The “West” actually has less freedom than it thinks it does, thanks to the proliferation of advertising and marketing. I know advertising and marketing are not synonymous, but for the purposes of this essay one will be shorthand for both.

I’d like to describe the problem by means of an allegory. I will borrow from Milton’s Paradise Lost, a story well-suited for the purpose.

Paradise Lost

In Milton’s re-telling of the Old Testament’s Adam and Eve story, God has advance knowledge that Eve will definitely eat the apple (thereby forcing humanity to fall into sin: history’s unhealthiest bite of fruit), yet it is stated that she had the freedom not to eat it. Consider this: can Eve really have the freedom to refrain from doing something if God knows she will do it? If she doesn’t eat it, a choice allegedly within her freedom, then God’s knowledge is wrong, which is impossible, because God is infallible. If in fact she is bound to eat it because God knows she will, then she cannot be said to be truly free.

The apparent paradox of the situation falls apart when reality instead of the theoretical conditions posited are applied; this is a fictional story about another fictional story and the God posited in it does not exist, so neither can any of the conditions.

But the allegory applies today to consumers/citizens (Eve) and advertisers (God). In this sense, advertisers have preordained knowledge citizens will buy into consumer culture, even orient their life around it, despite having the freedom not to.

 

Are people free, then?

Their advanced knowledge about consumer/market behaviour is not omniscient, but reliable and improving all the time. Becoming more god-like.

In this sense, how much freedom do people ruthlessly subjected to advertising truly have? An important amount! There is an enormous difference between governments actively depriving citizens of their actual freedom, and being given freedom with the foreknowledge that it will be exercised narrowly. Advertising does not equal freedom eliminated, certainly not on a legal level. But at least psychologically, ads’ increasing volume and sophistication (of the ads themselves and the accuracy in targeting) does undermine people’s agency in their own life. This is problematic.

 

Outside influences are inevitable, though

But it’s also impossible to imagine a scenario where nothing external influences a person’s life. Humans live in communities where, thankfully, we must encounter people and institutions. Outside influences change our minds and behavior. This is good and inevitable. In this sense, freedom cannot be thought of as a person’s life being guided merely by the intrinsic things inside them, or free from outside messaging, like ads. The question is, then, what is the nature of the outside forces seeking to influence people? Whose side are they on, theirs or ours?

 

Give people a break!

Some people, often self-satisfied, scoff looking at the latest stupid/expensive/useless shit to hit the markets, and say “what kind of idiots buy this shit?” Many products are indeed useless and expensive and the rest.

But it’s unfair to assemble teams of sophisticated psychologists, artists and others for the express purpose of seducing masses of people, bombard them with million dollar ad campaigns, then blame the targeted people for succumbing.

You can hate the vapidness, triteness and all the exploitation of consumer culture without thinking every participant is an idiot. It’s not just unfair but irrational to subject people to what amounts to mind-control, then blame them for being controlled to some degree. Marketers conduct tests until they know the targeted demographic will respond. How, then, can the demographic be blamed for responding?

To be sure, the larger social issue is bigger than the merits of a single ad or product, but about buying into a concept of life, buying into the end product of an accumulation of ads. This is consumerism.

Narrow economic outcomes are dictating the psychological well-being of millions of people by coercing them psychologically. Many people in Toronto, other Western cities too, are surrounded by money and misery. Why? People are spiritually bored, there is no outlet. Aside from the daily work grind, having babies and going to the gym, meaning is in short supply. The messaging they are bombarded by doesn’t fulfill them. Of course they don’t. They are meant to take, not give.

Is advertising evil?

No. Advertising is inherently amoral—advertising is done for causes good and evil. But every evil cause can use advertising to pass itself off as virtuous. From cigarette companies targeting children, to Narendra Modi’s BJP Party spreading bogus stories via WhatsApp. The point isn’t that all advertising is evil, it’s that any evil on Earth can use advertising to further its purposes.

Besides, nobody totally avoids the consumer shit around us, not even the smug pieces of shit who write articles about how stupid it all is. If you want to be an activist for exploited labourers, it’s an extremely worthy cause. But for most people the point isn’t to abstain from consumer culture entirely, it’s to prevent life from being reduced to its (often empty) values, to maintain some kind of unique inner-life in the face of ads.

This doesn’t excuse the worst sins of the ad industry or those who use it sinfully, just that public ire should be directed chiefly at the perpetrators.

On the surface the participants in ad culture, the middle- and upper-middle class around the world, look like its benefactors not its victims. There is some illusion here. Only professionals or people who come from money (often the same), or that ultra-rare species the self-made-man/woman , can afford to comfortably participate in top-shelf consumerism. They will buy “local” things, which are expensive because a white person made them. To appear like they belong, the less affluent social aspirants either buy things they can’t afford or buy Fast Fashion, things cheap because a white person merely markets them.

