The below is in an exercise in rhetoric, not logic.

Feeling Brainwashed?

The United Kingdom is cascading into debt and people are driving themselves progressively deeper into bankruptcy. Our resident writer asks why.

Once upon a time, there was a powerful and cunning king. However, he was not satisfied with his kingdom. He was greedy and his people disliked him. They even didn’t always do what he said. He called together his advisers and asked them how to get his people to pay him his rightful money. “Easy”, they said. “Hire some armed guards to take the money by force”. He did so, and sure enough he become steadily wealthier, and able to afford better and better armed guards to get more and more money. Alas, one fateful day, his guards came back empty handed, for the citizens had but one copper piece left between them. Suffice to say, the king didn’t last very long afterwards.
In this age, in this country, taking money by force is illegal. Nevertheless, every day thousands of pounds are spent on advertising. If this had no effect they wouldn’t do it. Thousands of pounds are spent on making people buy things that they don’t want and don’t need so companies get more money, and, thus, thousands of pounds are spent by companies dragging others into debt to keep themselves up.
The power invested in advertising has reached and passed a dangerous level. Products are becoming more desirable instead of more useful, teams of psychologists are devising adverts that insinuate themselves into our subconscious, the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in adverts are steadily retreating, and it is working. Very well. These thousands in debt, this nation of the obese, we are living out some twisted clinically devised American English dream, working for multinational corporations consuming for multinational corporations and propelling ourselves absolutely nowhere.

And you can’t do anything about it.
Of course, this being beloved Britain, we have a crucial but completely ineffective line of defence against these assaults on our senses. Let me introduce the Advertising Standards Agency. They have a code, which states that companies can’t directly lie in their adverts, roughly equivalent to telling the dragon it can’t breath fire over 230 degrees Celsius.

According to the Advertising Standards Agency, most people enjoy adverts and think the world would be a dull, dreary place with nothing to talk about if there weren’t advertisements every two yards to brighten it up. I for one can’t stand the sight of a bus not plastered with posters.
These people don’t care about your ‘rights’. These people don’t care about your life. These people do care, about your money.

Some multinational monstrosities have more money than many governments, and not just small, out of the way, malleable, only-there-to-rip-off governments. That amount of money, in the hands of someone who can commit it to anything they want with no justification whatsoever, is a threat. Fortunately, so far they seem focused on breeding their money to get more, with no end goal other than having collected everybody else’s money.

This money corrupts. Remember when Christmas was a Christian conspiracy, not a Consumerist celebration? With people watching over 20 hours of television each week, our exposure to this virus is in the extreme.
There are some key differences between spam and television adverts; one pays money, one doesn’t, one is illegal, one isn’t. Neither of them require your permission, both of them are more common than the common cold.
Advertising has become, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn described it, the ‘rape of the soul’. It should be dealt with as such, and would be, if it weren’t for the money.

If only it was just the attractiveness of products that is drowning real people in debt, Britain wouldn’t be much worse than your run of the mill third world country. It’s the attractive slickness of loans that mean people don’t stop spending when they hit water level. They keep right on borrowing till they’re out of sight, and claim bankruptcy, using the government to lift themselves out, and taking the money away from decent social services.

While debt and obesity may not be the greatest threats to our existence in this age, the live for the moment, your body is a temple, spend our products on it, and to hell with everybody else attitude being irresponsibly proliferated by marketing companies for the money it gets them is not going to help the cohesion and stark sanity needed to tackle the things that really matter. The ending of the fairy tale approaches.

For any anti plagiarism people: I wrote this for my english coursework, 07/08

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