In 1954 J. B Priestley coined the word admass: the creation of the mass mind, the mass man. Admass man was blinded by the dazzling array of consumer goods offered by the consumer society, his senses dulled by the bland rapidity of modern communications and the pervasive pressure of advertising; he lived, Priestley thought, in a mechanical, superficial, conformist world, where people would cheerfully exchange their last glimpse of freedom for a new car, a refrigerator, and a TV Screen. Sixty years on ad,ass man is more the norm than the exception.

The greatest engine for fighting this blight of consumerism is education. I don’t mean training or learning a manual skill. I mean being enabled and encouraged to question everything, to think outside the box, to see connections where no one else sees them, to solve problems that others dither over, to expose the double talk and double-think that characterizes so many self-important people, and to be able to argue your point of view politely but convincingly. I would also add that the study of history, greatly misunderstood as a boring string of events, kings and battles, is actually a study in human motivation and nature, properly taught, of course.