The middle and upper-middle class people are of course not the worst victims–that would be the factory worker in Bangladesh, etc. But they are pressured relentlessly in different ways to pay for social status, to calibrate their values according to lines people from dire regions find incomprehensibly decadent, and in this way they are parted from their money and often left wondering why they are so miserable in a rich society. I tried to explain the mental health crisis, the rise in suicide, to my Indian colleagues–I suspect it has something to do with this.

They/we enable consumerism, but are victims too. No doubt some people disagree. They find their place in this arrangement to be wonderful. OK. Many people born into a favourable place in it loved slavery, too.

The above is oversimplification perhaps, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. It’s complicated, this ad shit. These are just some thoughts.

 

A buddy was telling me that Nietzsche often wrote in little bursts, or aphorisms. I am not Nietzsche, to put it lightly, but that mode is an efficient way to get a wide variety of things on my mind off it.

1. Restaurants in Toronto are increasingly wonderful, but there’s a kind of person who only enjoys the best ones because a publication endorses it. This person eats status, not food. The people who want a good chill with good good look identical to the status eater; the point isn’t to judge who is who, it’s that people ought to consider what kind of restaurant-goer they are.

2. I considered bringing my Leafs jersey to India, but expect that team’s shame has travelled that far, and mutilated beggars with leprosy will feel sorry for me.

3. Capitalism is a Ponzi scheme, but instead of new investors to keep the fraud known as the economy afloat, they raise inflation to insane levels and incrementally enforce austerity measures on poor people.

4. The musician’s goal is to transcend the physical instrument, so that when they feel a sound or hear it in their head, the fingers simply move so that they produce that sound. This is a hard stage to reach, but is only a prerequisite to the next stage: the sounds you hear and feel must be good ones.

5. Human rights and consumerism each have a Sisyphean aspect, an endless escalator, I find interesting, even if there’s no causal connection; addressing one oppressed group inevitably but accidentally excludes another, or a subdivision of it, but including them excludes another, and so on. While in consumerism things like car models are of a year time hasn’t reached yet. In 2016 they sell the 2017, etc. Burgers were promoted for their size, then grade, then for the extent they were organic/natural, then the aioli, then for its gourmet cheese, some other highly local or exotic ingredient…it never ends. On the one hand, it’s delicious, but often the real purpose isn’t to serve a delicious, it’s to advertise the ingredients to justify the higher cost.

6. Money/currency being unshackled from the gold standard has a parallel in consumer goods; neither currency nor goods have any intrinsic worth anymore, so since things are only worth what people will pay for them, making people insane makes their value insanely high.

7. Young males, and immature older males, are an absolute threat to females, and have no idea that they are. Their obliviousness is mirrored in themselves, as fuckboys are anything but self-actualized. Intellectual or self-proclaimed progressive males, of course, can be slimey towards women too. When considering this topic, seek input from females, which I don’t say because it’s a trendy progressive thing to say, but because I’d ask a musician about music or a scientist about science.

8. Novels can be assessed for their social and artistic worth. Each written document is a separate entity that may have value in one category, both, or neither. “Don’t write for the day, write for the ages” is the battle cry of aesthetic artist, but those who wave this flag either get enough sustenance from this niche specialty to look at the world’s ills and shrug, they separate aesthetics from their socially engaged essays or, more likely, they aren’t marginalized. It’s noble to be dedicated to functionless art, but it’s wrong to sneer at the artist whose art uplifts or serves people who need that.

9. Serious thinkers let go of certainty. Anyone who believes they’re infallible isn’t just wrong, they will suffer; embracing uncertainty permits spitballing halfbaked ideas until they develop into better ideas, while those who believe they’re always right shy from saying anything potentially wrong, and this ego deprives them of a great tool for learning, or developing ideas. Also the incorrigible think everyone around them is stupid, and this embitters them.

10. The only person more despised than a liar is the person who tells the truth.

11. People sometimes brag about the volume or quality of what they read. Some art presupposes a certain intelligence in the audience, but remember, idiots claim to love and understand great art. Anyway, anyone can read a novel if they look at all its words. Bragging should be reserved for the person who wrote it, not read it, and the point of reading isn’t to own a cultural claim but to experience pleasure or, better, ecstasy.

12. I get why wealthy white people don’t read about the marginalized—it’s uncomfortable and they don’t see an immediate need to do so. The ignorance it breeds, tragic but understandable, continues bc most major papers have predominantly white writers. Editors should fix this, but they reasonably assume that publishing important but unpopular writers won’t save a dying industry. Their position is about hopeless.

