I remember the day I became disillusioned with advertising. I was eight years old and Mom had taken me to the 1/2 Price Store in Crossroads Mall (now Gordman’s). We had a long-standing shopping protocol: I am well-behaved and patient while she shops, and she lets me go by the toy department before we leave.

I was big into LEGO when I was a kid, so I was looking at their selection when I noticed an off-brand knockoff of assorted blocks packaged in a LEGO-style bucket. There was a brightly-colored star on the label that said “Leading Brand!”. But these weren’t LEGO. They weren’t even Mega Blocks!

I asked Mom how they could say that, even though, as any eight-year-old could tell you, this brand was clearly not leading anything. “Well,” she said, “they didn’t say they were the leading brand.” It was at that moment that I realized people can say anything they want about their product as long as they don’t use any definite articles. And I was eight.

According to a study from 2007, we see an average of about 300 advertisements in a day. It’s safe to say that most of these advertisements stretch the truth to varying degrees; the company doesn’t really have a product worthy of the incredible things they say about it. Some of them, especially on the Internet, will even tell an outright lie in order to get your attention: “You’ve won a free iPod!” Then you click on the ad, only to find out that yes, the iPod is free, but you have to complete ten of their “sponsor offers” first, which each vary in cost from $10 to $50.

Given the deceptiveness of most advertising, it’s surprising how rarely companies get hit with false advertising lawsuits. Recently, Classmates.com was sued for sending someone an email saying that a former classmate was trying to contact him. He signed up for their paid service to see who it was, only to find that these “attempts to contact” were only profile views, and that he had not even gone to school with any of the people who viewed his profile. Classmates.com had intentionally misled him in order to get him to sign up for the paid membership.

To me, though, the most interesting aspect of it is that Classmates.com has been doing this since 1995. I got those same emails while I was still in high school! (If a classmate wants to contact me, why doesn’t he just wait until tomorrow morning?) And in a decade, no one ever thought of challenging this company on their deception. So much advertising is false that we think it’s normal. We are numb to it.

But everything has its consequence: I believe our consumerism is responsible for the cultural slip into postmodernism. Yes, postmodernism traces its philosophical roots back to the middle of last century, but like all philosophies it isn’t influential until it is widely adopted. Human nature being what it is, an idea usually must be felt to be right before it is thought to be right; and when the philosophers first came up with it, it didn’t feel right. But today, when we are told so many lies that we don’t even notice anymore, it’s easy to believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth. And the more we consume, the more we encourage it.

Just like the bluefin tuna, it won’t be just one big lie that pushes Western society into postmodernism — it will be a lot of little ones by a lot of little sales and marketing departments. And just like the bluefin tuna, it can all be easily rationalized. Picture this: the VP asks the advertising exec to run an ad campaign that clearly stretches the truth about the product but has been carefully worded so it’s legal. If the exec says, “Sir, I don’t feel comfortable heaping logs onto the bonfire of postmodernism by running this advertisement,” the VP just finds somebody who will. The exec loses his job and the ad still runs either way, so what’s the point?

I’m not calling for the demise of Western capitalism. I fully realize that it is the reason I have a steady job, or a guitar, or any hopes of buying a house in the next few years. And advertising is necessary part of capitalism. My point is still only this: that there is a consequence for every decision we make. All the way down to the things we choose to buy, we are responsible!

Like the current subprime mortgage crisis caused by easy credit, the consequences are not usually immediate, but they are inevitable. It may not be in our lifetimes that the country collapses under the weight of our bad decisions; but we do not live in a society that can sustain our consumerism and greed for much longer.