The credit card: spending tomorrow today

The credit card, perhaps more than any other commodity, is most synonymous with human desire. It is not so much a tangible object, but is rather an invitation, and injunction to indulge and consume; to reach out and grab what you desire with both hands. Like a movie spoiler which reveals the great twist at the end of a nail-biting thriller, credit cards short-circuit the normal mechanisms of desire and invite us to skip the usual process of longing for the distant prospect of ownership.

In one sense the credit card allows us to repeatedly experience the euphoric joy of consumption, but it also forces us to repeatedly relive the disappointments and deflations which accompany the attainment of objects we desire.

Having “reached out” and grasped this or that commodity by means of our credit card, we are left with a two-fold disappointment:

First, once we have the object we want, our desire is almost immediately thrown off onto a new object (the next model in the series, with more memory, higher resolution, a bigger screen, and so on): the object we so desperately desired suddenly loses its lustre.

Second, we now possess an object which we don’t actually own - an object which is accruing interest with each passing month. We have already “spent” the feeling of emotional levity which so frequently accompanies the purchase of “things”, and are now left with the reality of an ever increasing debt.

The credit card, it seems, is merely one more symptom of our society's devolution from what Freud termed “the reality principle” back to “the pleasure principle”.

At its most simplistic level, the pleasure principle is that innate part of the human being which seeks to increase pleasure and decrease pain (specifically, to avoid negative stimulus). Newborn infants thus endeavour to increase pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-pleasurable sensations. Sooner or later, though, a child must learn that it cannot maintain the requirements of the pleasure principle - it must learn that negative stimulus is an unavoidable part of life, that reality dictates negative stimulus.

The “reality principle” represents a kind of negotiation, whereby the individual acknowledges the necessity of non-enjoyable sensations and agrees to put off immediate pleasure in the hope of attaining a lessened form of long-term enjoyment. Put simply, the infant learns the necessity of delayed gratification. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, it learns to “choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of least resistance”.

With the credit card, we no longer delay pleasure, but instead delay pain. We indulge our desires prematurely, putting off the increasing costs of our purchase until some future time. As a consequence, we are forever indebted to both the objects of our consumption and the financial institutions which underwrite our debts. We are, in a sense, slaves to desire; but not only our own desire, rather the desires of advertisers, producers, sellers, shareholders and those with a vested interest in keeping us in debt.