Your virus model presumes the problem is alien to you and your holier than thou self. If you look at the problem from multiple perspectives of addiction models, some divergent from the others and many incorporating a disease model, you can find an argument for the idea that each and every one of us is both holier than thou and mundanely evil, the banality thereof—nowhere are our better angels ever to be met without our baser demons. In my view, a first step is to get off of one’s high horse, then something like searching and fearless, honest, unashamed moral inventory comes to mind before becoming the change one wants for all of us good and bad creatures of absolutely limited power to temporarily be in the world. The disease model is seductive cuz it blames “the other” and that takes no work of one’s own, but being the victim is not attractive nor is it creative.
Thank you for your great essay on our world of capitalistic fiction.
I thought I'd just toss this in from the Athabasca University Communication Studies course where I first learned of Adbusters in 2002.
Neil Postman from his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
[quote]By bringing together in compact form all of the arts of show business – music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity –The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
(Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: public discourse in the age of show business, Penguin Books USA Inc. New York, New York, 1985, pp 126 – 128) Available at the OKLibrary, https://orl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S111C503408
Amusing Ourselves to Death is really having a moment — I’ve seen so many references to it lately. I’d love to see an update to incorporate the internet and now AI age.
Yes, like what I dubbed, 'Postman's rant,' above, from when I first read it, of which the evidence was easily seen to back up the print, I've seen deepfake political *bleep* arounds, and even commercial ads, but I believe they would have to be visually presented as evidence to accompay writing about them. Perhaps Adbusters . . .?
Your virus model presumes the problem is alien to you and your holier than thou self. If you look at the problem from multiple perspectives of addiction models, some divergent from the others and many incorporating a disease model, you can find an argument for the idea that each and every one of us is both holier than thou and mundanely evil, the banality thereof—nowhere are our better angels ever to be met without our baser demons. In my view, a first step is to get off of one’s high horse, then something like searching and fearless, honest, unashamed moral inventory comes to mind before becoming the change one wants for all of us good and bad creatures of absolutely limited power to temporarily be in the world. The disease model is seductive cuz it blames “the other” and that takes no work of one’s own, but being the victim is not attractive nor is it creative.
Thank you for your great essay on our world of capitalistic fiction.
I thought I'd just toss this in from the Athabasca University Communication Studies course where I first learned of Adbusters in 2002.
Neil Postman from his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
[quote]By bringing together in compact form all of the arts of show business – music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity –The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685791-the-television-commercial-has-mounted-the-most-serious-assault-on
(Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: public discourse in the age of show business, Penguin Books USA Inc. New York, New York, 1985, pp 126 – 128) Available at the OKLibrary, https://orl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S111C503408
[/quote]
All the best,
Les
Amusing Ourselves to Death is really having a moment — I’ve seen so many references to it lately. I’d love to see an update to incorporate the internet and now AI age.
Yes, like what I dubbed, 'Postman's rant,' above, from when I first read it, of which the evidence was easily seen to back up the print, I've seen deepfake political *bleep* arounds, and even commercial ads, but I believe they would have to be visually presented as evidence to accompay writing about them. Perhaps Adbusters . . .?
As you said, you don't understand money