Mr. and Mrs. Dad say 'So What?'

It should concern us that children are targetted by business in such a way that their mental functionings become dependent upon following brand discourses. But why should we want this to be different? Asking this question is to ask why a person who has autonomous use of their faculties is better than a person who does not. The answer I can immediately indicate is in two parts (and they are independently sufficient).

Firstly, an analysis of the likely outcome of the corporatised person, who has emotionally invested in getting life satisfaction from what the market offers (both in terms of material and ideological gain), will reveal that this person is perpetually unhappy and abused. These facts are of course necessitated by the 'economic realities', the acceptance of the nature of which News is Good is more able to describe.

Secondly, the understanding of any problems whatsoever - societal, interpersonal, philosophical, political, however we contextualise them - are only dealt with arbitrarily if we have the movement of capital shape both the content and the conditions of our responses to them. If considered answers to important questions are irrelevant then we had better leave the ebb and flow of life to the dead, stale corpses that litter our graveyards. The irrepressible fact of suffering should wake us to a basic need to respond appropriately to problems - dealing with suffering seems to be a pretty universal imperative if you ask me; a line between cruelty and compassion must be drawn somewhere, and this natually shatters such absurd maxims as 'let the world come and go as it may'. Note that even whether you should, while at work, even DO any, are not accounted for by the authority of one's company.

The consequence of these considerations is that it must be the case that the person with the independent mind (and the independent use thereof) is the only person capable of being both a happy and a good person, or at least not a sorrowful and cruel one. As soon as we realise this and choose to approach life's problematics, of which the most obviously pressing is the insitutionalised nature of not so doing, the better for humanity - for only then can we can hope to be defined within the term.