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needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”[8] Driven by a culturally fueled conviction of insufficiency, we become addicted to consumption. “Consumption is a way in which you mute the pain,” Glover said to me. “I know people who have plenty of resources to divert the pain by buying unnecessarily . . . The structure of capitalism creates a situation where people’s value relies on their capacity to consume. I don’t care if it’s consuming from Walmart or from Saks Fifth Avenue. When we talk about addiction, whether it be to drugs or whether it be to other forms of behavior, they all symbolize the sense of being devalued as a human being within a system. That’s basically it: feeling alienated within the system.” The Third “Character” Trait: Hypnotic Passivity Unlike the denizens of Huxley’s dystopian fantasy future, we are not automatons, engineered in test tubes to be a certain way and programmed to carry out only certain preordained functions. As citizens in ostensibly democratic countries, we have free will, up to a point—but in practice that freedom rarely strays beyond the frontier of what is socially acceptable. Not daring to rock the boat, we risk sinking with it. Self-abandonment programmed into the social character makes us passive even in the face of threats to our existence as a species. Healthy people connected to their real emotions and authentic requirements would not be susceptible to blandishments inciting artificial needs and the products to satisfy them, no matter how cleverly packaged. Nor would they accept the unacceptable, except perhaps under threat of force—and even then, they would not be inclined to internalize it as the way things ought to be. “Children,” the great public intellectual Noam Chomsky has remarked, “are constantly asking why—they want explanations, they want to understand things.” But soon, he says, “you go to school, you’re regimented. You’re taught this is the way you’re supposed to behave, not other ways. The institutions of the society are constructed, so as to reduce, modify, limit the efforts and control of one’s own destiny.”[