Marketing Equals Lying

Back when Fred Reed attacked pitchmen, I rejoiced at the good sense he conveyed. In the process, he offers a very graphic lesson in economics:

The Industrial Revolution was the real villain. Supply — of virtually everything — outstripped demand. Used to be, nobody had squat. In say 1850, there was a vast pent-up demand for refrigerators, air-conditioning, and computers, even if nobody had heard of any of them. So when some rascal invented, say, a washing machine, everybody charged out to buy one. A washing machine actually had a purpose, so you didn’t have to advertise. Pretty soon everybody had everything he needed or could reasonably want. Warm dry house, plenty to eat, appliances, car, shoes.

Yet factories in their reckless lunge toward ill-considered fecundity produced more junk than anyone in his right mind could conceivably want. Things kept getting incontinently invented. You know, electric toothbrushes with New Miracle Bristles, or strangely colored toothpastes.

The stuff piled up and threatened to unbalance the planet, causing it to break into asteroids. Advertising exists to sell people things they wouldn’t buy if left to themselves, spreading the weight of the electric tooth brushes and thereby saving the earth.

When people have needs, there is a heavy market pressure to produce. When needs are sated, you are left with whims, which must be blown out of proportion in order to continue the high sales volume. This is the inherent deception in marketing: “You really need this useless toy.” For the past couple of decades, precious few new things actually needed have entered the marketplace. Most of it is mere convenience, and must be quickly replaced. In other words, the bulk of our corporate dealings with the consumer is downright dishonest. These corporate thieves are the ones who get to write the course material defining business ethics. They have zero interest in your actual welfare.

Instead, everything is designed to break down quickly, and the entire industry does it that way. There’s no competition, except in the area of useless features. It’s not a concrete collusion, but a collusion by culture. No one does anything differently because the dishonesty is built into the entire system. These days, “honest businessman” is an oxymoron. And by no means should the words “honest” and “marketer” be in the same paragraph.

None of this is news. You already had similar thoughts, I’ll bet. It even infects the mindset of Open Source projects, as noted in yesterday’s post. The saddest part of all is how this affects religion. Most of the big names in American Evangelical religion are selling something, trying to make a buck first, never mind they really have nothing new. But because this awful mindset has become so deeply rooted in our culture, not a one of them admits to it. They are hawking new features, but only superficially meeting any real needs. Instead, they create a lot of noise and build a shallow fad, making it seem so absolutely necessary and meaningful. And the average sheeple church member buys it without question. I can’t count how many people I once took seriously are gung-ho about the Purchase Driven Church model.

I don’t know anybody really looking forward to the coming economic collapse, and the attendant upheaval it will bring. Still, those things reflect God’s judgment on us for being so goofy. Christian faith has not changed in 2000 years, and human spiritual needs are far older than that. The only thing changed is the paint job by which we make the works of human religion vaguely resemble genuine faith. When it all comes apart, I wonder how the marketers will survive. Many of them are standing in church pulpits this weekend, and it won’t be pretty when it goes. Let me remind you, those huge investments in Treasuries were of the 3-month type, coming due in February. Should the US Treasury actually be able to pay these bonds, the dollars will be worth far less than now. And by then, there will be even fewer places to take those worthless dollars to protect the value of that wealth. Yes, it’s all just imaginary assets even now, but human behavior is the key here. If these big financiers realize they have nothing, it will change how they and a lot of other humans act.

God help us.