Brandwashed

   The subjects of Brandwashed are marketing and branding, both of which are designed to drive consumer buying, but in different ways. The function of marketing is to  detect a need and to inform consumers as to the existence of the product and includes pricing, promotion and distribution. The intent of branding is to establish a link between the consumer and the product, using psychological mechanisms to establish brand loyalty. The book title suggests that branding may act as a form of brainwashing, wherein the consumer is psychologically bonded to the brand. Furthermore, it implies that at times, the employed methods are illegitimate and that consumers must be alert to this form of coercion. The fact that sellers use advertisements to usurp the minds of potential buyers is an important subtext of the book. Ads that are effective often have an emotional content that penetrates our unconscious, and makes us subservient to our hidden desires that are often rooted in fear, anxiety, self-image and sexual interest. This book explores each of these issues in depth.

    This is not the first book to address the use of psychological methods in order to motivate consumer preferences. In  1957, Vance Packard published a groundbreaking book whose premise was that unconscious desires determine consumer-buying preferences. He proposed that access to the buyer’s unconscious is essential to effectively motivate consumer buying. The name of the book was The Hidden Persuaders.  The book advanced the use of Motivational Research to uncover consumer desires, which remained buried in the unconscious. Freud contended that the unconscious is the seat of forbidden desires, often related to sexual feelings. Since these desires are repressed they are inaccessible to routine questioning, and require psychoanalytic techniques to bring them out into the open. The Packard book explores these methods in fine detail. Whether these methods are as valid for populations as for individuals is discussed in one of the final chapters of the Packard book.

    Brainwashed picks up where the Hidden Persuaders left off. The author contends that psychological forces responsible for consumer preferences are the products of neurologic mechanisms. The author discusses in detail the role of neurologic imaging as a method to uncover

neurocircuits responsible for decision-making. He thus moves from psychological mechanisms to anatomic and physiologic determinates of buyers’ thoughts.

 

    Unexpectedly, he comes to the conclusion that peer pressure is the most powerful stimulus for consumer buying.  The author contends that identification with trusted peers primes the consumer pump. Along with peer pressure is celebrity endorsements.   Identification with celebrities is central to consumer self-image supporting the contention that consumers must be proud to choose certain products. In all cases, trust is the essential ingredient of the power of the suggestion. An interesting chapter in support of the power of peer pressure depicts an imaginary family called the Morgensons who by their very presence in the community impels consumer preferences by  example, contiguity and suggestion. The Morgensons are modeled on the Jones’s, a TV family whose goal was to make buying suggestions to the community The Magnesusns consisted of a family of people, who like the Jones’s suggested products to the community. The conclusion of this study is that community pressure is the most effective motivator of consumer buying.

   The most powerful and startling chapter in the book is entitled Every Breath You Take, They’ll be watching. It is no accident that this title reflects paranoid ideation.. This chapter deals with what the author refers to as mega data mining, a practice by which sellers accumulate personal information from a variety of sources in efforts to plumb the minds of potential buyers. This chapter is both illuminating and frightening in its implications.   Whether it be Facebook or Google, our use of social media makes it possible for third parties to uncover facts about us that we always assumed were private. Similarly, by monitoring our wandering through supermarket aisles sellers accumulate first hand knowledge of our consumer interests. Most importantly, and unbeknownst to us these data are shared with a variety of providers. All of us have had the experience of researching  a subject on the internet, only to receive an e-mail or coupon related to these activities, almost immediately. We assume that these are just coincidences, but an author points out, in marketing, nothing is a coincidence. This chapter is not to be recommended to those who are influenced and frightened by paranoid thoughts.  Such thoughts are accompanied by fear that there is a conspiracy to influence oneself. There is an old joke that being paranoid does not exclude the possibility of actually being followed and monitored.

   Unlike the Vance Packard book there is no chapter on ethics and morality. Is it right to use hidden methods to influence peoples behavior based on hidden desires, sexual interests, anxieties, fears etc.?  We have come a long way since Vance Packard wrote the Hidden Persuaders. New techniques have been developed which allow one to probe the minds of potential buyers. The author warns that companies are “collecting information about us without our knowledge, not just our buying habits but about everything about us-our race and sexual orientation; our address, phone number and real-time location “ It brings to mind Orwell’s nightmare about big brother is watching you. We would be well advised to heed the warning of Vance Packard in his conclusion of his book “they try to invade the privacy of our minds. It is this right to privacy in our minds, -the right to be rational or irrational- that we must strive to protect”. Perhaps this book will be adequate warning to those captivated by issues of marketing and branding.

