Make Your Own Label 

I saw an ad for Jack Daniels whiskey going to work last week: translated – “Be your own brand! It worked out for Black Jack.” The perfect expression of the connection between capitalism and narcissism. I hear: the social media influencers or content creators are their own brands (or labels). They market themselves. And this is a pervasive feature of personality formation in general in capitalism, almost a description more than a metaphor. Everybody in the system is induced to become their own brand – or become a nobody. Individuality as a brand. The narcissistic personality type is reproduced by the economy and its social structure. It is, for example, quite different from the socialist personality type. "Identity" is another word for brand. Pseudo-individuality. In reality it is the desire to be a thing, analogous to a product that other people desire. The fear of being a real individual, defined by character, virtue, vices, actions, decisions, choices, thinking, loves, etc. The fear of being 'authentic'. The fear of freedom and the desire to escape from it. Capitalism and consumerism are premised on that fear. Defined by the products you buy and the 'identity'-image that is constructed for you - that is not your soul. The sociology behind that is not only the semi-omnipotent market but the systematic uprooting, dislocation, family breakdown, and drying up of rural life – all formed by a media structure that is not only coincidentally perfect for generating pseudo-individuals and virtual realities. Whoever has read Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) and Stuart Ewen's The Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1977) will be in a better position to grasp the changes. What we have now is a turbo-version of a trend that pre-dated social media for decades.