Hypnotic conformity: The social bombing of Americans (by anon)

Let’s face it - the majority of Americans are seduced by food, bad reality shows, new cars, magazines, flat screens, celebrities, fashion, physical appearances, and shitty sentimental rhetoric. Most people accept what they are told by the media. A lot of people think they have to be attractive and/or succeed financially (of course, what other kind of success is there?) to be honored or valued in society. Most people don’t have any idea of who they are or what they truly want, because they are constantly bombarded by stamps of society that work to define people and their needs artificially (mostly for the sake of capitalistic agendas, but that’s another story).

Most Americans are hypnotized by appearances, seeing substance and value in things like classy home décor and luxurious, pricey accessories to declare style and social worth. Many of us are instilled with values that have no use and thus no meaning. It's sad when people don’t see value in others who do not live up to social standards of excellence, as if those kinds of people are a disease of some sort. It is also sad when people can’t accept and are afraid of anything (or any person) that is different or unusual, or doesn’t seem to “fit in” with society, despite not being harmful at all. I want a society that embraces variety, differences, and uniqueness, a society in which it is customary to form actual relationships with the people we encounter, relationships that are soaked in meaning and sincerity instead of glossed with courtesy frosting (which eventually dries up and flakes off). I want a society that openly recognizes and understands that every individual is necessarily linked to everyone else, no matter the dress, physical traits, ethnicity, lifestyle, financial success, etc., because we’re all human, and we’re all products of differing life experiences, genetic makeup, and locations in space and time. I don’t want anything to take that uniqueness away from people, but every day in America we are constantly being stripped of and told to hide things that make us unique by being pressured to fit in and essentially forced to be molded into something we simply are not. And what bothers me more is that a lot of times, even when people try to be unique (because “unique” can be stylish too, you know), they are really adopting someone else’s idea (and bastardizing the whole concept) of uniqueness, rather than expressing their own true uniqueness. I’m tired of seeing more impressions of society in Americans than impressions of Americans in society.

We’ve got to realize that we don’t necessarily have to conform to survive, but the ideas shoved in our faces from the ruling class via the media are there to make us think otherwise. “They” want us to think that we need things we don’t need, “they” want us to think that we’re not OK the way we are without products to make us look better, and “they” want us to think that we have to make ourselves from the outside in and act the way society wants us to. Well I want to make one thing clear – we can only truly make ourselves from the inside out, and never the other way around. Once we know who we are on the inside, our selves will quickly take form on the outside, and we’ll never have to TRY to be anything. It is pretty cliché, but I’ll say it anyway: Find yourself, be true to yourself, and don’t buy in to what society is selling you if it doesn’t fit with who you really are.