elledark:

Are You Brainwashed Yet ?

Hey you .. yes you .. you’re fat and ugly and smelly .. your breath stinks .. your car is shit ..  your clothes suck .. and if you don’t buy what I’m selling you’ll be a lonely loser for the rest of your miserable life.

Well okay, they’re usually slightly more subtle than that but we all know its the job of ad-men to make us unhappy and anxious about ourselves so they can flog us stuff we don’t really need. Consumerism is the religion of the 21st-century, shopping malls are its cathedrals, and the ad-men are its priests. Oh I know you’re smart and you understand all this and maybe you think I’m exaggerating. I know you believe you can ignore advertising. We all do and we’re all wrong.

I mean, of course advertising doesn’t work. Thats why hard-headed business-men spend billions of dollars every year on it. Thats why we’re remorselessly bombarded with adverts every single day of our lives, from birth to death.  Of course it doesn’t work. They do it just for fun, I expect. Oh and look .. there goes another little pink pig flying past the window.

No, the truth is that advertising is so pervasive in our lives, and works so extremely effectively, that if it all ceased at a stroke tomorrow society as we know it would collapse. You think I’m exaggerating but I’m not and I’m not just talking about economic collapse either.  It goes much deeper than that.

Consumerism, through advertising, has taken over the role filled for centuries by religion in shaping and giving meaning to our lives. We exist now to consume and the life-path that allows us to do so most successfully is the one to follow. Without advertising guiding us along that path from birth to death and telling us what to aspire to we would be like lost sheep wondering what the point of our lives was. Its that fundamental.

I compared advertising to religion but in fact, overall, it has a far more profound effect on our life than any religion currently does. Starting as children, we’re bombarded by daily brainwashing that conditions who we think we’re supposed to be and how we think we’re supposed to live. It gives us our life-models and our motivation. Its all-pervasive and all-powerful in shaping our society. We all live in an ad-shaped consumer fantasy world with ad-shaped priorities.

Since it has such a profound effect on our lives I’d love to see compulsory classes in every school teaching children how to look critically at advertising. They need to understand the buttons that are being pushed and how the ad-men will attempt to manipulate them throughout their adult lives. I’d also love to see serious regulation of the advertising industry, particularly to stop ads targeted at kids. There’s no realistic chance of either happening, of course.

Still, I can’t help thinking that without the daily bombardment of ads cynically playing on our fears, weaknesses and insecurities we’d be happier and our society generally would be more at ease with itself. Oh I know that’s not going to happen but what goods a blog if you can’t dream ?