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First, our brains are malleable. Scientists use the term “neuroplasticity” to describe the fact that our brains are continually being rewired depending on the kinds of stimuli that we receive and the ways that we choose to behave. Meditation can help us gain calm. TV watching can reduce that sense of calm, especially among young children. Second, animal behaviorists emphasize the importance of “super-normal stimuli,” meaning simple cues of color, sexual stimulation, or some other sensory information that can trigger highly complex behavior. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett has convincingly extrapolated from the remarkable animal findings to argue that humans too are biologically configured to respond powerfully to particular cues.8 The food industry entices us with the fatty foods and refined sugars that we naturally crave. Marketers easily lure us into buying cars, beer, and cigarettes through the sexually provocative poses of models selling these products. These are well-known lures, of course, but we’ve opened the floodgates through the ubiquity of advertising. Third, our vulnerability to addiction makes it easy for the marketers to hook young children into a lifetime of consumption and overconsumption. We are a society of pushers, not the drug gangs, but many of the biggest names in advertising. Fourth, many of our decisions are unconsciously made. We are often not even aware of why we’ve made a purchase or latched on to a particular product. The brain is easily “primed” by sights, smells, and stimuli of which we are not even aware, inducing us to buy products for reasons that are even obscure to the purchaser.

When I reflected on such issues twenty or more years ago, I regarded the problems of consumer addictions and “irrationalities” to be serious social issues but not serious macroeconomic issues. Addictions were for social workers and drug enforcement officials to deal with. Macroeconomics, I reasoned, is about the preponderance of behavior, not about the oddities and painful exceptions. I no longer accept that division of labor between psychology and economics. Within one generation, Americans have displayed a shocking array of addictive behaviors (smoking, overeating, TV watching, gambling, shopping, borrowing, and much more) and loss of self-control. These unhealthy behaviors surely have reached a macroeconomic scale and raise deep questions about our well-being in an era of relentless advertising and excess. Have we actually created a world that is programmed to undermine our very balance as individuals? Our society is addicted to overconsumption and household debt. It is addicted to a miserable diet that has led to a staggering 33 percent obesity rate. It is addicted to television itself, with individuals spending four to six hours per day in front of the tube and indications that they are unhappy as a result.

The Marriage of Mass Media and Hypercommercialism

The astounding fact of America’s media system is that it has become a juggernaut out of social control, one that is partly responsible for carrying America to the abyss. The media juggernaut has taken over our living rooms, our national politics, even the battlefields. It is yet another of the runaway factors that are destabilizing American society. The media, major corporate interests, and politicians now constitute a seamless web of interconnections and power designed to perpetuate itself through the relentless manufacture of illusion. The media peddle illusions, and those illusions lead to even more addictive behaviors, including the fixation on the media itself.

Many observers have documented how America took a distinctive course in the TV age, thereby opening itself to maximum long-term vulnerability to the dark arts of propaganda, both corporate and official. Most consequentially, at the start of the TV era the government decided to hand the TV networks almost entirely to the private sector, based on an advertising-led model of broadcasting.