     What Brandwashed does not deal with is the role of branding in political races. Such branding has far more consequences than whether people buy Wheaties. Studies of what determines political choices have found that people rarely vote based on professed policies. Their vote comes from the gut, from their perceptions of whether the political choice supports them as people.  Thus the election of Donald Trump was undoubtedly determined by populism, with the notion that he favored a sub segment of the population at he expense of others.

  The main problem with this book is that in its intent to be user friendly, the author falls prey to a writing style that is chatty to the point of being distracting. The writing meanders and it is difficult to discern the author’s intention to provide a cogent massage.  One becomes unsure of the direction that the author is taking and becomes lost in the pointless verbiage. Each chapter is headed by a cute title which in its opaque way suggests the subject to be discussed but leaves it to the reader to decipher its meaning. Fortunately, the author rescues himself and the reader with a few sentences at the end of each chapter, which summarizes the message

   Another major problem with the book is that it frequently asserts outright falsehoods and half-truths, disguised as established facts. An example is the reference to hand washing and the use of hand lotions to prevent the flu. The author argues that hand washing cannot protect against organism spread by aerosolization. He overlooks the fact that such aerosols alight on objects in the environment and are transferred to the airways by tactile transfer of organisms. A bit of fact checking would have been helpful. None the less, the book is thoughtful and encourages  us to examine critically the methods that marketers use to influence our buying choices.

Post by Arthur Banner

Freethinkers. A History of American Secularism.Susan Jacoby. NY. Holt and Co. 2004

   This book was discussed at Wise Guys on February 5, 2018.

   The premise of this book is that the United States was born a secular society, parented by the enlightenment and midwifed by such luminaries as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. The documentation of this heritage is the United States Constitution, which is notably secular, grounded in human rather than divine authority. What bedevils Jacoby, who appears to be a secularist, is the myth that the United States is a Christian country, founded and supported by a belief in God. Her goal is to support those who believe otherwise and to return them to their rightful place in society.  She argues for a return to reason, the guiding principle of the founders.  

  

   Those who adhere to reason have generally been termed secularists.  The term was coined in 1851 to indicate separation of church and state.  However, Jacoby prefers to call them freethinkers. The author then discusses the essential differences between freethinkers and believers. Both can be said to be a religion. Believers believe in God whereas freethinkers believe in a search for truth. She claims that believers feel that they have found the truth whereas freethinkers are still searching.

   The book begins with a discussion of the disturbing tension between religious and political ideas. The essential issue relating to the founding of the country was the enlightenment notion that in order to eliminate the divine right of kings one needed to eliminate belief in the divine.  Thus, one needed to champion the idea that all humans have the ability to reason to guide their lives. Jacoby advances these issues by discussing Jefferson’s   Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was a statement about both freedom of conscience and the principle of separation of church and state.  The book consists of a compilation of freethinkers who have contributed to this country in significant ways and thus reminding people of the proper appreciation of them and arguing for a national goal of reason over faith.  The author begins with a discussion  of the significant impact of Thomas Paine, on the meaning of the country.

   Paine was English but became an American political activist who was varyingly described as an atheist or deist. He published 2 influential pamphlets embodying enlightenment principles and so laid the basis for the American Revolution. The decline in the influence of Paine was related to the religious orientation of the country which is discussed in the chapter headed The Age of Reason and Unreason. Although the nation was begun as a secular state, there was a persisting tension between secularism and religion, eventuating in the preservation of religion  at the expense of secularism. The Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival beginning in the early 19^th century initially precipitated this shift. Two centuries later this tension still exists, as when George Bush signaled that religion might have achieved the ultimate victory, he delivered an address at the National Cathedral following the traumatic events of 9/11. He thus signaled that religion might have achieved the ultimate victory, That it resembled a sermon more than a political speech was lost on no one. The favorable response of the nation was reflected in the opinion polls revealing a 90% approval rating for the President, indicative of the hunger for spiritual comfort and solace following the terrorist trauma.

 Despite this religious current, the country has led the world in technological advances. The author attributes this phenomenon to the secular components of the society.  The contribution of freethinkers to social progress is highlighted in the fascinating chapter describing the links between secularism and both abolition and feminism. It would appear that many of the feminists and abolitionists were freethinkers. That feminists would be freethinkers is not surprising when one considers that the Bible downgrades women and links women with original sin. Similarly abolitionists would favor freethinking since the south justified slavery by biblical references.

