Virtually all advertising is predicated on glamour, not only the ads targeted at women to improve their looks but the car ads to lure men to lure the women who have been lured to dress up in a world which clearly revolves around women.
The artificiality of life's needs are all around us. The impact of subliminal messages is immense and the psychology of engaging with people, 24/7 is well honed in this society. Our society, based on consumerism, has this important feature, a massive artificial stimulant, the need to buy and continue buying, ad nauseam.
I suppose the Soviets propagating their need for industrial might produced reams of visual propaganda to stimulate people to work harder and make the nation great but somehow this propaganda that we should impale ourselves on the cross of consuming things for no other reason than we can. That we should be encouraged for instance to eat food that is clearly bad for us purely to enhance the stock market price of say McDonalds or drink liquids saturated in sugar when too much sugar is known to be bad for us, so we sustain the bottom line of Coco Cola. The ethics of big business always trumps the ethics of the health industry and we, the simple pawn in the middle, are played and forfeited at will.
There is little or no protection at government level where it is only at this level does the persuasive language of leverage come into play. Business of course would say it has no business evaluating the rights and wrongs of the products it sells, its loyalty is to the shareholder and the companies bottom line. The gun industry in America deny's it is complicit in the slaughter of children on a campus saying it's not the gun which kills but the man or woman behind who pulls the trigger. The gaming industry deny their complicity in gambling addiction and, at this moment are crying about the massive job losses which will ensue because government have cracked down on the slot machines reducing the £100 bet to a maximum of a £2 bet in the hope that the debts racked up will be minimised. The manufactures of motor cars in which they embedded devices to mislead the authorities about dangerous exhaust emissions. The banks who twist and twirl their products to manipulate the market and the real estate industry encouraging people to enter into a contract for which they have not a chance in hell of fulfilling.
The list goes on and on. The capitalistic mantra, "there's a sucker born each minute" or as Lloyd Blankfein the boss of Goldman Sacks put it more prosaically when responding to the accusation that the derivative market was the sale of deliberately disguised rubbish for which the purchaser was being hoodwinked, his answer was that the trade was between adults who had a duty to protect themselves, 'buyer beware' and therefore there was no onus, in a free market for the seller to consider any ethical standard.
So 'buyer beware' but it's an unfair playing field when the seller spends millions of dollars or pounds each night pumping out adverts every 10 minutes on the TV just when our defences are down as we relax in the lounge with our children perhaps participating in some wildlife program and next second the screen is alight with adverts from an industry which wouldn't know the difference between truth and falsehood if it bit them on the bum. Every 10 minuets the same adverts, the same manipulation of the facts, the same blatant untruths and all we can say is 'buyer beware'
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