THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

mysteries of the universe they live in. During their evenings
mesmerised in front of the TV, children today find the equivalent of
myths, story telling and elders' chants in initiation caverns. 'One
could say that the chant has been replaced by the TV show, but at the
core of each show, driving the action, and determining whether or
not the show will survive the season, is the advertisement. What is
the effect on our children? Before a child enters first grade class, and
before entering in any real way into our religious ceremonies, a child
will have soaked up 30 thousand advertisements. None of us feels
very good about this, but for the most part we ignore it. It's
background noise. We learned to accept it so long ago that we hardly
think about it any more. But at the deeper level, what we need to
confront is the power of` the advertiser to promulgate a world-view,
a mini-cosmology based on dissatisfaction and craving. One of the
clichés for how to construct an ad captures the point succinctly: 'an
ad's job is to make them unhappy with what they have. In short,
values are not inborn but a cultural creation, and our culture has
become saturated by the corporate advertiser's agenda (see sidebar
on advertising everywhere). The net result is that materialism and
consumerism has become the real religion and world-view that gets
inculcated in contemporary children.
Notice that here again we do not even need a dark conspiracy for
any of this to happen. During the heydays of the 1950s and 1960s,
broadcast technology did not enable broadcasters to charge
consumers directly. So they charged advertisers for time used to
expose viewers to ads interwoven with programmes. ‘This created a
bias towards lowest-common- denominator programming. Consider
two programmes, one which will fascinate 500,000 people, and the
other which 30 million people will watch as slightly preferable to
watching their ceiling.' If the advertisers pay for the programme, they
will prefer the mass audience because its degree of interest in the
programme has little relationship to the effectiveness of the ad. If the
viewers were to pay, they might very well get the niche programme.