Heady Matters

A friend recently asked if I’ve ever had a bad hair day. I lifted my face to the clouds and roared with laughter. My baseball cap fell off. My friend guffawed.

I came close to having a bad hair decade. At one stage of its growth, my hairstyle took a phone-call from Tim Burton’s casting director. Rent Edward Scissorhands and look very closely at the topiary. I’ll say no more.

It began when I went to see Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street’. I remember thinking that the real lesson of the tale was that if you have hair like Charlie Sheen, you should be beaten with a xylophone hammer. Traumatised by displays of power hair, I needed to rebel, to send ripples through my community and to commit crimes against paternity. I grew a mullet.

After the mullet, came the pony-tail, then something that slowly conquered my back and was formerly declared an area of outstanding national mockery. They were hard years, featuring Magoo glasses and green caps. They formed scars on my psyche that still send shock-waves through my hair.

I looked like I had been rejected from a buskers’ union. That was partly the point but what I thought was self expression was lack of direction. I should have looked for role models. I should have studied team sports.

There are athletes who steadfastly maintain sensible haircuts. Indeed, some of them are not just sensible, but are the very archetype of sensible, an ideal of a hairstyle, that has been mystically formed to provide corrective guidance for those tempted by the ways of the crimper. The athletes provide the kind of self-less public service that should, at the very least, merit an Esther Rantzen special.

Witness Michael Owen a striker who has always known where the gel is. Such is Owen’s talismanic quality that a previous England manager based one of his pre-match tactical talks on the symmetrical perfection of the player’s hairstyle. (“You see lads, he’s kept it flat at the back, even in the middle and the front line is well forward but could track back later.” It produced a dull but solid performance, leaving two key members of David Beckham’s appearance consultancy team weeping into their man-bags.)

Owen’s sensible haircuts are reassuring to the team as they do not disturb its cohesion. They blend. They guide the individual to tribal belonging and are a consequence of joining a group of older players at a young age. The fresh- faced interloper wants to look the part: young bobbies grow moustaches and focused hard working athletes adopt a bland hairstyle. That’s the point I just didn’t get.

Michael Owen dashed over the threshold of adulthood and immersed himself in the bath of team belonging. I just stood there, looking for a signpost, shaking my head and shoulders. He needed to belong, I needed to be lost. They were choices that have shaped our personalities.


Although his hairstyle choice was healthier than mine, it can lead to other problems. During post-match interviews he sometimes sounds like the bureaucrat who can quote the rulebook. It is one symptom of the recently labelled condition ‘grouphair’. (The review of the label’s accuracy is still pending from an independent peer group). Its sufferers avoid promoting any hairstyles that might be outside the comfort zone of consensus styling. However, because the condition drives members towards unanimity, they occasionally slip up and forget that they also exist (at times) outside the constraint of the team.

Michael Vaughn, sometime England cricket captain and full time grouphair sufferer, said, in a recent interview, “This is not about Michael Vaughn. This is about cricket.”

There’s the rub. Too often, Michael Vaughn thinks of himself as Michael Vaughn the cricket player. It has become too big a part of him. He has sacrificed too much identity on his temple. My hair was a formless mess reflecting my confusion but by letting someone shape your style too early, you may lose out on a bit of individualism. One can become interchangeable. No one wants to mould it like Michael because he shapes it like everybody else. The future is WikiHair: team belonging assisted by a team of consultants. Ask David Beckham.

Sailing on the waters of free enterprise

The French cosmetics company L’Oreal has recently changed its advertising slogan from: ‘Because I’m worth it’ to ‘Because you’re worth it’. (The slogan for the male line is ‘Because you're worth it too’. One of the products will ‘rejuvenate expressions’ and another offers a ‘long-lasting healthy look’; most reassuring in these troubled times for masculinity.)

L’Oreal thinks the consumer feels uneasy proclaiming ‘I buy it because I deserve it’ so they now flog the same product by easing guilt. It’s a slightly quieter version of consumerism, but not one which is about to state: ‘Because we're all worth it’. Christ, no. Let’s not go nuts. Products are still sold on a philosophy of privilege and by appealing to the ego.

It is a small change of strategy that might help explain why it has been suggested that we may have reached a ‘high tide mark for individualism’ (read the post here). It is a piece written by a marketing man and its main arguments are: the rise of China and India; growing awareness of global problems; and the Internet’s peer to peer networks. He wonders how marketing strategies will adapt. They may not have to.

