Humans are suggestible. Most of the population is highly suggestible. The unspoken truth about human: most decisions are a direct result of someone else's direct influence; the rest -- of indirect influence. Advertisers know it. Salespeople know it. We all know it, but choose to pretend -- that we have free will; that the choices we make are the result of careful research - or maybe, our own luck. The stories we tell are of our own Self, one with agency and choice. These are stories - usually boastful, because we like to feel smart. Sometimes tragic, because we like feeling like our decisions are better than the ones undertaken by the hero.
The human brain is a device designed for lying. It weaves a story in which the hero makes good decisions, and reaps the rewards (or suffers the consequences of other people's bad choices). Rare is a person who admits to bad decision-making.
I try to recognize my own flaws. My post-covid decisions have not been wise, and I am loath to make new ones. I even have trepidations about writing this post. Am I much stupider than I was before? Or is it the opposite - am I smarter, more capable of recognizing my own blunders? Or perhaps, facing my own mortality is making me more aware of my surroundings?
People who know me would probably use the word 'obstinate' to describe me. Or maybe that is what I was going for. I've not been easy to sway, especially when it came to popular opinions. I've fancied myself a contrarian - when a crowd is rushing in one direction, I am drawn to go in the opposite. And yet, I feel that most of my life decisions were not mine. Perhaps that is just a cop-out -- a way to lay blame away from me.
The machinery to propagate influence is vast and well-funded. It is almost never discussed, and when it is, it is often made to look like something entirely different and 'beneficial'. Dissenting voices are drowned out when possible. The machinery is turned against anyone objecting, silencing them with precision and efficiency. Ordinary objections are shouted down by the indoctrinated masses who stand up to defend the opressors. Serios objectors are often labeled as traitors of some form, or when all fails, child pornographers (of course, sometimes, child pornographers are just child pornographers).
Advertising is insidious. As an emigrant from USSR I have a strange viewpoint. I was not born into the culture of advertising. Soviet Union completely lacked any form of actual advertising, as there was little choice of products to be had, and no one stood to gain from selling them. Consumers still drove the markets, not by measured profits to the producers, but by the length of lines in front of stores during permanent shortages. Branding was not a requirement, but products did have labels with catchy images - because people like that sort of thing.
I was dumped into Capitalism head-first at a tender age of 13, an age at which the surroundings make distinct life-long impressions. I embraced it, via the found-in-the-street black-and-white television set, radio ads nearly indistinguishable from content to someone desperately trying to understand the meaing of strange words and products whose function is impossible to guess. From glossy print ads in magazines discarded in the lobby of the once-beautiful Brooklyn building I now called home. I wanted things.
The advertisements filled in the linguistic and cultural gaps in my teenage brain. Beach Boys were introduced to me in the form of "Help me Honda" and SunKist ads. Mayor Koch saying "Don't Dump on New York". The befuddlement over phrases like "leggo of my Eggo", straining my ability to understand - I lacked the linguistic skill to decipher the message. I had no idea what an Eggo is, or why it was called that. Did it have something to do with L'Eggs? Leggo blocks I just learned about? The confusion over this completely uncharted world drove me to absorb highly slanted references to things as well as events unfamiliar, be they Woodstock or the Vietnam war.
We are taught that consumption will save us. That buying a pair of jeans will make us sexy. That spraying some shit into our mouths will give us a circle of friends that love us. Kiss a little longer with Big Red. Drinking Pepsi or Coke will change the world. And consume we do.
It took me years to unravel the garbage that filled my head. I thought I was aware of the idiocy, and was actually enjoying the ads for the comedic relief, or as an anthropologist studying an insane culture. But as the saying goes, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.
I despise Steve Jobs. I've hated him since the 80's, when little was known about this despicable man. I watched the Cult of Jobs constructed, the stories of a man so wise, the man misunderstood and cast out, only to be resurrected from the ashes and welcomed back. The prodigal son, advancing Capitalism to a new age, the age of beautiful machines, turtlenecks and smart glasses. It is a cruel statement, but the day he died was a good day for the humanity.
Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do...
This version of Steve's wisdom sounds innocent enough: a brilliant man, one step ahead of the market. But is it true? Would people wake up one day and say "We want an overpriced phone that spies on us, cannot be repaired and has a weird charging port incompatible with everything else". Or is it because it's shoved down their throats by an incredibly sophisticated marketing organization, encouraged by blatant social pile-on bullying and propped up by a trillion-dollar market valuation?
A real-estate agent acquaintance had let it slip one day: "People just need a push" to buy or sell a house. He genuinly believed that he was helping people take the leap. A couple of months later he sold me a house (a money pit that nearly ruined my marriage). I just needed that push.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
In the 1970s, the writing was on the wall and it certainly did not require a genius to see the future. Intel and Motorola were selling microprocessors for thousands, then hundreds of dollars. The 6502, introduced in 1975, was only $25, forcing Motorola to drop the 6800 to $69. The price war was on, and there was every reason to think that in the not-so-distant-future small computers would become big business, and more importantly, a ticket to a great fortune and celebrity. Taking into account Steve's background as a child (I'll leave the story to the many biographers), it makes sense that this antisocial maniac would jump in and push his way to the top.
Wozniak, on the other hand, was not at all a psycopath, and had little interest in fame or fortune acquired by taking risks. Jobs rode this man's coat tails, turning around so it looked like he was up-front. He used him, and like many other talented engineers who made Apple what it is today, discarded him when he was used-up.
