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 t

Just as advertising and sermons both appeal to the emotion of fear, they both also appeal to the emotion of hope. This can be seen in many of the Chevron commercials a few years ago. These ads are almost indistinguishable from religious sermons. They show deeds of great philanthropy and conclude, "do people really care this much? People do." They ensure us that there is still hope, that things aren't as bad as they seem, although they also seem to imply that they're somehow partly the cause of it all. Why else would they show the ads? You could almost take such an ad, remove the name "Chevron," and call it a sermon on the Good Samaritan. Indeed, the Good Samaritan was a God-fearing person, and the implication is that that's somehow the cause of his good deeds.

One heavy emotion that we're susceptible to is fear. Fear tactics are used in advertising just as they are in sermons. For example, the Dial soap ads use the slogan, "aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everyone did?" This slogan seems to assume that the consumer already uses their product which can't possibly be the case because if it were, why would they need to advertise? Thus they seem to be implying that if you aren't using Dial, you'd sure better redeem yourself quickly before they find out! Similar fear tactics are also used in religious sermons. One extreme example of such sermons are those presented by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in which he says, for example, that sinners "deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using his power at any moment to destroy them." Whereas the Dial ads try to subtly hint that you'll become one of those people cast from society if you don't redeem yourself, the sermons tend to blatantly tell you that you'll become one of those people cast from God's Kingdom if you don't redeem yourself. One is subtle and the other blatant, but both are effective in swaying their audience.

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.

It seems consumerism shares with religion many more of the bad cha

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