The eCrozier

“I need, no, I have the right to be unlimited.”

Advertisements in the media do not so much drive cultural forces as they reflect them. Those who develop advertisements tap into cultural trends and exploit them in order to entice consumers to buy their product or use their service. Such exploitation can quicken the pace of a cultural trend, but not create it. So, presented for your consideration: Sprint’s new TV ad for their services. It jumped out at me when I first saw it a few weeks ago. In the middle of the ad the narrator utters, I need, no, I have the right to be unlimited. As if to beat this into the viewer, the word “unlimited” flashes across the screen a couple of times after that.

The “unlimited” the ad’s creators were referring to, of course, had to do with the particular cellular service they were offering that gives the consumer unlimited minutes and data each month for a flat fee. But that piece of information alone is apparently not enough to move consumers to purchase that service. Sprint needed to make a larger metaphysical claim about the consumer’s right to be unlimited.

The language of rights has been with us for a long time. If one can frame any situation as an issue of a “right” to something, then there becomes an implied moral or legal warrant for having it. There follows the next logical claim: anyone who questions my right to this or that or anyone who might wish to prevent me from having the right has now fundamentally violated me. Codified rights we have are well enumerated in our laws, as they should be. I believe we are all thankful they are there. But when we begin equating the right to unlimited cell phone usage with such basic human rights like the right to vote, or the right to follow our religious practice, or the right to face our accusers in a court of law, then we have entered a whole new realm of individual expectation that is, well, unlimited.

And that is the other part of the ad that gives me the willies: the implication that we should have no limits. Of course in the Jewish and Christian narrative we know that limits enter the story from the very beginning when God says to Adam and Eve “y’all can eat whatever you want in the garden, even the eggplant if you’re that desperate, but y’all got to stay away from fruit on that tree in the middle of the garden” (translation mine).

Now, I may be making a mountain out of a molehill here. One may say: “It is only a TV ad. You are blowing this out of proportion.” But I don’t think I am. This advertisement reflects a larger cultural disease with which we all live and it is literally killing our souls.

This disease tells us that world exists (or at least should exist) to satisfy our limitless desires and preferences, which are now understood to be ours by right. The Gospel of Jesus is in direct contradiction to this claim, but it is also the remedy for it. The Gospel tells us what God has done and is doing in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s a tough sell to people who believe that their life should be selfishly unlimited.

+Scott