From our early days we are indoctrinated with a confused message about the meaning of success. We are criticized and pushed aside by the groupies of success and 'successful people'. We are told to 'live up to our potential' - as measured by the levels of abuse and enslavement of others. We are given lip service about compassion and friendship, while shown psychopaths as shining examples to be emulated - from murderous European explorers to cutthroat businessmen of today. We are told that hard work leads to success, while it is obvious that successful people are clearly a product of privilege. We are told that hoarding is bad, unless it's hoarding of money or real-estate. We are taught that these successful people know something we don't, and we must try to be like them - by reading books about them, or screwing others whenever possible.
We are influenced by powerful figures, who are, invariably, psycopaths. Unless you are ten years old, the desire to become, say, President of the United States, is a clear sign of mental illness: you are a danger to others. You want the most horrid of all jobs - the job that requires you to lie to billions of people to secure and maintain your position, to commit mass murder, fraud of epic proportions, to enslave populations through taxation, inflation, and counterfeiting. And yet that is the pinnacle of political careers, and success in general.
Media is an amazing device for hatching psychopaths and allowing them to build a network of disciples. Paradoxically, the followers, having been indoctrinated into the cult of the rich are themselves often destitute. Dreaming of building vast real-estate fortunes, immigrants from far-away places cast their support for Trump as he builds camps to hold their fellow countrymen. The story of the newly-minted conservatives is often "well, we filled out the paperwork and dealt with the bureaucracy, so screw these criminals".
Psychopaths lie. They don't let something like 'facts' slow down their campaigns. Donald Trump is by any measure a failed businessman, with a record of spectacular trainwreck bankrupcies behind him. Only one bank in the US would deal with him. Starting with a billion from his dad, Donald was generally insolvent by any reasonable accounting standards throughout most of his career. And yet, the cult of the privileged white male projected through the lens of brilliant psychopathy did the trick. Placed on television by a producer looking for 'comic relief', the psychopath rang true with the suggestible masses and took the reigns.
Psychopaths will grab whatever is around them to use as leverage, and people eat it up. Al Gore saw the several prior attempts to bring people's attention to the looming environmental catastrophe. The message is not so compelling when expressed as 'pollution is bad', or 'packaging is bad' or better yet, 'consume less'. It's much more effective if pumped up to cataclysmic levels, and all blame is removed from individuals and shifted to governments and large enterprises. That way, we can feel bad, but not too bad because we, as individuals, can't do that much.
Highly-placed psychpaths of course love that. This is the stuff that makes them indispensible. Often politicians themselves, they love problems that 'only governments can solve' - they can uses them as platforms to propel themselves higher - or profit from their current positions. Al Gore did not disappoint - he started an exchange to trade pollution credits, and built a considerable fortune - while his 10,000 square-foot house burned energy sufficient to power 10 normal people's homes. We gave him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Pollution is horrible by any account, and no one can dispute the rapid deterioration of our environment. It is hard to do anything about it as no one wants to have voluntary rolling blackouts, give up their cars, and stop buying new TVs every year or two. It's much easier to feel good about buying a Tesla and saying you no longer contribute to CO2 emmissions.
But Elon Musk is a particularly dangerous to our environment kind of psychopath. Electric vehicles are hardly a solution to our problems - they simply shift the pollution from your tailpipe to a big chimneystack of a coal-burning plant in some poor area. Production of lithium for batteries is extremely polluting, and likewise the pollution takes place in poorer countries. Elon is not a passive participant in the massacres that take place as big money enters corrupt political regimes leading to bloody coups. And the vast pollution of the atmosphere each time he sends a piece of junk into space is largely not commented upon.
Electric batteries are not very efficient (and psychopaths will readily redefine efficiency and any other facts standing in the way). Lithium battery life is only a few years, leading to an upcoming disaster as $10,000 batteries overflow trashbins, or get relabeled and recirculated to unsuspecting consumers, only to wind up in the trashbin.
Fuel cell technology has gone silent, likewise stimied by the low energy density of hydrogen. Unfortunately, the best way to move energy around is by binding hydrogen to carbon. The liquid fuel known as gasoline may be combusted with incredible efficiency in a modern engine, and a properly operating diesel engine is nearly impossible to beat in terms of efficiency. These are not popular facts.
Nuclear energy is rapidly losing ground in the wake of well-publisized disasters. Unfortunately, everything is dangerous in the hands of psychopaths, who will lie and cover up easily-fixable problems in order to futher their goals, be they financial or political. The problem is not with nuclear energy, it is with psychopaths. But the psychopaths have moved on to other pastures, as usual leaving a trail of devastation.
Nothing will change unless we stop listening to the lies of the psychopaths. We must not allow them to build disposable economies and prevent us from fixing the things we already own (thanks again, Steve Jobs). But first we must stop buying new objects, making these sickos obcenely rich while the dumps are overflowing with packaging and disposed items. And you will never break even, environmentally, if you trash a gas car and replace it with a Tesla - no matter how much more efficient it is.
Of course the only way to reduce energy-related pollution is to use less energy - not by buying more efficient devices - but by cutting down your actual energy usage and making existing devices last longer through maintencance and repair. Picking a day or two without driving at all. Turing off the AC for a couple of hours - even if it's a little uncomfortable. Trying to buy local when possible.
The word 'influencers' should be enough of a clue. And yet, people are drawn to them for the same reasons - they are taught to emulate, venerate and support these from the bottom, while corporations cultivate them from the top. Their claim to fame is fame acquired by idiocy or a combination of prior notariety and current idiocy. Fame is generally acquired by privilege.
Celebrity is just scary. Anyone wanting that kind of attention is sick and needs help. These people's stories read as borderline personality exploits at best, full of narcissism and often outright insanity. But there is a city on the West Coast of the US that is pretty much entirely populated by wannabies who are just as sick as the 'successful' celebrites, just not as good at it.
Is there a hope for humanity? Probably not, as long as we continue to let psychopaths run our lives.