Ellen Weis, San Francisco's Museum of Modern Mythology

Consumerism fuels the capitalist fire. In a capitalist society, the goal is to make money, by whatever means possible, exploiting whichever potential weakness that might exist. The human race is one with a wild imagination, and this wild imagination, though a great strength, can, like all great strengths, serve as a potential weakness.

It is our imaginations that advertising exploits, and it is our imaginations that religion and myth traditionally played the role of satiating, telling stories that have morals to them, lessons to be learned. Now consumerism fulfills this role. The consumer ideology serves as the golden rule, advertising serves as sermons, products serve as our idoltry, and just as religion instills faith at an early age, so too does consumerism.

Ellen Weis (qtd. in "Advertising Characters" 1997) speaks from the perspective of one who is an authority on mythology. Her analogy between religion and consumerism is an accurate one. Undoubtedly, she's referring to this role that consumerism is playing in stimulating our imaginations. It does this by telling us a stor

All of the toy companies and most of the fast food restraunts have multi-million dollar campaigns aimed at children. It's not even children that do the purchasing, it's the parents, and these companies are cashing in on the parents' love for their children, as well as the susceptable minds of the children. Religion, too, aims a lot of its teachings at children. Almost every church has a Sunday school oriented toward convincing the susceptable children. There are plenty of animated Bible story books available to teach children in a way that they can understand.

y, with us playing the lead role, painting a picture of life as being better with the products being sold to us. Our imaginations are carried away by these stories. We want to believe them because they make sense of the world. We want to believe that all it takes to be happy is a trip to the store. This making sense of the world and simplifying to such a triviality is exactly the reason why myths are created.

Of course the medium for these lessons are the ads themselves. Advertising nearly always has some emotional appeal to them. Instead of catering to our intellect and giving us rational reasons why we should consume the products they flaunt, rather they cater to our emotions. What better way to stimulate our imaginations? This is almost directly analogous to the emotional appeal traditionally found in sermons. Especially before our society has become so secular and scientific, sermons were heavily driven by emotion.

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