In the year 1215, King John of England was ambushed by a group of Nobles in a meadow called Runnymede and was made to sign the Magna Carta.
The Lords and Barons who wrote the Magna Carta wanted to establish limits to the previously absolute power of the King and to return England to the state of law that existed prior to the Norman invasion of 1066.
None of those present were alive in 1066 and none of them really knew exactly what the rule of law was in pre-Norman times - they mostly just made it up to suit themselves.
The Magna Carta has since had a profound influence on constitutional law and part of the document was later re-written into the US Constitution - "No person shall be ...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process..."
The right to own property thus was deemed to be inalienable by invasive aliens in a land whose original human inhabitants had no concept of private ownership.
Private property rights form the basis of Capitalism and along with banking and credit facilities were crucial to the development of large-scale privately owned industry as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in the 1800's. Many goods had previously been produced under the domestic or cottage system. Under this system, raw materials would be delivered by a merchant to a craftsperson's home where people working on their own time would produce clothing, lace, baskets, shoes or what-have-you to be later collected by the merchant for resale. The Industrial Revolution spawned a new idea - the factory system. Large buildings were put up, industrial machinery installed, and workers were recruited to drive the machines.
Workers lost autonomy over their time and the tasks they performed moment by moment and gave up the right to self-determination for the duration of their work hours. The system was evolving and the rules along with it.
In Britain, the enclosure movement was forcing the poor off the land; most faced the choice of working in the factories, emigrating or starving. In the Northwestern United States, after Colonel Edwin Drake had successfully drilled for rock oil in Pennsylvania and established that kerosene refined from it could be used as a subsitute for whale oil, corporations were established and rapidly grew in size, monopolising supply of fuel and distribution of freight by railroad, making massive profits.
Corporations were originally set up for the service and benefit of the wider community but Government turned a blind eye to the sheer scale of the profits made and some of the anti-competitive practices that were going on because in the infancy of corporate capitalism everyone was benefiting. Grain farmers in the MidWest were now able to efficiently ship vast quantities of wheat into bagel shops in New York and bakeries in Boston for example - once hapless innocents engaged in subsistence on the Mid-Western plains began evolving into major primary food producers and wheat became a commodity product traded mostly on the basis of price.
As the Industrial Age began to kick into high gear, industrialists began to worry about the capability of industry to turn out more product than could be sold to a public that stubbornly retained many pre-industrial values and remained essentially frugal. In 1929 an article written by one Charles Kettering appeared entitled "Keeping the Customer Dissatisfied". Kettering was director of research at General Motors. He advocated a change in approach - from need satisfaction to need creation. From pull to push.
Advertising was nothing new but had been limited to basic newspaper ads and rough posters until Thomas Barratt of the Pears Soap Company revolutionised the industry with the use of expensive reproductions of artworks printed along with glowing recommendations from doctors and chemists which appeared in newspapers and magazines. An 1883 advertisement covering the whole front page of the New York Herald quoted religious leader Henry Ward Beecher as saying "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" - associating Godliness and virtue with the use of Pears soap.
The advertising industry grew through the 1920's developing further on propagandist techniques refined during the First World War. Following the setbacks of a major economic depression and another World War, the wide uptake of televison and a condition of growing affluence during the 1950's enabled spectacular advancement in advertising's reach and influence. Initially a whole televison show would have a single sponsor but soon the idea of an ad-break was developed so that multiple commercial messages from a variety of advertisers could be inserted into a single program. Since the 1980's there have even been shows about ads featuring nothing but commercials introduced by a witty host - and with ad breaks.
