Man, I’m sick of adverts. Everywhere I go, it’s impossible to escape their omnipresent gaze. Even in the smallest, darkest spaces, you cannot help avoid being caught out by a designer handbag billboard, an App-forwarded product hoard, or incur painful self-analysis upon encountering another human who seems more a walking advert than an evolved bipedal.
I’ve often wondered what chance a class-action lawsuit against the giants of advertising would have in dismantling the current media-obsessed world we live in. I mean, imagine a world where people were free of the prejudices and mental imprisonment that advertising engineers in the minds of young, impressionable folk who form their worldviews from what media they consume.
Now, please don’t consider me so naïve to think I’m suggesting we erase all media-led progress and revert to informational Dark Ages. What I’m considering is a world where advertising isn’t so utterly in your face that we believe advertisers are allowed to terrorize us at any given time or place. And while some might say, “Ok, drop your tech, move out the city, make fires by rubbing twigs together,” I don’t think that’s a balanced analysis. Urban environments, for one, don’t necessitate advertising, as the lure of city comforts is already so intrinsically ingrained that they don’t need additional propagation. The modern world has done a good enough job of selling urban lifestyles already, so do we really need the advertising onslaught that erroneously parades as the proudly-minted definition of what ‘civilized’ society means?
And then comes political correctness. Why must we be political, let alone correct? It might be fair to say that people are inherently political, but does that mean we have no choice other than bowing to elitist political will? I consider the malevolent wave of thought control doing global runs at present, what with the ‘un-gendering’ of everything, the curtailing of free thought in favor of a politically-correct driven homogenous mind (with accordantly-tailored terminology), the sum of which plays directly into the hands (and henceforth coffers) of advertisers and politicians. I mean, if you cannot comprehend the sycophantic link between advertising and political correctness – how they ceaselessly corral people into Single Mind thinking – you’re disconnected from your own potential, probably in large part due to advertising and political correctness.
It’s difficult to see past any status quo, mostly because its practitioners have pronounced interest in the incumbent regime. Concerning the ubiquitous worldwide paradigm that is advertising and political correctness, corporations and their public relations people (i.e., politicians) hold the upper hand, creating and selling us ‘truth’ that naturally segues into whatever best (i.e., most profitably) aids their causes. And yes, it’s paradigm-shifting to grasp how much this elitist double-pronged tool dictates the zeitgeist, but only when we realize the extent of its scope will the desire for something more human rise to flood the global economic landscape.