Raymond Woo raises some very pertinent points close to my heart in his opinion 'Apathetic youths or pathetic adults?' (May 12) and he is right to place responsibility for this on the present ruling powers.

However, that's only partly true, since the insidious power of advertising by local and foreign companies also plays a major part in fostering this 'materialistic' attitude among youth. I place the term 'materialistic' in inverted commas because it actually refers to a belief that the acquisition of wealth, goods and status is the sole purpose of life and a supposed source of happiness. However, the philosophy of materialism seeks to find solutions to problems through analysing the real world, rather than seeking answers in mysticism and superstition.

Materialistically speaking, the real culprit for this attitude among youths worldwide (except Cuba and North Korea) is the consumer society fostered by capitalism and imperialism which tells youths they need to have this or that thing to be 'hip', 'cool', and so on and all it does is to make the capitalist companies and their advertising agencies richer, while the young (or their parents) get poorer.

Worse still, the capitalists and imperialists seek to create a youth culture or subculture in which peer pressure makes youths feel they must have these things to be accepted and to feel a part of an 'in-group'. One just has to look around to see the how uniform youth's dress, accessories and hairstyles are and it's ironic that they might think that they are not conforming to society's norms, while they mindlessly conform to consumerism's dictates.

I have often wondered whether youths who wear a baseball cap backwards know why they are doing it. I was told that some baseball team members need to wear the cap backwards because the peak would otherwise block the view of their ball, which a very practical reason for doing so.

As a writer on information technology, I often come across much partisanship between users of Apple Macintosh and Intel Architecture PCs which is no different from the antagonism between fans of this or that football club, which in Britain often goes as far as physical fights and which takes a milder, non-violent form in Malaysia. However, only the companies making the computers, as well as the football clubs are laughing their way to the bank, while their fans squabble among themselves while buying their products and merchandise.

While I don't doubt the strengths and weaknesses of various PC architectures for performing specific tasks (such as graphics and animation), there's no real reason for consumers to get emotionally involved with products and services created by various companies who are all out to make money off consumers.

Instead consumers should be demanding better quality, reliability, ease of use, better prices and so on from the manufacturers, rather than taking partisan positions and fighting among themselves.

Meanwhile, the effects of imperialist globalisation will only intensify this attitude among youth worldwide, as has happened in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and increasingly in China.

On the other hand, bourgeois governments worldwide (including in Malaysia and Singapore) have an interest in creating an apathetic, indulgent and docile youth who will not question or oppose them.

A Singaporean once commented that the Singapore government sought to fill their people's stomachs, while emptying out their brains; that analogy applies worldwide (including in Malaysia).

Bourgeois governments seek to encourage notions amongst youth of them being 'free' but if this 'freedom' is merely the freedom to have sex, to get drunk, to indulge themselves and to take drugs, thus it's only an illusion of 'freedom'.

Our neighbours like Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia have been very liberal on personal matters of sex and so on even while they were ruled over by clearly repressive military and dictatorial regimes and that 'freedom' was one of their tools of repression. Opium is also an opium of the masses (so to speak), along with alcohol, sex, marijuana, LSD, ecstacy, heroin and so on.

Even today, with supposedly 'democratic' regimes in these countries, one still wonders what real power the people have over matters affecting them, while the consumer culture and indulgence continue unabated. No doubt, this consumerist culture creates social problems, which capitalist governments sometimes lament but try to explain away with all kinds of mystical reasons to deflect criticism away from the real cause - i.e. capitalism itself - so the answer to all this is to get rid of capitalism and that is the materialistic solution to the 'materialistic' problem.