Henry Ford, who was largely ignorant of history, had long before declared it was 'more or less bunk'. A future-obsessed populace, eagerly anticipating commuting to work in the morning by jet-pack, went along with the idea. In Western society, and particularly in North America, a new generation was rocking around the clock, hanging out at the Mall, and looking towards a future so bright everyone wore shades. Everyday life was beginning more and more to resemble a Disneyland fantasy and popular thought, such as it was, was informed by Flash Gordon and Star Trek, Barbie and Ken, open blue sky and romantic sunsets set to orchestration by John Williams. Above all the theme of the age was Progress. Economic expansion without limits. Systematized manufacturing techniques, not invented by Ford but forever associated with his name, had revolutionized the booming production of cars which were coming off the line in massive numbers and so cheaply that in an economy awash with easily extracted oil, even the burger flippers could afford them. Workers were able to shut out the horrors of busy, polluted, noisy cities by commuting to and from manicured suburbs in the comfortable leatherette interiors of their vehicles. Waste was flushed or trucked away, dumped somewhere out of sight. Life was as bright and shiny as Doris Day and becoming increasingly fake - from the plastic trees lining the roads of many American freeways to the smiles on the faces of the customer service staff to pre-packaged food manufactured using production line methods and so processed that consumers didn't even have to digest it on their own. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was materialising right in front of people's eyes but no one noticed because they were too distracted by the sideshows of that very same Brave New World - cinematic spectacles ever larger than anything before and a growing smorgasboard of consumer goods, toys, motor vehicles, modern home comforts and gadgetry continually updated to next year's model - usually introduced half way through the year prior.
Instead of adding to one's happiness, the reality is that an oversupply of consumer goods subtracts from personal satisfaction, adding to one's misery (while multiplying rapidly and dividing one's attention). Chocolate-coated sugary candies leave a taste in the mouth that can only be assuaged by the consumption of more chocolate candy, gaudy entertainments dull the senses to anything but even more gaudy entertainments. It never occurred to a Roman that there could be a number zero, it never occurred to most Americans that less might be more.
Any society that fails to control its appetites in the short run surely will go hungry in the long - you can quote me on that one dear readers - and the surest way to ruin is printing paper money and spending it.
President Nixon removed any connection of the dollar to a value standard such as gold in the early 1970's. This was necessary if the consumer mardi-gras was to continue as the United States was passing its peak of domestic oil production and energy is money. The rules governing credit expansion were now free to be made up as they went along and a system of global finance, now largely experimental, waited like a dormant influenza virus ready to evolve into a pandemic explosion of debt once computers and telecommunication networks enabled risk modelling and creative packaging of loans into parcels for resale.
Archimedes said, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth." He was talking about the power of levers - to him it was not a question of whether someone had the strength to move the Earth but simply a matter of where you had to stand to gain sufficient effect from leverage. Fossil energy is a form of leverage in that it can be used to power tools that augment human muscular energy. Borrowed money, effectively a debt against future energy reserves, can be used as leverage to increase the effect of monetary gains. Now, like a teenage boy behind the wheel of a muscle car, whole Nations of doe-eyed, dairy-fed, daydream believers imagined it was they, their power, their cleverness, that wrought these wonders and not a one-off endowment of fossil resource.
The public couldn't make the connection between energy and debt-based money and no one wanted to think about resource limitations. They only knew that nothing could stand in the way of Progress.
The main driver of Western economies for the last decade or so has been consumer spending. To begin with this had a positive effect - stimulating retail activity and service sector employment. But each time there was threat of a recession - in a capitalist economy necessary for manufacturers to re-align their products, work out excess inventory, improve processes - central bankers dropped interest rates making credit easier to come by and re-stimulating spending. Savings rates dropped to nothing and then went negative.
Once the initial huge advantages of industrialised production had been realised and markets had been saturated, the law of diminishing returns began to take hold and tweaks to time and efficiency gave only minor benefits. The focus turned to cost-cutting. Manufacturing was exported to cheap labour economies. But this changed nothing about the old problem that industrialised production is capable of turning out far more product than consumers actually need. What do you do when everyone already has a car, two cars, a boat, a fridge, a beer fridge, the latest vacuum, a washing machine, clothes drier, food processor, lawn mower, electric iron, a TV in every room, electric shavers, multiple stereos, dvd players? You turn to your pals in the advertising industry, to create a perceived need for bread makers, juicers, cappucino machines, rice cookers, yoghurt makers, Mr. Soda, ipods, robotic vacuums, electric air fresheners, ever more obscure manufactured appliances to fill ever more trivial manufactured desires and then you make an offer too good to refuse by making these products available on credit and then easier credit and easier credit again.
