The automatist society manifesto
2.5.4.4.7.The advertising as basic tool of the manipulation - a capital instrument for contemporary halfslavery system functioning
More than a year ago I wrote
a review about a fairly well-intentioned but wrong approach documentary: "The Century of Self". Adam Curtis, the author of this documentary claimed that contemporary consumerism manipulation and propaganda would somehow come from Freudian psychoanalysis on the basis that his grandson Edward Barnays emigrate to U.S. and become there the founder of the advertising and PR. I still think that getting to Freud from this distant hardly known nephew is a kind of empty speculation and some hint of racism because is showing the psychoanalysis itself not as an objective scientific fact but a matter of family blood. Being preoccupied for its errors and for reducing the text length at that time I did not pointed the merits of this documentary. It is now time to return to the subject to show its the good side in the very analysis that will make about contemporary phenomenon of collective manipulation techniques discovered by Freud and then diversified in various aspects by other theorists or psychotherapists.
Indeed the role of people manipulation to become maniac customer for the capitalism functioning is overwhelming and the psychological knowledge from various investigative tools were generally used for this. For this issue it is typical one of the psychology world famous experiment that founded the development of nowadays advertising. The experiment was done in 1957 by James Vicary who studied two random groups of individuals by showing them the same movie with a small difference. In one group the movie there were added the flashing short video messages “Drink Coke!” and “Eat popcorn!”. Finally it was found that selling of cola and popcorn in the group where the film had such messages was much higher. The entire contemporary manipulation and civilization, that pretend to protect “human rights” or human dignity, work on this principle. The liberties gained by the contemporary halfslave as those of the contemporary classical slave charged with the emergence of a huge and absolutely grotesque consciousness machines manipulation so that it is not obliged to serve any longer by force, but it is persuaded to voluntarily do so. No matter how misguiding or suicidal would be an idea, no matter how deceiving there would be a politician, if their image is obsessively repeated, then the community eventually attaches and to enjoys it.
Such an experiment was practically showing what previously Freud theoretically analyzed with phenomenon of transfer. It involves mainly the interlocutor response of worship towards its psychotherapist. I say “mainly” because the reaction may be excessive hostility also. Although this second case is rarer, however the two feelings are homologous, similar and retroactive. I won’t get into details here on the second case because the area belongs more to psychology.
Within the psychoanalysis session Freud as a person was perceived by the interlocutor, as a prophet that guesses the thoughts and talk about things that bourgeois morality of that era hid them under the rug of consciousness. Inhibition of sexual compulsion that defines the neuroticist psychopathology transforms in prophet worshipping as the therapist seemed to seek for the solutions out of state neurotic suffering. The neurotic conscience transgenerationally came from a humble social class so it psychically projected religious contents into the therapist person. Religious constructs of the interlocutor deep primitive soul gave rise to this type of worshipping and hope for liberation from suffering. The same mechanism has happened in the history of culture when the Christianity became a new type of transferential spiritual enthusiasm. Christianity promised equality of all people before God and thus this religion became ancient slave worship solution destined by classical culture to remain eternally an animal.
The right to be human (or at least man alive) was not accepted for the classical slave. The so called contemporary democracy has replaced the classical slave with contemporary halfslave based on this new technique of persuasion through worship. If someone worships then that person can be convinced more easily and with less expense to serve and bring profit. I pointed out in detail
here the way that the primitivism is a source of exploiting for “elegant manners” civilization. The emancipation is a word with unexpected blades.
Anything new gets a worshipping response in the consumer depth psychic level because it promises a new world, a better world, a supernatural world, a heaven. Most of the times the new objects are not entirely new, they just repeat the existing technology. Their “novelty” relies on external design that is presented in a way that they give the illusion to the consumers that there is revolutionary technology involved. This is the false technologies prototype because instead of setting slaves free as Aristotle hoped in ancient time, on the contrary it enslaves them more.
From an economic point of view such worshipping involves the object offered for sale overvaluation, which implies an unfair exchange. The quantity of labor offered in exchange for the purchase of that product is too high. Basically a part of such overvaluated object does not cover the natural exchange relationship. That means that this labor is done actually for nothing, just like in the classic case of forced slave labor in exchange for providing a natural right that classic steals: right to life. But with the emergence of the industrial age and the number explosion of the different household objects there was a time to adjust the Christian morality that ancient slave bet almost two millenniums ago: the equal rights for all the people. Obviously, as long as the machines have not yet definitively replaced the slave labor that ideal of equality in rights remains to be achieved in the future. The slave was not totally liberated but has only won some more or less hypocritical and more or less applicable rights. At least she/ he is no longer forced to serve, but only convinced to do it with the wide state institutions manipulation. And for the persuasion to be effective there is rights limiting required. But with the industrialization (which began with the Renaissance), the salve won some real rights. As escaped from the lands of feudal, the classical slave slowly moved to bourgeois factories. This time was no longer threatened with a gun to work (maybe it was done rarer) and it was enticed to worship a new world, the worldwide excess of objects.
