It's Day 100 of the Year 2019 CE (Gregorian), meaning that it's April 10, 2019 (Gregorian), or 13.0.6.7.1 by the long count It's also the Feast of the Third Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law (Thelema)
I considered writing about Thelema. After all, we all need a basic understanding and appreciation of all of the major cults religions. That picture of Crowley, however, cast a sinister pall over all of his works and efforts, which inspired me to write about something far more sinister -- Consumerism.
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So, here's the story of stuff - if you haven't seen it very recently, give it a look, it has a lot of good information:
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Now, for grins, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/user/storyofstuffproject There is a project of folks dedicated to producing informative and educational videos on the specific histories of specific products and markets, including a whole series on plastics. Up in the original story of stuff video, you will find a famous marketing and PR wallah named Victor Lebow quoted with a major elision as follows (without elision):
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.
These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. The home power tools and the whole “do-it-yourself” movement are excellent examples of “expensive” consumption.
What becomes clear is that from the larger viewpoint of our economy, the total effect of all the advertising and promotion and selling is to create and maintain the multiplicity and intensity of wants that are the spur to the standard of living in the United States. A specific advertising and promotional campaign, for a particular product at a particular time, has no automatic guarantee of success, yet it may contribute to the general pressure by which wants are stimulated and maintained. Thus its very failure may serve to fertilize this soil, as does so much else that seems to go down the drain.
Read that puppy a couple of times, especially the first paragraph. SOURCE: https://www.gcafh.org/edlab/Lebow.pdf - a reprint of "Price Competition in 1955" by Victor Lebow, Marketing Consultant, President, Victor Lebow, Inc. originally in the Spring 1955 Journal of Retailing. Earlier on, in discussing the Strong Influence of Television, he notes that:
Probably the most powerful weapon of the dominant producers lies in their use of television. To a greater degree than ever before a relative handful of products will share a monopoly of most of the leisure time of the American family. We will have over 30 million television households next year. And television achieves three results to an extent no other advertising medium has ever approached. First, it creates a captive audience. Second, it submits that audience to the most intensive indoctrination. Third, it operates on the entire family.Clearly this man and his works and his programme are far more sinister and destructive than anything Crowley ever thought of, but I cannot find his picture. Marketing, like public relations, is a hybrid of Propaganda and psychology, to the extent that those two are separable. In fact, the term public relations was invented by Edward Bernays, a serious propaganda expert, to disassociate it as a form of propaganda from the Nazi's, who, at the time he invented the term, wee strongly associated with the word propaganda. The techniques and skill set grew, but it is the very same game Goebbels played, brought to you pretty much every waking hour by the entirety of your everyday surroundings.
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Consumerism is a disease and a curse, it is destroying our lives, our leisure, our pleasure, happiness and sense of self worth. Most of all, it is destroying our planet. The great irony is that it is, for the most part artificial. We have hungry and homeless people and others who have far more than they need or can really make use of. Much of that is a misallocation of the products of our labors and our means of production, but embedded therein as a vast trove or over consumption based on artificially stimulated demand for things that not only aren't needed, but which in reality don't benefit us at all. Back in High School I read The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. It was, as of that time, recently published expose of the whole advertising and marketing game and some of its tricks and trickery. If you have never read it, antique though it is, it is worth a look. I found it at the archive, here: https://archive.org/search.php?query=The%20Hidden%20Persuaders . There are, as I write this, two loaner copies with very short wait lists, a free for download .pdf copy, a second free for download copy available in numerous formats with an MLSU Central Library Bar code and the cryptic reference The Hidden Persuaders Vance Propaganda nwo illuminati freemasons on the webpage, and a downloadable audio copy available in multiple formats. (Please, btw, support the Archive at archive.org)
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So, I could ramble on and on, but that really shouldn't be necessary. Wanna be a subversive? Wanna be more fearsome and threatening than those damn commies and leftists could ever be. Commit the following to memory and practice saying it until you really feel it and want to live by it. I'm satisfied. I'm satisfied with what I have, and I don't really want any more stuff. Enough of that for now.
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Little Eva Died 16 years ago today:
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Image is Aleister Crowley and is public domain
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Its an open thread so have at it. The floor is yours . Cross posted from caucus99percent.com