Market System: how it influences our behavior

Let me be the devil’s advocate.  Advertisers are a byproduct of the powerful manufacturers. According to Ewen’s 1976 article, the underlying idea of advertising in a market system is to create desires and habits of people to increase consumption.  I agree with his theory. Because we live in a market system that voluntarily or involuntarily paralyzes us by limiting our choices to make decisions about what to buy, eat, wear, and so on.  Enter advertisers who are the master manipulators of our psyche.  But their purpose also focuses on the “education to production” (p. 36). The market system imprisons us.  As Lindblom (1982) says that our democracy today is joined hand-in-hand with the market system.  Furthermore, to achieve a full democracy, we’d need to eliminate the market system.  Arguments abound against Lindblom’s theory.

Polley (1990) used a great quote of engineering of consent. It says that the engineering of consent “is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest. The freedoms of speech … which make the engineering of consent possible are among the most cherished guarantees of the ‘Constitution of the United States’” (p. 89).

It is, therefore, inherent in our system that people are going be informed, educated, and persuaded and that we are limited in our legal and moral capacities to prevent it from happening.  As Lindblom aptly added, “Our dilemma or difficulties are extraordinary – and are not clarified for us by the current state of either of market theory or democratic theory” (p. 332).

If market can provide what we need, we ought to accept it but certainly not by compromising our cognitive power and moral stance.  If we see something detrimental against our well-being, we have the power in this democratic process to speak up.  The very notion of freedom of speeches also empowers us as citizens.  While the powerful companies have the leverage of engineering consent, we also have the power to frame issues to claim our well-being.

But, perhaps, we also need to acknowledge, or at the very least, consider, the fact that the “… market system imprisons policy. And we are less free … such are the inevitable consequences of imprisonment” (Lindblom, 1982, p. 336).