American Binary.

Beginning in the 30’s with Edward Bernays creating the public relations industry America has a long history of triggering our unconscious to the tunes of whatever that industry is paid to produce. That change from satisfying demand to creating it transformed the public’s choices to what ‘we choose you to want.’ The cart overtook the horse. When Betty Crocker cake mixes weren’t selling Bernays suggested adding an egg would make mothers feel good. They took the egg powder out and Betty became a success. When cigarettes weren’t selling to women he branded them as ‘torches of freedom.’ The power to manipulate emotional triggers has given immense power to the advertising industry. That’s well documented but are we now suffering from an unintended consequence? When one formulated a decision prior to this change it had some intellectual depth; it required thinking about. Post this change has triggering our unconscious to be the decision maker made decisions far easier to make? Has advertising, in its unconscious tinkering, created an era of facile decision making based on easy unconscious responses. There are degrees but that’s the direction. So question: Has advertising’s use or abuse of our unconscious created a nation of lazy emotionally led thinkers? It’s an important question. It can only lead to bad decisions, bad outcomes and bitter divisions. Brexit and Trump are merely symptoms of this much deeper malaise. True it wasn’t perfect before, far from it. Germans didn’t want Hitler’s war but he sold it to them. So another question: How can we create a social structure that puts important decisions in the hands of those best capable to make them? It’s painfully obvious our current government, however committed, industrious and intelligent they are, are too deeply disconnected in their political bubble to be our ‘best capable.’