Are we making social changes based on a product that excites us briefly with ideas about ourselves?

Everything of powerful cultural change we in the world, outside of the United States, have embraced as if it sprung from us, has come from the USA. The list is endless: the Beats, Jazz, the Blues, Levis, rock and roll, the hippies, the Yippies, the counter culture, the student protest movement, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the environmental movement, feminism, gay rights, self improvement, etc.

Some of them may not have originated in the USA, some of them came to the USA as original seeds, like the Beatles, and the repositioning of the Blues by British bands, or the style of Carnaby Street.

Wherever it came from it was embraced by America and finally owned, repackaged, then sold on to the world, as if America was the source.

What we receive passively is the product of a complex society, but paradoxically incredibly simple, and the nature of that product is the nature of the country. The product is actually nothing, it’s something so beautifully constructed that it seems real, as if, yes, that’s America. It’s appealing because it’s attached to so much power and glamour. Of course it’s not America and it’s certainly not us, wherever we are.

What they sell are cultural ideas that have no depth, no connecting history, no sense of direction, nothing but the sensation of buying it. Everything is a product, everything is consumed, everything has a use by date.

The problem today is that these cultural packages take on a huge momentum with extreme consequences, because it’s not just jeans, and drugs and rock and roll anymore, today it’s climate change and ideas about patriarchy, gender, justice and language. Each one of those things has been packaged and sold on to the world and the rest of the world bought it. We bought something from a door to door salesman who told us we needed it, that everyone else had one and what would your neighbour think if you didn’t have one.

Would any of those movements have grown in other countries without the sales pitch, the packaging, the excitement, the feel good glow of taking part.Theres no solutions in these packages, just a brief sense of virtue or self satisfaction, which leads to emptiness when the product loses its original appeal.

Not only do we consume culture but we consume a culture that’s not ours and in fact is not even real. Even now we’re about to have the idea of Socialism sold to us by the USA as if they invented it.

My question is are we making social changes based on the ideas we emulate that have no content and no substantial meaning, except as a product that excites us briefly with ideas about ourselves?