search for identity. A sense of discontent is central to the revenue flow. From the tabloid rack to the cosmetic counter to the television celebrity profile, there’s big box office in subtly pushing the consumer toward dissatisfaction with his or her appearance, lifestyle and identity.
Writes Gabler: “Acting like a cultural Ebola virus, entertainment has even invaded organisms no one would ever have imagined could provide amusement.” He points to the strange case of Dr. Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and sixties icon, who “turned his death into entertainment by using his computer webpage to chronicle his deterioration from prostate cancer, a show which ended with a video of him drinking a toxic cocktail in what he called a ‘visible, interactive suicide.’ ”
In modern day North America, celebrity and envy are joined at the hip: the Siamese twins of the corporate-sponsored social contract. According to US media critic Todd Gitlin, “to speak of a culture of celebrity nowadays is nearly to commit a redundancy.” Instant stardom has become the all-purpose spray-on, to be liberally applied on everything from products to politicians, for a branded, otherworldly glow.
To Cintra Wilson, sometime screenwriter and former LA resident, this culture of fawning obsession over superstars has become the secular religion of our time, one filled with false messiahs and empty rituals: “It is generally not the icons themselves that I jolly and assail; it’s the huge tumescent aura of Otherness, the grandiose Largitutude and supermagnified glamour of these deranged old musicians and dumb pretty kids and Sacred Cow Ornamental personages that I attack.”
Wilson insists the machinery of fame, with its promise of global attention and big bucks, can reduce real talents to camera-hungry hacks, and the rest of us to hungry ghosts at a banquet where we will never find a seat. In a media-mediated world where you can never be too rich or too thin, it’s no surprise that some young outsiders will reduce themselves to drug-taking wraiths in an effort to reach an illusory ideal.
In the forward to her book, A Massive Swelling, the author smashes celebrity’s hall of mirrors into shards, and exposes the little person behind the curtain:
“I attack the maddening blizzard of tinsel scattered in the icons’ wake: the tidal waves of false awe glaring off their shiny suits. I swipe at the lurid neon head of the amplified celebrity wizard and not the frail, dumpy little nebbish behind the big screen of fire, because deep down we’re all delicate and pitiable inside. I believe that deep down, everyone is fundamentally an OK Joe deserving of your civility and compassion, even the ones I really hate, like Richard Dreyfus.”

Geoff Olson is a Vancouver writer and political cartoonist gefo@telus.net