🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

~ Marshall McLuhan (via Fr. John Culkin)

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Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers,

Here's the latest installment of our study of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death...

In Chapter Nine of Amusing Ourselves to Death, “Reach Out And Elect Someone” Neil Postman looks at the ascendancy of the image and what it has meant for capitalism, politics, and American society more generally.

“The move away from the use of propositions in commercial advertising began at the end of the nineteenth century. But it was not until the 1950's that the television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete as the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.”

~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 127-128

The departure from the concept of “truth in advertising” followed the same slippery slope as the movement from text to image, from idea to feeling, and so on. As documentaries such as The Social Dilemma suggest, this movement has found its apex in social media companies’ manipulation of the human limbic system (through dopamine, etc.). As always, a huge problem in this process is that we were all raised on a diet of the media and advertising world’s manipulation of human emotion. We were raised to be emotionally manipulated in this way.

The reason for this is obvious: it is good for business to manipulate human emotions. It is good for the current government to have a nation of consumers: economic “growth” continues, politicians get re-elected, and the populous remains “happy.” Related to the Myth of Progress, which we have discussed before, is the Myth of Continuous Growth. For decades now, Americans (and citizens of most developed countries) have gotten used to the idea that each year would be more economically prosperous than the previous one. This is understandable because for decades now this has been the case. In the long history of humanity, however, our era is an aberration and not the rule. It is only a matter of time before our hubris becomes apparent and we find that continuous growth is not actually sustainable.

Retail Therapy

“The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy.”

~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 128

According to Wikipedia, the term “retail therapy” was first used in print in 1986: “It [the term ‘retail therapy’] was first used by Mary Schmich in the 1980s, with the first reference being this sentence in the Chicago Tribune of Christmas Eve 1986: ‘We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy.’” Obviously, Postman had already been referring to this phenomenon long before this. Regardless of who coined the term however, it’s helpful to note that this shift is a completely modern (and a relatively recent) one. While the phenomenon appears banal, it is actually a serious problem that leads to devastation on both the personal as well as on the environmental level: wasting money on things that one doesn’t need in the vain hope of filling an inner void that can never be filled by the things one buys leads to constant disappointment and the bottomless desire that results in the destruction of our ecosystem. Postman’s concern goes beyond the capitalist manipulation of consumers however, as he connects this phenomenon with another dangerous concern: the undermining of American democracy and the rule of law. He writes,

“What I am saying is that just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason.”

~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 136

As Postman noted at the beginning of the book, most Americans still very much believe that the real threat to democracy will come from overtly authoritarian regimes. The irony of course is that while this could eventually be the case, it would only be because Americans themselves have prepared the path to authoritarian control by ceding power to the governments and our technocratic overlords for the proverbial bowl of lentils.

The deeper cause of our willingness to give up our freedom for conveniences is that we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by our deepest desires. Rather than electing politicians based on their worldview, positions, or ideas, Postman wants to show us how in our narcissism we now elect the politicians that make us feel good. American capitalism has taught us to worship ourselves (by buying things that we believe will make us happy), and American politicians have learned the same lesson: they need to create and sell an image that will make people happy, regardless of what their particular policy or political ideas may be. I’ll leave Postman with the final word:

“How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.”

~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 141

Thanks for joining us for this look at Chapter Nine of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. We will look at Chapter Ten next week. As always, please share with a friend who you think might find this of interest...and join the conversation on my Substack page.

Have a great weekend...enjoy Neil Postman's excellent book...and reach out if you have any thoughts/questions you'd like to share! We'll be looking at Chapter Ten next week.

Warmly,

Herman

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