A Q&A with Paul Roberts, author of THE IMPULSE SOCIETY

Q&A with Paul Roberts, author of The Impulse Society What is the Impulse Society?

It is a society so focused on immediate gratification and narrow self-interest that it can’t think constructively about the future, or about the health of society as a whole. This is the “culture of narcissism” that Christopher Lasch described back in the 1970s—but vastly more advanced now. Since then, thanks to our free-market ideology and an explosion of technological capability, the tendencies that Lasch worried about in individuals have entrenched themselves at every level of society, including the very economic and political institutions that were supposed to temper individual selfishness. It’s as if no one is minding the store, and most of us feel that absence intuitively.

You argue that the hallmarks of the Impulse Society can be found in many of today’s most significant social and economic crises.

Under the Impulse Society, we’ve gotten really good at delivering what people want, but not what we really need. Wants aren’t evil, by any means, but they’re often self-centered and short-term—and no basis for running a society. But that’s what we’re trying to do—run a society on short-term, selfcentered desire, and the consequences are everywhere: in our faltering, increasingly unequal economy, where CEOs and Wall Street get rich while the middle class withers; in a political system that prioritizes quick wins over actual governing—even as urgent problems go unaddressed; and of course in the behavior of individuals, who have been “empowered” in recent decades with all sorts of want-gratifying products and “personal” technologies, yet feel more vulnerable than we have in generations.

One of the main products of the Impulse Society is anxiety—which you suggest may be our salvation, because it will lead to change.

Our anxiety is telling us that the status quo is completely unsustainable. The values you need for real, lasting social progress and personal happiness—patience, discipline, and self-sacrifice—the things you teach your kids—are precisely what has suffered most under the Impulse Society, which prioritizes short-term, bottom-line thinking. Worse, many of us have come to believe that losing these essential values was somehow inevitable—the price of success in our new, fast-paced, hyper-competitive, globalized economy. But that’s insane. The economy is more challenging today, but in no small part because we’ve succumbed to the absurd promise of immediate, consequence-free pleasure, and to the idea that patience, discipline, and self-sacrifice are no longer necessary. That’s why we’re so anxious— because, at some level, we’ve always distrusted the illusion. We know we need to revive those older values—a lot of us already are, in fact, and that’s where our opportunity lies, because as more of us do that on an individual level our institutions will have to follow. Which, ideally, is where this book can play a role – as a lens that shows people see where and how things fell apart, and how they can start to turn things around.

Talk more about this lens—what’s the story of the Impulse Society?

The main storyline here is the evolution of the relationship between the consumer economy and the “self”. As the consumer marketplace has become more efficient and sophisticated, it has, in effect, drawn steadily closer to self—so close that we can talk of market and self merging into a single entity where desire and gratification happen continuously. Some would call this an ideal state—the place humans have been trying to get to for eons. But if you see the market as blindly reaching for the bottom line, and if you see the self, not in its most enlightened and mature form, but more adolescent and impulsive (which, by the way, is what the market encourages) then the merger starts to look like a doomsday scenario. The bottom-line values of the market and the selfish impulses of the individual feed off and reinforce each other in a snowballing dynamic that pushes other, more moderating values— patience and self-sacrifice, say, or commitment to the long-term—to the sidelines. That, in a nutshell, is recipe for the Impulse Society.

There is a historical component here—this didn’t just happen over night.

In some ways, the Impulse Society is the latest chapter in the rise of consumer economy, which starts in late 19th century. Before then, we’re mainly a producing economy—we make a lot of what we consume, and the things we buy are largely essentials. The consumer economy, by contrast, emerges because we’ve finally reached a level of affluence where we can cater to our needs and our wants. As our wants become a bigger part of the economy, the economy reorients itself toward the source of those wants— the self. Now, here’s the important part: for most of the 20th century, that merger was gradual, glacial; but in the 1970s, it gets kicked into high gear by two events. The first was a revival of a free-market economic philosophy—think Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—which basically sought, through deregulation, to revive the economy by liberating business. The market would now be free to do what capitalist markets do best—generate wealth as fast and efficiently as possible. The second was the arrival of fast, cheap computing power. Together, these two catalysts supercharged the business world and, among other things, dramatically increased the speed at which the consumer economy could respond to the self. By the 1990s and early 2000s, as more and more personal technologies became available, you’ve got essentially a continuous feedback loop between self and market, which is where we really start to see some seriously negative outcomes, in everything from the financial world to the political realm.

You have a chapter devoted to the financial crash of 2007, which you see as the culmination of the major trends in the Impulse Society.

The crash, and the lead-up to the crash, perfectly captures the essential drivers behind the Impulse Society. You start with our own inherent appetites for immediate, self-serving rewards. Add in a consumer culture that promotes the idea of fast, painless wealth—and, importantly, a financial industry that, thanks to computers and aggressive investors, is offering credit to anyone with a pulse. Throw in a government that has abandoned any pretense as a regulator of financial markets and you have the perfect storm. Impulsivity and greed became the new normal—so much so that even after the crash—a wake-up call if ever there was one—the “solution,” for too many of us, and certainly, for many of our institutions, has been to do everything we could to get right back on the escalator.

One thing that stands out in this book is a lack of political stereotyping.

That’s because confronting the Impulse Society requires solutions from both ends of the political spectrum. I’m a firm believer in capitalism and efficiency, but it’s abundantly clear that the market needs to be put in its proper place, so it is serving us, and not visa versa. Some will see that as a liberal position, but it’s actually quite conservative. The tragedy of the free-market experiment is that we tried to replace social values with the values of the marketplace. But it is precisely those market values, and namely, the drive toward ever-faster gratification, that undermines individual strength and character and debases the values of hard work, and permanence, and community—things that conservatives have traditionally fought for. In the end, what you realize is that the impulsiveness of the marketplace and the impulsiveness of the individual are inseparable—two sides of the same crisis.

How do we get from where we are now to somewhere better?

Look to history, for a start. Nearly a century ago, excess and short-term thinking led to the Great Crash, and the lesson we took away then was markets need rules in order to pull society forward. It’s the much the same today. Our own “great crash” underscored the need not only to better manage the market, but to rethink what we meant by success. Profit is and always will be central, but real success has to include values like sustainability, the well-being of our entire society, and how well we plan for the future. Certainly, our challenge is more daunting now; the market and its values have penetrated our culture and our psyches more thoroughly than ever before. Yet, in the wake of our economic crash and our political paralysis, you can sense that people have had enough, and that we may now have a window of opportunity to move.

In tangible terms, how can we affect real change?

The first thing we need to realize is that nothing about the Impulse Society is inevitable. Everywhere you look, rich and poor, liberal or conservative, people are already pushing back against the reflexes of the current system. It might be the family down the street that decides to unplug from smartphones and social networks in the hope of reclaiming some familial intimacy. Or it’s the people who get into locally produced food, because they no longer trust the corner-cutting of the industrial food producers. Or it’s the political junkies who swear off the talk shows because they see the media echo chamber destroying their belief in democracy. True, these acts of resistance are small and often isolated. But if that discontent could be made articulate and channeled into social and political action, our elected officials would be forced to abandon winner-take-all politics and tackle the systemic, structural obstacles that prevent us from doing the big things that need to be done.

Really, it comes down to re-affirming who we are and what we value. Over the past half-century, we’ve allowed the values of the marketplace to become the values of society. What we need now are ways to push the market back where it belongs, as the servant of society and not its master.