When there is too much information to know, it becomes valuable to rely on reason, on personal experience. It becomes significant to know where when how and who to trust.
“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, then 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 |
| Expert Illusion - PhD in Happiness |
Today, information from one group is pretty much as good as
information from another. The tendency is to take such sources at face value.
Why? Because we’re distracted by so many news stories, we’re lazy, and we’ve
been conditioned to believe that anything labeled “Statistics Show” “Polling
Proves” “Data Results Are Clear.”
Acronyms convey expert status, expert knowledge - the more
titles behind someone’s name, the more our eyes glaze but we immediately
believe them because they must be
smarter. It’s become almost ridiculous what people add behind their names, but
even more ridiculous that we believe they are smarter than we are simply
because we see a few initials behind their name like Ph.D. FBI. CIA. MENSA (a group of REALLY
smart people). Master’s Degree. Dr.
Doctorate. Director. CEO. CCO. PA.
Most of us don’t bother to do research to find out if the
diplomas or experience they have really exists. We’re distracted. We’re lazy.
We’re trusting. And when people do
discover the truth, they are too afraid of being attacked or sued, isolated, or
losing their status, or job, and so they remain silent.
Here are some few actual examples (though names have been
changed).
Ms. Smith graduated from Harvard with BA in Political
Science, and earned an MA in Foreign Affairs from University of Virginia. She
was the Directorate (what the hell is a Directorate?) of Intelligence at the
CIA as an analyst focusing on Middle Eastern leadership issues. She was the
media spokesperson of the CIA.
Mr. Smith: Greater Philadelphia Area | Law Enforcement
Civil Rights Committee at International Association of
Chiefs of Police, Core Faculty, School of Public Service Leadership at Capella
University,...
Adjunct Faculty at Montgomery County Community College,
Adjunct Faculty at Chancellor University, Adjunct Faculty at The National
Graduate School...
Education: PHd from Walden University, FBI National Academy,
Mercy College, Bellevue University, Montgomery County Community College
As mentioned previously, as a paramedic, I always found those with “street” experience
– the men and women who had worked for years – had much more knowledge than
someone who graduated from some elite medical school. Street smart has always
proven to be much more significant than book smart.
There’s also a trend to make up terms for classic words –
advertising executives call themselves “brand ambassadors” or “change
agents.”
What if I told you there is woman who is a ‘happiness
expert’? She has studied happiness and written a book about it. You’d shrug.
Sounds okay, but…doesn’t sound like she has any ‘real’ authority…right?
But then, what if I tell you that she is Christine Carter,
Ph.D., a sociologist and happiness
expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, an interdisciplinary
research center that “translates” the study of happiness, resilience, and
emotional intelligence for the public.
Well, now that changes everything, doesn’t it? If you saw
all that written on a book blurb about her, you’d immediately give it more
credibility because you recognize the college, the term “sociology,” and so,
obviously, if she went to college for it…she must be smart!
When I read that blurb on a book she had written, I had to
laugh. I thought it surely was made up, a joke to see if people would believe
it. Who knows…maybe it did start off as a joke but people are so eager to
believe in “expert” status that they fell for it and it stuck!
You’d probably be sucked in to buying her book because she
has “expert” status simply because she has ‘studied’ happiness at a well known
college.
Remember, the behavioral sciences are not regarded as a
valued, authentic science by actual scientists.
Behavioral science is extremely subjective because each person has different
emotions, different experiences, and also has the ability to lie in order to
either impress the interviewer or to hide true feelings out of fear.
There is an old movie from 1969 called Putney Swope – it makes fun of the
advertising industry and how consumers
are clueless but so are advertising agents. It opens with a helicopter dropping off a man with long hair, carrying a
brief case, wearing a leather jacket
with “Mensa-member” written on the back of the jacket. He is an advertising
guru and is dropped off onto the roof of
a Manhattan high-rise. Then, he makes his way to a board room where
advertising executives are sitting around a conference table. They have called
in this ‘expert’ to provide them with a tag line for the beer company they are
representing. The ‘Mensa’ Hells Angel
walks to the front of the room with his briefcase and says: “Beer is for men
who doubt their masculinity. Beer is Peepy Dicky”
Yep. The “Expert” said, “Beer is Peepy Dicky.”
One of the agency board members summed it up perfectly well
in after hearing the MENSA guy deliver his “peepy-dicky,” proclamation “Well, it must be true; we paid a shit-load
of money for it.”
This is a great example of how people will buy anything if
it’s from a so called expert (especially one with such an elite educational status
“Mensa”).
When it comes to “news” information is hard to trace once it
has been filtered through news reports or news websites. Stories gain more
credibility because they appear to
have been vetted by independent, “critical” journalists. Such
information-laundering makes stories and facts seem clean when in fact they may
be very dirty, e.g., “Reliable sources say . . .” or “An expert in the field
reports.”
But as we’ve seen increasingly, every news station today has
an agenda. Run by either the left or right, it’s hard to find unfiltered,
unaltered, news. And unfortunately,
because of our crisis in character, (why tell the truth? It’s rare there are
consequences if you lie…) very few are vetting ‘news’ stories and simply
running with a story because “if CBS, or CNN, or Fox News” said it, it must be
true!
Ed Bernay’s is a great example of manufacturing illusion
with his numerous “front groups.”
Granted, it was probably much more difficult to trace where the roots of the
front group led; and for the most part, people were quite honest until Bernays
and his peers created “public relations” which was really private delusion and
public confusion.
The Radio Institute of the Audible Arts, for instance,
appeared to be promoting a public cause, but Bernays’s whole reason for
proposing it was to advance the private interests of its founder, the Philco
Radio and Television Corporation. Bernays worked with legitimate charities but
failed to point out that his corporate client was paying the bills and
benefiting from the link. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis
agreed to help the United Fruit Company challenge a rumor that bananas caused
polio.
Corporations, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to
turn the American mind into a kind of zombie jell that will buy, give or vote
at their command, and we are too lazy, distracted, and confused to do
otherwise.
