Having a specific fear at a given time in a child’s life is normal for everyone. Even the bravest of hearts beat right up against their edges sometimes. As your child learns more about the world, some things will become more confusing and frightening. This is nothing at all to worry about and these fears will usually disappear on their own as your child grows and expands his or her experience.In the meantime, as the parent who is often called on to ease the worried mind of your small person, it can be helpful to know that most children at certain ages will become scared of particular things.
hat they permit this to happen, “they give up their individuality” (ibid), they accept the products and the tasks they have to do in order to receive the commodities. In other words, “McDonaldization has brought the customer into the labor process: the customer is the laborer” (ibid: 65). A person that spent most of his life in this kind of system cannot realize what is really happening: he/she is trained every day to accept “an enchanted iron cage” from which “there is no escape, and worse, even any interest in escaping” (ibid: 67). The replacement of labor with consumption cannot be observed by people who have no other standards in their lives.
To sustain the existence of the mentioned irrationalities, Ritzer refers to the replacement of “need” by “wishes” and he employs Karl Mannheim’s term of “substantial irrationality”: “McDonaldized systems seek to manipulate the needs, desires and impulses, the substantial irrationality of customers, in order to get them to become devoted, if not habitual, consumers of their products and services” (ibid: 30). For the institutions of society whose organizing principles are based on rationality, discipline is very important and that is why one can say that they follow the model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, described by Michael Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975). In the Panopticon, as well as in a McDonaldized society, “rigorous discipline is imposed to make people follow the detailed rules imposed by those with power over them” (Smith, 1999: 29). The efficiency, predictability and control in this type of society are used to “hypnotize” the people through “the delights of consumerism” (ibid: 29). “The rationality of consumer society is built on the irrationality of its individualized actors” (Bauman, 2001: 17).
In the postmodern consumer society, the “McDonaldization” process is still present in its organizing principles, but for the people who are trained to become “active participants” Bauman mentions a new kind of mechanism: “the Synopticon”. “Unlike the Panopticon, where the few watched the many, in the Synopticon the many watch the few” (Smith, 1999: 153). The consumers in the “Synopticon” watch the few models provided by television, cinema, magazines and they are seduced by them. The consumer society controls people’s desires and it provides
