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Rather than accept the derealizing, dehumanizing reduction to passive consumer, the individual seeking internal and external liberation must renounce the impoverishment of "consumer" and embrace the power of a citizen's independently constructed sense of self.

One key feature of the marketing/advertising derealization is the erosion of adulthood in favor of a simulacrum of adulthood: permanent adolescence.

The very traits needed to negotiate adulthood--an awareness of being tricked/manipulated/cheated, an awareness that life is a series of trade-offs in which one desire is sacrificed to support another deemed more important, the ability to put aside short-term impulses to meet long-term goals, the acceptance of responsibility and "no excuses/no blaming others for my own faults" accountability, etc.--are derealized in favor of an easily malleable adolescent worldview of spontaneity (that is, impulse), denial of accountability, malleable (and thus worthless) integrity, immediate satiation of appetites, escape from ever-present boredom and an obsessively insecure monitoring of one's peers for approval.

The adolescent is the perfect marketing target: insecure, focused on gaining approval via external props and cues, easily distracted and bored, powerfully stimulated by "newness" (a key feature of marketing exploitation), drawn to "tribes" of prescribed behavior and identity, fearful of consequences and thus attracted to denial and assigning blame to others, and prone to powerful sensory surges triggered by sexual and physical signals (taste, scent, etc.).

The ideal adolescent can barely restrain his/her impulses and emotions and is ever ready to indulge whims and desires. He/she is intensely insecure and doesn't trust his/her own experience but instead seeks the approval of peers or peer tribes via marketable clothing or other externals, suppressing his/her own inner life and experiences lest they conflict with the security offered by conformity. Regardless of the apparent marginality of the tribe he/she seeks to join/belong to, the conformity is equally intense, marketable and unthreatening to the State and the Plutocracy.

The more the "consumer" internalizes these positive cues for adolescence, the more they experience their own alienation as their own fault; given that the very adulthood skills they would need to break free of the trap have been eroded/derided by marketing, they find their inability to feel what they're supposed to be feeling ("happy") only drives them further into compulsive, self-destructive behaviors (the primordial "eating a quart of ice cream in the bathtub" experience, cutting oneself, sexual/drug excesses, etc.).

The very shallowness of this ubiquitously marketed adolescent worldview insures the participating consumer will feel unfulfilled and insecure after the brief high of consumption wears off. Unable to cross the chasm to their own experience, they turn with increasing desperation to marketed escapes and distractions for relief.

The Debt-Serf Consumerist Connection

Debt is slavery of the free. Publilius Syrus, Rome, First Century B.C.E.

Debt-serfdom--that is, the funneling of the lion's share of household income to debt service--is intimately connected to the false ideology of consumerism. Here is the key concept: the products purchased all have an end value of zero while the debt lives on. After the initial thrill of purchase--somewhat like an addict's initial euphoria--the consumer's purchase quickly falls to zero value even as the interest due continues on.

Every purchase other than land, gold, silver, a well-built house and a working system of energy production falls to near-zero value. A well-made and maintained vehicle may last 20 years, but the value will fall precipitously as it ages.

Unfortunately, many consumer goods are simulacrum of former products. Thus a piece of furniture which was once crafted of real wood and thus built to last hundreds of years is now fabricated of wood chips, glue and a paper-thin veneer which offers the facsimile of wood