We are living in a world drowning in words and the world would be a lot better off if most of them were not expressed. In our advertising and media dominated world the value of words has been cheapened almost to the point of meaninglessness and it’s time we began paying attention to what it is costing us and doing something about it. Nothing displaces people and their lives and creates a modern dystopia, dehumanising and demeaning us, more than the endless, meaningless, verbal barrage we are constantly subjected to.
Liars serve no one but themselves, but in so doing they also cheapen those against whom their lies are directed and whose sense of reality they seek to distort for their own ends. Advertising, whose sole purpose is to increase a products market share, is just a very expensive form of deception diminishing its audience to mere consumers for profit.
Advertising was born when Edward Bernays, also the father of modern Public Relations (PR), was hired by the tobacco industry to persuade women to smoke in public which had hitherto been a social taboo. Bernays hired a group of socialites to light up during the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929 inNew York, describing cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’. It was a hugely successful stunt about which George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, said, ‘It will be like opening a gold mine right in our front yard.’ The consumer society was born, then, on the basis of deception and we’ve not looked back since.
Politics today is dominated by PR in the shape of spin doctors. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Director of Communications, being almost as renowned as Blair himself, but something very new has emerged since the coalition came to power in 2010. The government has abandoned facts and expert advice, PR and spin, for outright lies. When Cameron told the House of Commons ‘Anyone with severely disabled children is exempt from the spare room subsidy.’ he was stating something that was completely untrue, an outright lie.
This new form of political advantage seems to be based entirely on simply using the media to say whatever fiction politicians want to promote with complete abandon. The danger it represents is enormous, relying, as it does, on decades of truth fatigue created by advertising, news as infotainment and general television entertainment, often described as live or reality TV, when it is nothing of the sort
The distortion of reality that lies achieve is doing incalculable harm and it is time to fight back, to get a grip and to get real. There is a social revolution taking place and it depends on sincerity and integrity and being true to oneself and others. The time to fight back is now for our own sakes and for the sake of the next generation who will inherit whatever we leave them. ‘What did you do in the info wars?’ might just become the burning question that our children could reasonably ask us in the years to come.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bedroom-tax-disabled-boy-logan-1753219
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
