What do advertisements mean? Many things. They urge people to buy goods, but they also signify a certain vision of the good life; they validate a way of being in the world. The Protestant ethic gave way to a therapeutic ethos in early twentieth century America, but has persisted in a subtle, influential form, encouraging personal growth through the management of desire. Advertising embodied this transition, ordering its various themes through the icons of self-realization. This paper argues that the agenda of advertising institutions, in connection with other cultural forces, has been organized around a rhetoric of control, rather than of hedonistic release. Advertising promotes visions of personal striving isolated from or antagonistic to the environment, contributing to “an unexamined commitment to economic growth despite worldwide depletion of nonrenewable resources; and preoccupation with an empty pursuit of efficiency that impoverishes personal as well as public life.”
