I’ve put my finger on why ads turn my stomach.
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The opinions of many people are affected via advertising. That’s the point, after all, of advertising: affect people’s opinions about product X, so that they’ll buy it. If people weren’t affected by advertising, I can think of no reason why presumably profit-oriented companies would spend bajillions of dollars on it, after so much time and experience with ads.
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Advertising is everywhere. If you doubt this, look around you. Watch fifteen minutes of television. Watch a movie, pick up a magazine, or go online. They’re so pervasive that we hardly notice them anymore.
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What’s more, everyone knows that advertising is bunk. Almost no one trusts advertisments; most people dismiss their claims out-of-hand, and can even point out the devices that advertisements use to burrow their way into the psyche. But advertising is still effective. See (1).
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Thus, much advertising is evil. It intentionally changes the opinions of great numbers of people against the best interests of those people, as they encourage people to want.
It’s one thing to advertise a new sort of product, so as to display its existence and its properties. Such ads may inform people of an effective means of satisfying a need or want they already have; this is probably a benefit for both parties involved, and is the crux of capitalism at its best.
In my experience, such ads are the minority. Usually, ads are carefully psychologically tuned to create a want, or to give the perception of a need where none really exists. In this case, the ad is encouraging the consumer to spend money on something the consumer would neither want nor need otherwise; the ad is manipulating the consumer into spending money against that consumer’s best interest.
And in subtle ways, the culture of our nation becomes the culture imposed by thousands of ads, such that the main drive of our culture is to consume. Passively consume to fit in, consume to stand out, consume to have fun. (Why is fun so important? What about joy, contentment, satisfaction of challenges overcome?) And, for great irony, consume to be creative. Don’t get me wrong - some stuff is nice. I’m quite glad I have a bed, and a room to keep it in, my computer, and my expensive internet connection. But I have all I want, and I don’t suffer from the desire for more stuff.
If you buy things for the pleasure of acquisition, or if you constantly feel sad, bad, or angry about the expense of the things you want and can’t afford, then you should consider the possibility that you’ve been horribly misprogrammed, and set out to fix yourself.