We have to be very careful with our kids. The TV, the radio, the internet, the commercials, the sinister manipulation done to entice them to want what is not needed. Then to buy, in other words, to get mommy and daddy to buy, producing the seeds of a vicious cycle of desire and reaction, inevitably leading to habits that will be used against them their entire lives. According to Noam Chomsky,
there has been a century of intense . . . a very sophisticated effort to develop a complex propaganda system. Mostly it’s used to brainwash people here through advertising. Huge amounts of capital go into marketing and advertising, and it’s basically to maintain a consumer society. For example, some years ago advertisers realized that there is a segment of the population that they are not reaching, because they don’t have any money, namely children. And a lot of thinking was done about what to do with this and they developed propaganda aimed at infants to try to get them to nag their parents because that’s where the money is. So if the children can demand from their parents, that they want this or that, parents would get it for them.”
And there is now an academic discipline, taught at applied psychology departments, of nagging. Different kinds of nagging for different kinds of purposes. If you ever watch television as I sometimes do with my grandchildren, from two years old they are being bombarded with consumer messages. There is nothing left untouched.”
Chomsky, Noam; Vltchek, Andre (2013-09-05). On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (Kindle Locations 726-728). Pluto Press. Kindle Edition.
How much of our spending habits comes from those seeds intentionally planted in us when we were young, innocent, and malleable. And who is to blame? The debtor? And by the time we were teenagers, often with our own money, what commercial techniques and messages were we subject to? And as adults, it should be obvious, but for most it is not…
Bankruptcy Attorney Robert Liptak
Iowa