Individualism is still a potent force if Nike can continue to advocate conscience-free triumph with ‘Just Do It’. The corporation still has a colossal turnover, for years boosted by the process of ‘doing it’ to Cambodian children. Its brand is almost as popular in ‘other regarding’ societies as it is in ‘self-regarding’ marketplaces, a fact that might counter the suggestion that the rise of the Indian and Chinese economies will cause the emergence of a newer, more community oriented world.

A clue to the future is offered by the arrival of a ‘tasteful, understated’ Starbucks in the Forbidden City. Clearly, it is diffucult to see it as a physical representation of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the vision of his country's future articulated by Deng Xiaoping, when he was Leader of China. He was using the patter of the snake-oil salesman to pitch capitalism to his people.

His words helped pave the way for the arrival of Starbucks. Moreover, they created circumstances that make it likely that China will influenced by individualism and the philosophy’s concomitant belief in the all-healing powers of the free-market. As China and India pursue their economic advancement and experience urbanisation, the workplace is likely to dominate their lives.

Already, for a lot of westerners, the office is one of the few places where they experience community. The Puritans advocated work as escape from terror. In the 21st century, that is still the case. In work there can be a constant pressure to maintain the correct ‘face’ and, because the group is competitive, it affects the bonding rituals that are important for emotional well being. It fosters distrust and isolation, perfect conditions for marketing based on rewards, privileges and reassurances. It is a model of going to work, feeling insecure, arriving home exhausted and drinking the beer that knows we need to ‘belong’. Consumers in India and China will increasingly be exposed to those pressures.

Starbucks is not the only western presence in the Forbidden City. The corporation that use to implore ‘Don’t Leave Home Without It’ now has its logo plastered in major museums. Just when people should be feeling a connection with history, they are aware of a brand that currently has a slogan ‘My Card. My Life.’ We are urged to consider ourselves at all times and that is not always beneficial.

Consider two visuals of mass togetherness: the home supporters at a football ground, scarves in the air, a mass of unified colour and chanting as one:

and, a scene from Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, which depicts a multitude of workers, drearily trudging to clock on:

The first offers what Nietzsche termed ‘the transient joy of self-loss’, the freedom from the responsibility of conscious thought; the second, a vision of a down trodden mass, an image close to Karl Marx’s term ‘lumpenproletariat'.

Individualism has prompted huge strides because it has given the majority of the west the voice to criticise existing social structures; but its flip side has helped to create a distrust of communal pleasures, which is a problem if one’s only experience of group belonging is the workplace.

Peer to peer networks provide some of the necessary connection but contact is limited to the screen and, most of the time, characters are anonymous or nebulous. It is a poor substitute for team belonging and it can never replicate the joy of self surrender. To put it another way, it is the sound of two hands typing compared with noise of community applause.

If one’s experiences of community are competitive or based on ambiguous avatars, conditions are rife for distrusting, critical paranoia, which can find its expression with anonymous bloggers, ranting to an audience of one. It is the same paranoia that produces the critical comments made from the arses on the upholstery of SUVs: on a two mile drive to an UK supermarket, the occupants pass judgement on the ‘chavs’ they see through tinted glass.

The paranoid criticisms help maintain social divisions: these can then be exploited by advertising and so individualism’s potential to affect structural change becomes, instead, a focus on the mobility of the individual. Products become overly important, so when one’s critical faculties do come into play, they are not always used for the most worthy of causes (unless the recipes for Mars bars and Coco-Cola are vital for a balanced existence.)

This sugar-coating of the ability to affect change might explain the success of ‘cause marketing’. Pioneered in the 80s by our reassuring friends American Express, it managed to raise money for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. Crucially, it also created an upsurge in both new users of the card and usage amongst the existiing customers. Spending on cause marketing is rising at a dramatic rate. So when you next buy a luxury branded cosmetic (because you are worth it) you can also ease your guilt about not doing enough to clean up the dirty parts of the world. (Heaven forbid that anyone suggest the cash be raised by direct taxation.)

Individualism will survive and hopefully produce a climate that encourages the scrutiny of corporations. (Given their influence, it is somewhat odd they are not often subject to the same level of inspection as western democracies. Possibly it is because they manufacture the products that give us our branded identities and to examine that too heavily might cause a few personal breakdowns.) The continuing pull of individualism will award us the power to: influence the recipe of a soft drink; to enjoy it in Beijing; to pay for it with ‘my card’, with 0.5% of its cost going to charity. It is individualistic infantilism, which will survive until climate change provides a devastating peek-a-boo moment.

The future?

It’s like the present: Coke is it.