Any commercial add causes some mental distress because psychologically it translates the harassment of psychodynamic system by creating an artificial psychical inhibition, which is an artificial provocation of desires. The consumer becomes a fish lured with the bait of shopping, with the obsessive collection of unnecessarily objects induced by the social system metamanipulation and propaganda. The social system abuses such natural role of the general mental desire which is to balance the organism and species with the potentialities of the environment. The harassment of human desires with subtle psychological advertising does not adequately reflect the environment to which the organism reports, but it reflects a tricky environment designed to manipulate and persuade the consumer to harness on the work which artificially sustains a lazy and parasitic social minority. In short: this is a trap.
The advertising is often confused or intentionally and forcefully identified with transparency that governments and institutions should open to ordinary people, or to communication itself. Many commercial offerings coming either from the Internet, or into the home mailbox, or directly while walking on the street call themselves "communication" but all of them are larger or smaller degree of violation of one's intimate space. Such business behavior is positioned within the category of “aggressive marketing campaigns” even by the marketing language itself. In a world full of lies and scams that actually cancel the basic principles of communication it can be said that somebody can happily skip such "communication." Such abusive intrusion into someone’s life, painted in "communication" colors, ends up on questioning real communication of private and personal thoughts that someone shares with friends or relatives. As they are officially recognized as “Communication Sciences” by the education and research, the official social organisms actually invariably involve on greater or smaller degree the social manipulation and the power of lying without anyone realizing that and without being caught or condemned for it.
The advertising is not just a notice to services that can be made by someone, although there was the point of beginning. Today it means much more than that; it means either the creation of artificial needs, or creating an artificial fear that purposes on having on consumer a psychological compulsion to acquire and consume, which is a subtle manipulation of demand and price overvaluation. The purpose is the same: the target, the buyer. The old analogy between the military organization and the organization and new factories, corporations, is exactly reflected inside the contemporary consumerism reality. The target is an individual person, with a humble pedigree either congenitally afraid of lord threats, or willing to escape of the everyday banalities just as her/his ancestors wanted to do centuries ago. They had been written in their genetic code this need to escape from the slavery to freedom, and the contemporary "target" is harassed by this compelling inner need to escape from the present into a new world.
The marketing and the advertising related to it consist of a body of actions that bring to attention the false choices in the field of human ideals so that the human dreams are manipulated and diverted to the contemporary commercial half-slavery. The historical need for freedom, the metaphysical need for immortality of the soul, the need for eternal emotional love, the need for admiration and respect and many others are meanly exploited by this commercial advertising halfslavery and attracted to the collecting of goods that replace the traditional running for these ideals.
The classical slave is generally frustrated and hungry. The almost phobic fear of poverty is the tool that contemporary halfslavery system subtle controls the halfslaves status. Inside the contemporary halfslave’s mind the poverty is equivalent with the classic slave misfortune. The legacy of this misery is found in the contemporary halfslave’s fear and shopping mania obsessively counteracts it. The civilization poverty is different from the primitive or the wildlife poverty. The civilized poor is a victim of the organ traffic, the rapes, all kinds of abuses and generally to of all kinds traumatisms. The contemporary halfslave counteracts this feeling of failure and poverty through the obsessive acquisition of all kinds of bizarre and useless objects. Obviously not the acquisition itself involves contemporary halfslavery state. The shopping is the nice part of things (although this can be questioned), but it is just the tip of the iceberg. For shopping money the person needs to work, to sell its freedom. And this is where the excess labor comes. Here is the critical point for handling modern halfslave to serve privileged social classes in contrast with the classical slave, which is simply threatened with weapons to do it.
