Stuff stuff and the sellers who don’t represent me stuffing my reptilian brain core
At first I was inclined to dismiss this TruthOut post Friday that claimed Madison Avenue geniuses through using the latest brain research could get to my reptilian brain core so that corporations and politicians could use these modern sales techniques to influence my buying and voting patterns. Not my independent brain I told myself. I long ago gave up adoring stuff and with all the political insights I have gained through the Internet, there was no way that “using MRIs, EEGs, and other brain-scan technology to craft irresistible media messages designed to shift buying habits, political beliefs, and voting patterns” would work with me.
After checking out a petition effort by TruthOut and World Business Academy to build popular opposition to the unethical practice of neuromarketing manipulation, I decided they may be right even with someone as well informed as me. They are calling upon Congress to hold hearings to investigate the commercial and political uses of neuromarketing so the public can learn which companies and political candidates are using neuromarketing research to manipulate consumers’ and voters’ choices. “We call upon all companies to take the Ethical Marketing Pledge not to use neuromarketing or other unethical marketing practices, knowing that the World Business Academy will maintain a public list of those companies who volunteer to sign the pledge.”
I remembered some of the kitchen gadgets I bought through late night ads stuffed in a box somewhere in the basement along with two hard plastic arches (ouch!). Or how helpless I feel when dealing with car salesmen who I know never lose any money in their deals even in the worst economic times. Then it struck me. Almost all the politicians are car salesmen just like Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Their antics and pitches are reptilian. Yet it works on a lot of people and probably me. See, I still won’t admit it works on me.
Director, producer and screenwriter William Friedkin then gave me the image of our elected officials that fits the pimp-whore status they now own. He proposed in a HuffPo post Saturday, “that every elected politician, state and federal, instead of going on hunting trips in Wyoming, appearing on So You Think You Can Dance or hiking in the Adirondacks, be required to spend a given amount of time before an election sitting in a window, perhaps in Georgetown with its little one and two story shops, with a sign around their necks proclaiming how much it will cost for their vote, be it on health care, corporate bailouts, cap-and-trade, whatever…”
The word legislator or representative does not do justice to the congress critters we have now. They are salesmen, sorry salesperson just doesn’t work for me. I’ll use seller for a gender neutral word. “My seller just asked me for more money and promised that he would keep those damn terrorists off all planes because he has a bill of goods that he just put together to persuade his fellow sellers to back.”
Politics today is selling stuff because our economy is now based on selling stuff rather than making stuff and then the Wall Streeters and bankers take the stuff they make or steal from Middle Streeters so they can gamble and make more stuff to buy stuff they really don’t need. George Carlin is either laughing or crying (or both) if his spirit still exists somewhere. It’s really not a laughing matter on what our reptilian desire for stuff has done to our nation and the world.
I learned in raising three sons and now assisting with the education of three grandsons and 14 years teaching children and youth in the inner-city that they can be among the best teachers. Look at what the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof in his column Sunday wants us to learn from a 14-year-old teen.
Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.
“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.
“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”
Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.
Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.
If we want to stop the sellers from ruining everything, we need to convince those who vote that they are being sold a bill of goods by the sellers that is hurting them and the future of all children and grandchildren. All of us need to rethink what is and what isn’t important in life and base our political decisions on community and love, not sales pitches and dramatic scenarios written by sellers in Congress or ad brainstormers who are trapped in a broken system that compels them to act our these pimp-whore dramas while striving and failing to maintain their integrity.
I watched this video William Timberman posted here Saturday and see the essence of life: food, music, friends, family, community and love. I commented then, “Granted the Italians love opera, but what human, except those scarred by war, power and violence, wouldn’t want the former and dump the latter. The essence of our current political challenge, is finding ways to help selfish, guarded, cold hearts turn into compassionate warm ones. Easy to write, still not impossible to do. We have to change enough minds to gain majority vote power in elections which could greatly reduce the power of the Corporate Communists. Or as DCLaw1 put it, stop the “engineering of our society by business and industry into a state of passive consumption and political near-powerlessness.”
So using the advanced sections of our brains, let’s take advantage of our people power by stuffing stuff and the sellers who don’t represent us before we are nothing but gadgets stuffed in some forgotten box somewhere.
If there’s any silver lining to the current recession, it’s that people, often unwillingly, are being forced to separate wants and needs. The old “he who dies with the most toys wins” has turned to “he who has the most toys is probably bankrupt.” I liked the Kristof article; I would have liked to know more about the family after they moved. The money they saved on property taxes, utilities, upkeep, etc. would surely pay for some nice vacations even after the initial cash-out.
