2. WHO AM I? I AM A PRODUCER!
If you call yourself something that is imaginary or unreal, you run the risk of becoming the thing you call yourself
As teachers know, words are powerful. It may prove out to be that the word consumer has more power over our behaviors than any other word. In the United States of America, if we are not in the physical or electronic marketplace buying things, we are thinking about buying things, dreaming about buying things, talking to others about buying things, subjecting ourselves to a media filled with things to buy, or using the things we’ve bought. People literally live 24/7 under the word consumer. Our children are constantly exposed to and highly influenced by consumer culture. They learn very early in life that you are not a good citizen if you reject, in any way, the consumer culture. America’s profound notions of freedom, liberty, justice, and equality have been reduced to the freedom to buy stuff in the marketplace. The word consumer has morphed the pursuit of happiness into the pleasures of material possessions. Unfortunately, being a consumer often results in unnecessary stress, fear, anxiety, and feelings of worthlessness and insignificance.
Neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio says that people are driven by emotions before rational thinking kicks in. When our higher thinking powers do operate, they mostly rationalize and justify desires, greed, jealousy, envy, fear, and other manifestations of the lower reptilian and mammalian brain functions that operate purely on the basis of pleasure/pain, approach/avoidance, and fight/flight. Damasio’s idea can easily be applied to consumer behaviors in the marketplaces. Note how emotions are used to sell and buy products and how people often tend to rationalize and justify their purchases (especially unnecessary purchases). [As a teacher, note your own feelings and thoughts about various consumer products. Note your students’ feelings and thoughts about various consumer products.]
Damasio raises an interesting idea: emotion before thinking is how infants operate. Could it be that an adult’s product buying decisions are no more than a child’s disposition and decision making? Are adults navigating marketplaces with an infant’s “Give me—Give me”, “I Like—I Don’t Like,” “Wow—Ugh” mindset? Are the literally millions of advertisements on cable programs, websites, billboards, magazines, newspapers, and store promotions merely playing to the infant’s pleasure/pain, approach/avoidance, and fight/flight mechanisms? Benjamin Barber thinks so. In his book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, he calls this phenomenon infantilization (i.e., adults made to act childlike). [If adults are behaving this way, it’s no wonder our inner-city public school students are still behaving as infants.]