Consumers began spending more than they earned, debt became normalised. Interest rates in the US have now effectively hit zero, with no more room to cut rates, the Federal Reserve is directly purchasing bad debt - just another way of printing money. Even as your author struggles at his keyboard, the US Government is buying up General Motors, former employer of Charles Kettering, a company that could be turning out thousands of new cars a day, if only someone actually needed another car or had the money to buy one. Leverage, as we are currently finding out, increases profits in the good times and increases the pain in the bad.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so said Isaac Newton, and every debt has to be paid back and accounted for sooner or later.
Socially, too, there were problems boiling away under the surface - although it's hard to quantify the equal and opposite part. Millions of people who were unable or unwilling to take part in the market frenzy found themselves on the streets, in prison, or dependent on substances that provided an alternative to perceived reality. Numerous counter-cultures developed, some of which came bundled with wacky conspiracy theories about how the Illuminati, the Rothschild dynasty, the Jews, are controlling our minds and our destinies because they are the evil Masters of the World, in possession of the secret of the Grail discovered by the Knights Templar while crusading in the Holy Land... or some such.
But these were just distractions, really it was our own thoughtlessness, our casual and disaffected attitudes. We've been complicit in our own undoing, equating self-determination with having the choice of six different brands of canned beans while the consumer society we've all been a part of regressed backwards into infantile, childish behaviours, focussed only on immediate gratification.
If you buy something with money and it doesn't work, then you have a right to get your money back or be compensated in some tangible way. When so much of life is commercialised, the idea becomes endemic that everything that goes wrong is someone's fault, someone else must be to blame, someone else must be responsible. Dickheads spill hot coffee on themselves in the drive-thru and then go and sue McDonalds for a million bucks. Not that I'm sticking up for McDonalds, but really.
When everything is corporatised and enclosed, citizens become disgruntled, disaffected, alienated and have no sense of community and no sense of ownership over their shared public spaces. It's every man for himself.
Alienated, disgruntled consumers make alienated, disgruntled workers.
In the cold, bloodless spirit of the production line, more and more administrative work became call-centerised. Workers were becoming so disaffected and demotivated that in order to get done efficiently, work needed to be externally driven by incoming calls. Increasingly, data entry was actioned by the customer through automatic teller machines, the internet, or while on the phone to customer service. Work output could now be precisely measured against a set of call standards, pitting each customer service operator against the other. Managers started referring to a worker as a resource. Processing and decison making was as much as possible accomplished automatically by computer software. Your author spoke to a bank recently about his account and was told by the operator "Computer say No!". Anything that doesn't fit into the systems and processes probably isn't profit-making activity for the organisation and therefore just isn't done.
Computer models became a substitute for thought. Finance companies keyed parameters into the model and out came a risk assessment. Rare or hard to predict events that fell outside the scope of the software - Black Swans as author Nicholas Taleb named them - weren't accounted for.
'Hey, I'm just paying the mortgage!' became a familiar catch-cry, both as an ethic for those engaged in obviously dubious employment such as debt-collection or cigarette and alcohol promotion and a lame excuse for those who sensed they could be doing something more relevant or meaningful. King John of England, brother of Richard the Lionheart, typecast as the villian in the Robin Hood Legend, who may have died from eating peaches, signed the Magna Carta or Great Charter in a picturesque but disgustingly named English meadow called Runnymede. The mortgage (from the French mort = death and gage = engagement, an engagement until death) was enabled by property rights written into law as a result. In the modern push-driven marketplace, one that is desperately creating perceived needs and supplying instant gratification for those manufactured needs in compensation for the de-humanised, shallow experience of modern life, what evil is perpetrated for the sake of paying the mortgage?