I remember an NYT Mag article recently, where some bankster explained that these guys have child support payments, second homes, private school tuition, and on and on, so they “need” so much money. Sheesh. They have to rip off the whole planet to pay for that?
It’s very hard to get sucker buyers to admit they were conned. The best chance of doing that is to appeal to their reptilian brain of how much they value family and community over stuff. I believe even the most hard core RWA/Evangelical can be reached. The Tea Party/No Obamacare protest energy supports my position. We have to get it harnessed against the real enemy, the sellers. That kind of bipartisanship is possible.
RMP, the main point of your post is my answer to “….but I’ll never use half that stuff!Why should I bother to learn it? “ My answer is “Yeah, you won’t need half of it, but until you need it, you’ll never know which half is which. Preachers, politicians, and salesmen* will always be trying to sell you something. The more you know, the better your bs detector will work.” Sometimes the light goes on.
One small(?) bone to pick : “Politics today is selling stuff because our economy is now based on selling stuff rather than making stuff .. ”
Not true . driftglass dug up a graph
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2009/12/protocol-droid-speaks.html
that shows it,in response to BoBo’s column in NYT ~ a month ago, making the above point. We’re still reponsible for 20% of the world’s manufacturing, almost double that of China (12%), and equal to China,Russia,India, & Brazil combined. Also, a large part (most?) of China’s growth has come fom the Chinese subsidiaries of US-based corporations. (The take-away : we’re competing against our own companies.) (also h/t driftglass? – not sure)
*“& pundits..” is probably approprite also, but I try not to get too cute, with the alliteration.
Thanks for that delicious bone. That really is surprising. I based my statement on no facts only the amount of Made in China stuff I have been finding in stores for the last 25 years. The difference must be we are making big stuff worth a lot more than the small stuff in stores. That graph needs to be shown to a lot more people, including the M$M, who have trapped their thinking through assumptions versus facts just as I have..
” Yeah, we make a lot, but we spend a lot too.”
– Patrick Ewing
CH, the financial whizbangs too? lol! :0)
They work their poor little gold cards to the bone, you know.
I read the later comments, that I missed when it was first posted. Apparently all is not rosy,a lot of military products make up that number, but still it’s not hopeless. Probably(guessing) the purpose of much of that doomsaying, at least at the source(s), is to make us less restive about being squeezed.
Of course the war corporatists. And here I was visualizing caterpillars and road machines etc. Too distracted by the Colts and Jets.
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Yeah, I meant to point that out, mikeinportc.
The bar graph of global ‘manufacturing’ percentages is showing percents of dollar valuation, not percents of units. USA exports tons of missiles, bombers, and battleships, and imports about $100 billion per month MORE (valuation) of appliances, furnitures, autos, textiles, consumer goods, electronics, and what-all. Hence, (12 months X $100 B.), an annual ‘trade deficit’ at $1.2 Trillion … and ballooning.
The biggest bulk of ‘aid’ that USA delivers to Haiti is bottled water. Now that’s some good ol’ Made in USA manufacturing Know-How!!! … oh, and USA also sent 2 brigades of armed military ‘workers.’
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ben Sykes, Velvet Verbosity and NeuroMarketer, Verilliance. Verilliance said: "Stuff stuff and the and the sellers who don't represent me…" http://bit.ly/81JIje Blog post on ethics of neuromarketing. [...]
Here and there I read certain “foreign” news sources like The Financial Times. I realize this a threat to me and anyone I might talk to. I know I should only read American publications, and not too many plays; but, sometimes I just can’t help it.
Anyway, there were two interesting pieces in Sunday’s FT: one on the flat-out demise of the Michigan-based domestic manufacturing base – which for a while, after World War II, gave us great, garish, finned, forward-looking, thirsty big cars – and the other on the now long, tangled, and deep struggle over the meaning of the sonorous political term, liberal.
The FT piece on cars, the Detroit kind, says, simply, the good ol’ boys who ran the car business in those days – and halcyon days they were – basically rested on their laurels after the boom market of the fifties by recycling designs and marketing schemes, over and over again, while ignoring, or de-emphasizing, long-term goals to make better cars, cars that ran well and lasted longer. The Japanese, on the other hand, did just the opposite: they emphasized the construction of cars from the inside out. They decided to make cars that ran well and long, setting the stage for what has now happened to American car makers. Two of the big three are belly up, under government control.
