Brand Engagement, Everyman and the Death of the Hero Leader

Abstract

Everyman is on his way to work on the 7.30 a.m. commuter train. He’s rereading George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in between elbows, coughs, sneezes, and newspapers. The banality of its antihero Gordon Comstock, who resigned from his job with a lucrative advertising agency in favor of the life of a penniless poet, to romantically rage against Mammon, seems so childishly idealistic. How society has advanced since Orwell’s pessimism between the wars. Looking around the smart suits in his carriage and out of the windows at the houses flashing by, he reflects on how he and his partner, like so many of his traveling peers, have made it onto the property ladder on the back of a free university degree, state welfare, and a job in the City with a generous pension package. They live at 8 New Road, a much-envied corner plot with solid middle-class neighbors; a teacher and his executive assistant wife. Nice couple. This is what his grandparents had suffered depression, conflict, and austerity for, the chance to create a landed generation of “baby boomers,” who would, in due course, hand down the baton of middle-class affluence to their own lucky children.