Must see video clip if you have ever watched TV

http://www.5min.com/Video/The-truth-behind-commercial-television-9716

Public relations or having relations with the public

Edward Bernays is considered by many to be the father of public relations. He helped encourage people in 1920’s America to overcome the social taboo of women smoking. He did this through a carefully crafted PR event where he had several pretty young debutantes whip out some cigarettes and start puffing away. They called them freedom torches and so an association between women smoking and being free was made. In addition, he had reporters waiting with cameras to report this incident, for what was probably the first staged photo-op ever. It worked great and so was born the need for making associations between people and perceived needs. This association we now call consumerism and it is what dominates and drives virtually everything today.

We like to operate as if advertising doesn’t have an impact on us and yet time and again, ads work and work very well. This is a nice little lie we like to tell ourselves. We like to live in the delusion that ads may suggest things to us, but our higher level thinking will overcome it and in the end we are in control.

Take a snapshot look at American society and realize over the past several decades American consumers have an insatiable appetite to consume things. Our accumulation of things then defines who we are. Certain things boost our morale, self-confidence and ego. Our most basic human wants and desires are used against us in order for capitalism to work in the best way it knows how. The formula is simple; to appeal to humans at the most base level and link a product to it.

Basic advertising then became more sophisticated with ads able to manipulate people into becoming robotic consumers through subliminal messages. Through flashing images in front of us or embedding them in other objects, our behavior can be modified. The scary part is that it successfully modifies our behavior without our conscience thought. Below is an incredible video of what is good for the robotic consumer is good for the subliminal purveyor.

It is after watching powerful clips like this and seeing documentaries like The Century of the Self, reading books like Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic and Affluenza that I begin to understand the bumper sticker that says”Kill your television.” I want my life back from this crazy overconsumption world that leaves people feeling empty inside. I hardly ever watch TV and yet I still feel it. That is because people through their hair, clothes, shoes, attitudes and words become walking advertisements for myriad products.