The writer of the article doesn’t speculate on whether Detroit’s future days will be any rosier after the government backs off. He does suggest though that the Chinese are now building a lot of little cars with engines that can, more or less like the Japanese and Koreans did.
As for that pesky word liberal, an FT reviewer writes about three complex books on how, you might say, that political term has been turned inside out (or backward, like a baseball cap) over the last forty years.
The FT writer points out something I’ve read before in “foreign” publications, and that is, the usual understanding of the word liberal in Britain and most of, say, the EU countries, is to describe a polity, or the framework for a viable political economy, where personal freedom is pushed to the max while no special interest of any kind gets favors from government at the expense of any other interest or interests.
Naturally, that’s an ideal, a mere truffle in the real world.
The writer quotes Friedrich Hayek, author of “Road to Serfdom”, who actually defined liberalism in this way, the European way. Somewhat oddly, for some time now, American conservatives have used Hayek’s books and theories as the last word on free markets. Back in the eighties, Margaret Thatcher put Ronnie on her knee and read Hayek to him. All reports indicate Ronnie was impressed.
So I wonder whether American definitions of liberalism were ever like that put forward by by “Old Europe”, or whether, somehow – after the Sixties maybe, or the thirties – the definition was changed, altered, distorted or just screwed up, so people in this country tend to hear the word defined only as a pejorative: liberalism equals socialism, is of the left, deals in “foreign” books, and is subversive, and so on.
Could have been an honest mistake. Ya think?
The FT writer suggests this American formulation of the word is now affecting, or infecting, some aspects of European debate on economic policy.
Who knows? – this might be good for them, except it might ring like a recycled ad for a 1956 De Soto.
They might be amused by the fin imagery, skeptical about the “forward-looking” sell line, while still wanting their BMWs, Renaults, and Saabs over any color Taurus you can roll off a container ship (and probably more partial to the Saabs, since GM ran that brand right into the ground).
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Here is an exhibit of the extent of distortion and defacement in the ‘meaning’ (definition) of liberal and conservative. Godawful.
Top 100 US liberals and conservatives, By Toby Harnden, US Editor, The Telegraph, 11 Jan 2010.
IMO, 90+ of the listed ‘liberals’ belong in the ‘conservative’ list, and 100 of the listed ‘conservatives’ belong in prison or mental-deficiency wards for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other fascism felonies.
In sidebar and archive accounts, of the ‘news’ lists, the most talking points — and most telling — are gripes and gibes by ‘listees’ disregarding which label is (appropriate) on them, and rather, going goofy about their ranking number.
I say Marx is Marvelous, (although Karl himself wrote, and thought, less of the material contents in ‘his’ books than did his ‘editor’ Frederick Engels, who wrote most of it).
Be Marx and be proud.
What the MASSmedia need is news of a Million Marx March in Washington (May Day) to report.
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How about a bronze bas-relief bust of the bearded nonsensical placed on a rod over the graves, marked, unmarked and mass, of all the innocents, most with no political opinions at all, killed in his name? Should keep a couple foundries busy for a long time.
Hey, Tom, do you have an opinion on the self-induced collapse of the American automobile industry?
In answering, are we to believe you might imply that Marx had something to do with it?
DETROIT, Jan. 25 (CHNN Exclusive) – General Motors announced today an agreement to sell Saab, the Swedish automaker, to Spyker, a boutique car maker based in the Netherlands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/business/global/27saab.html?hp
Harpo Marx, a public relations representative for Spyker, said the sale should be seen as a boost for fin-free socialistic cars, priced out of sight and thoroughly undesirable, except by academics, fashion designers, indie film producers, and people with pure-bred Labrador Retrievers.
“We’ll keep making funny cars like we always have in Europe, whether Americans like it or not,” Marx said.
The General Motors spokesperson standing next to Marx as the sale was announced had no comment, but was later heard on an open mike, seeming to wonder how Spyker could possibly expect to be “taken seriously when it hired a representative from the Marx Public Relations Company, a known socialist front group.”
The G.M. spokesperson also wondered how Marx got a visa to visit the United States.
Groucho Marx, the CEO of Marx Public Relations, located somewhere east of Cracow, Poland, could not be reached for comment.
In regards to incredible high-class automobiles, the Europeans maintain the crown, as a result of such popular brands as Ferrari, Bentley, Koenigsegg, and Wiesmann. Experience luxury, appreciate life.
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