And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.
I am not a political person by nature. I don't think writers should be political persons. But in South Africa, you can't keep politics out of your life.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.