13. Compassionate, intelligent people can be extremely racist, because racism doesn’t derive from a deficit of these things, but from being unaware of how things are when you have a different body. We’re hard-wired to live in smaller communities because we evolved in tiny bands for 10,000 years, and multiculturalism in a globalized world is new and hard for not being suited to our brain in its default setting.

14. The caveman who ruled the cave by various permutations of brawn and intelligence—who supplied food by hunting, pleasure by charisma, safety by cleverness, or some mix—is regarded roughly the same way by his community as the Porsche driver, the Hollywood celeb, and the good family provider. The underlying impulse has never changed, only the expression has. Responding to these qualities are ingrained in us, but look for more in a lover than excellent survival skills. Maybe humans alone have the capacity to process and appreciate abstract, complex things, so revel in this.

15. The prude bore who dismisses art because it’s lewd or funny is the most sad but contemptible idiot. This describes every government sensor, but also self-important smug academic types. Lewdness alone doesn’t make art good, obviously, but consider that masterpieces like Madame Bovary, Ulysses and Lolita were not just frowned upon when released, but were made illegal.

16. I imagine even the biggest meathead sports fan would be mildly affronted to learn how much of their tax dollars go to subsidize billionaire sports owners. Cities pay hundreds of millions of dollars so the owner has a free or hugely discounted stadium, usually in a prime downtown location, needed for him to generate tens millions of dollars annually. The cities never get paid back. Diehard sports fans should question if this is a waste of money, and those who hate sports but love education and clean water should be rioting.

17. Everyone knows that the only force that commands respect is physical force, yet many who watch oppressed people riot from afar sympathize with the cause, but wish they expressed justifiable anger peacefully, forgetting violence is all that’s ever created change. I don’t like violence either, but I get it. (Not all violence is justified, of course.)

18. It’s a shame that the truest things are often expressed in such corny banal terms, but that doesn’t invalidate the underlying sentiment. Love is nearly impossible to write about. It often appears on walls in stand-alone form, “love,” as if that alone says it all. It’s a directive, a reminder. Don’t confuse the sophistication of a phrase for the truth of it. A lot of garbage is expressed very cleverly, too.

19. Ace Ventura has a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes, so on the Halperin meter I rate Rotten Tomatoes 0%. I hate it when brilliance dressed in silliness is thought to be stupid, and there isn’t a prison sentence long enough for the people who gave this movie a failed rating. Ace Ventura is a modern masterpiece, comparable to Gogol’s Dead Souls.

19. If you light a candle at night and listen carefully to Robert Johnson, you will feel the ghosts that eluded you as a kid when you looked in the mirror and said “Bloody Mary” three times.

20. As TVs grew in size and quality, the systems people commonly hear music on got worse. MP4s, Apple’s music, compress the sound waves so they fit onto little devices, so they sound terrible. The difference between a good phonograph and digital music is as palpable as that of a colour and a black and white TV. Seriously.

21. The most brutal, vicious, and psychologically demanding sport in the world is chess.

22. Creating a laugh where otherwise there’d silence is the closest thing to a godly act. It’s creation, and the pleasure borders on ecstasy and the sublime. It’s just from the gut. A genius without a sense of humour is an enormous waste.

From what I saw, the Leafs played the whole time in Columbus’ end, scoring, getting rush chances and continual sustained pressure. They looked dangerous and determined. Bozak barely missed what looked like an open net chance in the final minute or so with the net empty to tie the game, and for once our empty net didn’t get scored on (we lead the league in allowing empty net goals, one reason why our goalies have great numbers despite our total goals against).

How did we lose? I’m unsure. For one thing I had work and only watched the last five minutes of the game, a 2-1 loss. It is incredible to me how in sync I am with my team. It appears my Leafers arrived to the game the same time I did. When I got to the TV we were down 2-0, I felt relieved to make it in time for the comeback. The Gods I disparaged last piece are sometimes called mysterious, but really they’re just bastards. More likely they’re like Poseidon, toying with Odysseus, bouncing him around the sea before giving up the game and sending him back to Ithaka. Odysseus was lucky, it only took 9 years to return from Troy. Ergo, we are overdue. The Cup should arrive in Toronto roughly between June 3-10.

Ignoring the divine realm, strictly at ice level, we have a tendency to play up or down to our competition, losing against teams like Florida, Columbus and recently even bottom feeders like montreal. But we dissected the shit out of Chicago 4-0 earlier, the second time this season we beat the reigning Stanley Cup champs. Having watched us dominate our enemies secretly fear the worst. Even the most severely warped, foaming-at-the-mouth sens or habs fan surely must conclude these are the real Leafs.

While this seems obvious, maybe I shouldn’t attribute powers of impartial judgement and rational thinking to low lives rooting against the Leafs. But alas, we can’t help our nature: I am not just the paragon of hockey wisdom, but am generous with those who don’t share my viewpoint.