I don’t know how many people have seen the “Little Deviants” commercials for the Toyota Scion, but they aggravate the living crap out of me. For those of you who haven’t seen it, little demons run around a city driving scions and decapitating “sheeple”, whose crime is apparently conformity by way of not buying a customizable scion. Let’s set aside the insulting nature of referring to people who think the scion is an ugly piece of crap, and the advocating of cutting their heads off, to focus on the issue of why this dumbass ad campaign is even being run.
Advertisers know that our generation is insanely self-centered, and most of their “generation-y” focused advertising is all about exploiting that. A side effect of being incredibly self-centered is the belief that you’re more important than everybody else, reinforced by all of our parents, educators, telletubbies telling us that we’re special for our entire childhoods. It sounded like a great idea, to boost all of our self-esteems, but it mostly contributed to our ability to justify acting like inconsiderate jerks.
When you’re more important than everyone else, you’re free to treat them however you’d like. Zoom around people in traffic on the shoulder, cut in front of people in line, toss garbage wherever the hell you feel like. It’s all justified because you’re special, who the hell are those other people anyways. Of course if anyone else does these things, it’s because they’re raging assholes. (If you want to know more about this kind of justification look up “fundamental attribution error”)
Ok, that was a bit of a different tangent, but it’s related to the problem. People in our generation feel this driving need to be better than other people. How could we possibly be special if we’re not better than others? Everyone has their own personal ways of feeling special, some are better at sports, some are better at school, and some buy scions. I guess the upside to owning a customizable scion is that you are instantly a daring, break-the-mold, little demon creature. At least this is the appeal of owning a scion that
Stupid as this ad is though, it works, and that what pisses me off the most. There are people out there who drive around in their damned scions looking down at other “sheeple” for their helpless conformity. And there are plenty of other people looking down on others for whatever product, viewpoint, and interest they aren’t a part of. God I really want to rant about so many other things that this ties into; selfish capitalism, more about attribution error, corporate personhood, advertising excess. But if this goes on too much longer it’ll just get more and more incoherent as my short attention span wanes, and there’s a good chance you’ve gotten to the point where your attention span is spent reading this, if you’ve even gotten this far. Besides, if I want to start ranting regularly I’ll need to leave some topics for later.
2 comments:
I would suggest that for a time, people actually believed they were 'special', as they were impressionable and believed the hype being fed to them by their bubble. Unfortunately they grew up, the bubble melted away, and the world refused to cooperate.
This then leaves a large cohort of people who try to act the part (or need to try to hold the illusion), but also carry within them a deep desperation. There are 6+ billion people on the planet, and an 18 year kid in Bangalore or the Philippines can compete with you on nearly equal footing. You better be special. Reality is knocking. Will you bend the world or will the world bend your views?
(I actually do believe that people are special, or have some special potential within them, but not in the way that the commercial culture conceives of that idea.)
I've seen that Scion commercial as well. At first I thought it was a bit disturbing because these little demonic creatures were killing the poor Sheeple, and I had no idea why. But then I learned it was because the Sheeple weren't smart enough to drive a Scion and therefore should be relieved of their right to live... makes sense to me.
I've always enjoyed the idea of conforming to a "non-comformist" view of things. To those people I say, "50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong."
I think you hit the nail right on the head in regards to the special generation. In this article it talks about the study that found the current generation of students much more narcissistic than any before. This article is just a random googling, you can pretty much find those results all over the net. I think one need look no further than any social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr) to see the attention on "me". I have some ranting I could do on this subject alone, but I will hold off for now. Suffice it to say that you see enough people that are more concerned with their face being plastered all over the internet, than I know what to do with.
You're absolutely right as the cause of this being the self-esteem boom. More focus than ever has been put on making sure that everyone feels special. So much so that we, as a society, have forgotten that the purpose of rearing children is to prepare them for the real world. Your childhood is a time of adjustment and learning. You go from a tiny blob of flesh that couldn't survive a day on its own to your own independent being. In this time, children need to make the transition from a world that is centered all around them to a world that is filled with 6 billion others. If parents never make an effort to impress upon their children the importance of the rest of the world, but rather only the child's individualism, that child will never be ready to be a contributing member of society. That child will view the world as a place for him to only do what he pleases, consequences to others be damned.
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