"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you."
This statement -- did it strike you as true? It is attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. The "Bring forth" quote has the common sense of "Don't keep it in! Unburden yourself! Let it out!" When psychotherapy began a century ago, this whole notion was revolutionary. Now, everybody gushes 24/7 into electronic devices, so much so that we wonder if the confessing is a bit much. Keep quiet for a while. If you bring forth everything you've got, then, do you have anything left inside?
Consumerism is like that. Corporations keep redoubling their presence in the air around us, the billboards go up to the stars and down into the palms of our hands. We have so much of our personal activity brought forth, our attention pulled out of us toward a product or an advertisement. All day and all night, the semi-naked celebrities are marching toward us. The corporate gadgets are creating a people emptied of an interior life.
This was envisioned from the very beginning of the age of corporate marketing. Edward Bernays was the cynical visionary who fathered the advertising age. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, the original "Bring-forth" thinker. Here is Bernays:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested ..."
As the voters who were so in love with Obama just a year ago switch back to fresher faces, I become alarmed at the shallowness of our personalities. What have decades of saturation-consumerism done to us? We are vibrating between impulses, controlled by outside forces with no countervailing gravity within ourselves. We are like the dogs responding to electric shocks in Pavlov's experiments.
And now that the U. S. Supreme Court has struck down campaign finance reform, here comes even bigger money pouring down upon us. There is no place to hide, or to meditate, or to vote. Think about it: The act of the vote is the initiating gesture of our democracy. It is a personal bringing forth. We stand alone in the booth and bring forth our own opinion on the election. But there's nothing left in us if we've been pressured for months by candidates so corporation-generated they are barely human.
Even as we're made more and more stupid by the forces of consumerism, we still have a depth in us like a river. A river cleans itself up and starts supporting life again if the polluting stops for even a few seasons. We should keep out the toxicity of the corporate messaging for a time. We will have to help one another develop techniques for defending ourselves. When each of us consumes less, we will all live more. What we bring forth will save us.