This Is How You Enslave A Mind (In 8 Simple Steps)

1. Select a small population pool. Choose them for their remarkable beauty or their fascinating charisma. They must be interesting to watch.

2. Idolize them. Worship them from afar for their perfection. Scrutinize each inch of their beauty. Wax poetic over their accomplishments small or large. Put them on the tallest pedestal.

3. After all the marrow has been sucked out of this storyline, just when that person has begun to seem more human than God due to overexposure or stupidity, topple the pedestal. Create salacious stories about how their lives are falling apart, narrate their woe over gaining ten pounds of extra padding one season, find horrifically unflattering photos and bemoan their impending aging, feast over their failed love lives, lost money, losing popularity.

4. Broadcast everywhere. Create a cycle of such nasty observations, such unrelenting and unmerciful objectification with such consistency, that no single citizen with any casual access to TV, tabloids, magazines, websites, blogs, and movies, could escape this systematic abuse of the selected population.

5. Sit back and watch as each spectator of this terrible sport, each man, woman, and child, begins to imagine that if the powerfully loud voice of the media collective, this representative of culture, critically observes the most watch-worthy among us in such a way, how then must the laymen be observing each other? Watch as each proletariat begins to imagine her peers, his neighbors, belong to this same pervasive school of thought. Watch as each looks in the mirror and picks up the same self-talk, the same perceived importance of the mere manifestation of our DNA. Watch them begin to feel less-than.

6. Create Spin. Sell products claiming to provide the youth and beauty that same select population exhibited in step two. Seduce the mass population with promises of achieving those goals yet keep the goals always just out of reach. Shill products supporting extreme weight loss to dangerous lows, extra lustrous hair, products to temporarily tan and bronze the skin, fight wrinkles in an effort to delay inevitable aging, find ugliness in basic human changes, find flaws so abundant and so hideous they must be a crisis solved with purchasing power. Pursue perfection tirelessly.

7. Watch as brilliant, beautiful, gifted, creative minds, turn energy into self-destructive talk about how much these fruitless pursuits matter, how essential losing those last five pounds are, how much our glowing good looks will make us feel powerful, satisfied, happy, immortal for just one moment. Watch as those brilliant, beautiful, gifted, creative minds are enslaved in a systematic loss of all their best potential. All those man hours that could have been devoted to solving poverty, global warming, homelessness, rising inequality in wealth distribution, cancer, war, disease are lost on commercialism fed by self-loathing in a riot of broken values.

8. Congratulate self on perfecting modern day slavery.