Dean Whitbread 2020
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Sometimes comments are better than the article.
David Mitchell in The Observer, writing on corporations using children to market brands to children, provoked this succinct comment from “HiddenLaserTrap” :
There was a time when products were advertised and sold purely for their functional value. This changed In America after the war when the corporations still had a taste for the spoils of wartime production and desired ways to sell more, but Americans weren’t consumers back then.
“We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” – Paul Mazer, Lehman Brothers
By employing the tactics of psychoanalysis advertisers began to understand the irrational, subconscious desires of consumers and use this knowledge to sell products, no matter how wasteful or useless. Thatcher imported this ideology to the United Kingdom. To make matters much, much worse New Labour imported these tactics into mainstream politics. Even our political parties sound out their policies with focus groups and peddle them to the electorate’s selfish subconscious.
Regretfully, I don’t think any of this is reversable. The “me” mentality is firmly entrenched in the nation’s subconscious, and anyone who challenges it is hounded out as an enemy of “freedom”. We’re basically going to consume ourselves into oblivion and it’s not going to be pretty.