The consumerism began from the necessary and essential objects such as a house or a car, continued with the useful but not indispensable ones, such as a mower or electric mixer and finally got to the point of creating the shopping man, the man who buys objects from the inner need to buy only as a result of continuous advertising that bombards consumer’s attention. Assiduously promoted by the consumerism’s stars of the day, the shopping has become the main mechanism of the neoslavery system. Instead of getting an easier job and have more time of its own, the contemporary halfslave choose paid better and more stressful job in order to pay the objects that doesn’t actually need. This kind of objects would eventually help her/him to feed an abyssal psychological ideal that somehow he/she would be a star too, and thus would escape the humble condition. It is this deep mind solution that eventually ensnares the contemporary halfslave into consuming trap.
Although they are talking of a "free market", it is clear that the advertising as the political marketing, are both artificial and perverse mechanisms of discrete influencing the market for the benefit of privileged classes by the artificial overvaluation of the demand. The halfslavery capitalist system abundance is just the bait in the most proper sense of this term. Its role ends up into less and less freedom for the ordinary people and framing it in different forms of obedience and exploitation. The advertising reveals what is the ugliest thing in today human being. The need to cheat and deceive, the need too lie for a certain benefit is far from a sign of a civilized society but just a poker table involving misleading faces that look like hide monsters came from other galaxies with a hand on cards, a hand on the chips and another on the trigger gun.
Today the (pseudo)freedom and the (pseudo)democracy differ from that of classical slavery only by this roles reversal. The armies do not come directly to steal human property anymore and do not keep vigilant eye over the slave for preventing its escaping. The classical slavery armies rob without giving something in return except for... the “slave’s life" and the promise of Heaven. The modern capitalist armies do not rob the halfslave in a classical manner, but constantly harass its carnal or spiritual desires by promising false solutions. This time the contemporary halfslave is lured to agree “by its own will” to provide a surplus of work to sustain the privileged classes. If the classical slavery system used to threaten the slave with taking away its natural right – the right to life – on the contrary, the contemporary halfslavery system instead tricks the halfslave into unfair exchange relationship for all kinds of unneeded products. Both systems have the same result: unpaid work for old slave or the contemporary halfslave. The overvaluation of the exchange product offered by the corporations is the halfslavery system functioning key. The advertising and its mechanisms are subtle and invisible scams; they are done much better and much more efficient than the ordinary ones, so that few notice what they really are. In this persuading social system there are more or less directly involved all the state institutions and all the "spiritual values". The false technology is so the flagship of the new slavery, of the halfslavery’s abundance.
That is why the contemporary halfslavery system panics when the halfslave moves on from the consumerist addiction and cross the barrier into the psychoactive substances space. Basically, the drugs attempt to throw down the drain all the state institutions work of causing discomfort to halfslave, so that he/she could be "cured" by the shopping. Drug addiction people do not buy "half measures" of the consumerism. They prefer strong inflow of chemical satisfaction and escaping out of the manipulation halfslavery gearing. All the efforts from the different institutions and other instruments of social system of halfslave humiliation and attract it into "VIP" consumption have a serious competitor: the drug consumption. The drugs are not as much a danger to addicted individuals as to those who can no longer count on its "good will persuasion” to accept exploitation and to be as productive as it can. Although the officials are concerned about the life of addicted person, still this issue is secondary and often hypocritical; in fact they are worried about losing that person as a slave, caught in the straps of manipulation and consumerist scams, and lost as a refugee into higher illusions of the psychoactive substance dependence. That is why the powerful drugs are still illegal.
The labor itself is a natural and even funny fact, as long as it remains reasonable and moderate. The human being can easily survive by making a simple discreet job and so the labor remains simply fun. Unfortunately the congenital greed of the historical social privileged ones transformed a part of society into workaholic. The work has become one of the most horrible things that classic and modern man must do. The false educational and moral values are systematically planted by advertising and / or classical culture in the human soul are put there by classic and contemporary social system just to persuade people to extra work and serve the boundless greed of these social cyborgs. The human mind mutilation is the price for satisfying this social privileged hallucinating greed. The poverty of classical slave has been replaced by overconsumption of contemporary society. In its genealogical desperation the contemporary halfslave finds peace with this minimum of comfort and excess consumption of food or objects that does not actually need. The panicked voices of its chained ancestors that scream into its soul are provisory comforted by this anesthetic consumption. But the unlimited consumption not only produces ugly, fat and predisposition to diseases people due to obesity. It also involves the destruction of the artificial environment to provide materials for those useless products. The contemporary civilization slave is no longer threatened by the army to accept its social state, but by controlling its soul and by the constant poisoning its mind. The
following entry will show in detail this process and will bring some examples of commercials to support of these assertions.
The issue of this entry will continue on the next one
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