reading response 6

In Jean Kilbourne’s article “Jesus is a Brand of Jeans,” the author attempts to grasp how the culture of advertising is influencing the nature of how we relate to each other. Kilbourne explains that advertising doesn’t merely function on the level of promoting a product. That is the endpoint, ultimately, but we would be deceiving ourselves if we thought we were immune to the side-effects. These unnoticed effects are namely the reversing of our value system, as Kilbourne explains: “Advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other but to feel passion for products rather than our partners.” This substituting of human/spiritual values for the values of material consumerism causes people to become cynical about their relationships with people, but romantic about their relationships with products. Kilbourne warns that this economic model of pathological commercialism leads to a toxic society, where “the major motivating force for social change throughout the world today is this belief that happiness comes from the market.”
I agree with Kilbourne that too much of this sort of commercialism can have negative consequences because I have known several people who have become swept up in the craze for fancy new things and went bankrupt as a result. This fixation with consuming led them to irresponsible spending, where they bought too many things they couldn‘t afford, and they eventually lost everything. However, I don’t think it would be best if we attempted to remove this control of advertising from our life. The majority of people I know are so engrained in this path, and so reliant on this value system, that they have nothing to fall back on, and would probably fare very badly in this system if we disrupted it. I have met several people who through their own admission would not be able to function without this influence in their life. Without the idea that there is a reward in their life for working so hard, rewards that contribute directly and immediately to pleasure, not the reward of immaterial values that have less direct and immediate hedonistic value. So, I don’t think we should necessarily detach the cultural context that feeds the dissatisfaction and craving in the populace, because without it we would be threatening to remove the impetus of people to function in our society. For instance, if we all lived in a void for long enough, we would slowly lose the defense mechanism of battling unhappiness with consuming, and thus the need for working to keep consuming would become less important. But since we’re all trapped in a bubble that makes people buy, in a job most of us don‘t think contributes to our happiness directly, and surrounded by people who don’t seem to know any better than keep consuming, the best scenario in our system seems to be getting the most out of a crummy situation by exploiting the advantages of a system that exploits us. This is not ideal, propagating discontent in the public is certainly not ethical, but our Capitalist system cannot simply be slowed down, so wide-scale unhappiness is a far more feasible economic policy for Capitalism than making everybody seek happiness through pursuing immaterial values. Without ever-increasing the consumption of the people, our system will inevitably lead to overproduction and possible collapse. So, advertising shouldn’t not exist nor exist too much.