We've all noticed how many suspects, accused of crimes ranging from theft to gross
child neglect and all the way to homicide, blame
addiction for their misdeeds. Their lawyers
stress this in their pleas for mercy. Typical is
this story from yesterday's Hartford Courant about a Connecticut police sergeant accused of stealing $19,000 from police-department youth programs to recoup some of the $240,000 that she lost in gambling sprees. According to a thirteen-page warrant, Michelle Wagner "stole $12,364.95 from the Police Explorers fund and $2,715.95 from child safety seat accounts by making ATM withdrawals" and "stole $3,240 from a Police Explorer gift-wrapping fundraiser." Judge Bradford Ward "ordered her to seek treatment for gambling addiction as determined by the bail commissioner's office."
Undeniably, addiction is a devastating problem around the world. But what gets insufficient attention is the role that advertising plays in grooming us all to become addicts - whether to substances or behaviors - by imbuing us with a set of impulses, values and beliefs that I call "addictude."
From infancy onward, ads teach us to crave. They teach us that there is no difference between "want" and "need." They trick us into believing that brand loyalty equals identity. They teach us that not getting what we want, and not getting it fast, is torture. They teach us that instant gratification is a basic human right. Ads teach us that restraint is a bad thing and that patience is ridiculous. Ads make us gullible, reckless, ruthless, dependent.
Like addicts.
The latest demographic that marketers have begun targeting is the pre-speech set. Attracted by logos and color schemes, infants have shown an ability to discern between brands by the age of eighteen months and can demand brands by name by age two, Susan Gregory Thomas writes in Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds.
We flail amidst a confluence of convenience, of cashings-in. When anyone anywhere lights up, shoots up, snorts, splurges, gorges, purges or the thousand other things that humans do that become addictions (or even bad habits), hark and hear countless cash registers clang - ka-ching - as dollar signs flash in countless corporate eyes. Your bad habits might not involve drugs or alcohol or any other substance. Even so, do you have any idea how many factions stand to gain from your bad habit, your weakness, your treat, that thing you do? Ads tell us that we're independent, that we're individuals, that we're autonomous, that we are making conscious choices. That's just part of the trick. In actuality, ads train us to want/need/do the same exact things over and over and over, and to feel highly uncomfortable if and when we don't. Ads prep us for the kind of slavery that is addiction: a servitude not just to the substance or activity itself but to countless strangers, companies and institutions that we cannot see, a linked-arms row extending over hill and dale, commanding us and extracting our time, our minds, our freedom and our cash.
