The Microplastics of Marketing
Morning Thoughts #182
Forget the substance of what’s advertised; focus on the idea. When you buy a product (a product may be a politician, mind you), heck, when you even passively accept the argument being made without seeming to approach it further, what you really have purchased is a worldview.
Sadly, friends, what you don’t consciously and critically reject often eventually makes its way into you, into your belief system, via other means. Let us call it the microplastics of the marketing industry. More than we’d care to admit (much more!), our world today is one made understandable through marketing. Peruse the underside of your beliefs; more often than not, you’ll find a price tag or a "made in (...)” sticker affixed.
Superficial values flood the surface of our being—always an overflow, never the natural river—but we’re swept up in the artificial current all the same. Swept up in a world of false rivers. Oh the current flows, and that’s all we know. That we’re so efficiently being taken is no argument for the river source! How soon we are bound to realize: we’ve lost our anchors and are now subject to the most ridiculous winds.
Oh secret chauffeurs taking us to what they assure us are majestic worldviews. Oh dominant yet degenerated morality, what a tourist trap! That so many have been said to have seen it is the sole source of its grandeur! Oh reputation preceding the fact, when it really is reputation substituting for the fact! Oh mimetic mischief, oh democracy risen to the status of religion, you challenge God with a popularity contest and have lost perspective to the degree you sincerely believe your candidate stands a chance! Always setting term limits on the ethics you propose!
Oh worldview that no one sees and everyone is said to have seen! Dogmatic absurdities! Bypassing reflection, the whole of the doctrine, a product of our environment—how could we not be, when our conception of who we are is determined by what’s best at selling itself to us! What efficient tourism when our defining worldviews turn up in our yard, seemingly like a stray dog. We take them in, not realizing we’ve gained a collar too!