  

   The centerpiece of the book is a description of the Scopes trial, which consists of the clash between freethinkers and believers. The trial was about a young teacher who ostensibly violated Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow, an iconic freethinker defended Scopes, whereas William Jennings Bryan, a fundamentalist, was on the side of the prosecution. Although the teacher was found guilty, this judgment was overturned on a technicality. Ultimately, the trial highlighted the national tension between religion and science and was responsible for the persistence to this day of laws against teaching evolution in schools.

   The topic of evolution is dealt with again in a more extensive fashion in a subsequent chapter entitled Evolution and Its Discontents, a takeoff on Freud’s book Civilization and its Discontents, wherein Freud deals with his failure to understand the basis of religious feeling. Though entitled “evolution,” the chapter deals with far ranging topics such as Spencer’s Social Darwinism and the basis for a schism between believers and freethinkers.

   Social Darwinism is a theory that individuals, are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals., and hence 

one deserves one’s status in life. It is a justification for conservatism and imperialism, the opposite of liberalism.  

 

 The final chapter of the book represents a pivot for the author, from a simple description of events and people to a blueprint for action, a preparation for the ongoing battles between freethinkers and believers. She begins with a target, Antonin Scalia, and focuses her ire on his talk at the University of Chicago School of Divinity. an event illustrating  a perfect example of the rupture of the wall between church and state. The author focuses on Scalia’s support for capital punishment, which is rooted in the Bible rather than in morality born of reason.  She then calls attention to Scalia’s supposed evidence that the United States was founded on religion including the repeated invocation of the nation’s support of the divine, such as repeated references to God on coins, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Jacoby points out that these invocations date not from the founding of the country but to more recent times as a response to other issues. She alleges that the Chicago speech attracted little national attention as a consequence of the religious right’s success in putting liberals and secularists on the defensive and the cowardice of politicians who fear being maligned as antireligious when they stand up for the separation of church and state.

   She charges that religious correctness can be attributed to right-wing money and political clout. More importantly, she refutes the allegation that religion is always benign. She provides potent examples,  noting the denial of transfusions to children, by Christian  Scientists and more importantly to Islam’s resort to religion to justify terrorism.

  

   What the author misses is that for many, belief in God is not a binary condition, that one either believes or not. Often people alter their beliefs with the challenges of living. The death of a child may turn some believers to atheism, while others who are agnostic may find strength in belief in God. A good example is Abraham Lincoln who is discussed in the book in a chapter entitled “The Belief and Unbelief of Abraham Lincoln.”  The chapter chronicles Lincoln’s turn to God for comfort after the death of his sonWillie and the deaths of a myriad of others in the Civil War.  His views are expressed in his second inaugural address, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Jacoby concludes that Lincoln was “poised between belief and unbelief”, and found only a question. Others believe he may  have found an answer.  The issue relates to the paradox of religious beliefs, which can vary on circumstances, and in particular the influence of uncertainty on one’s beliefs. For Jacoby the answer is all or nothing.

Posted By Arthur Banner

Radical Son. A Generational Odyssey

   The David Horowitz book entitled: Reconforming our Universities is well described by Barbara Banner. What appears to elude her is an insight into the motivation of the author. This is not her failing, but was a consequence of the author who seemed reluctant to reveal what made him tick. He seemed quite exercised about the issue of leftist domination of college campuses, but denied us an understanding of what led to his conversion from a left wing firebrand to rightist activist. Perhaps he felt that he had already bared his soul in his memoir Radical Son, published 13 years previously. In that book, Horowitiz appeared to be suffering a midlife crisis. His newfound identity was elicited by progressive alienation from his extreme left-wing background, crowned by the realization that the left wing heroes, the Black Panthers, were more deserving of derision rather than adulation.
 
   A midlife crisis is a questioning of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals. Characteristically it consists of a change in attitude and direction of previously held beliefs. Accompanying this transition of beliefs is recurrent depression, anger and rupturing of previously formed relationships. In Horowitz’s case, there were serious depressive episodes, dissolution of 3 marriages and a change in beliefs from left wing ideology to conservatism. Consequent to his midlife crisis was further alienation from his communist father. His devotion to leftist causes slowly unwound following the Khrushchev report on Stalin. Both he and his parents began to pull away from communism as a result of these revelations. More importantly, his disillusionment with the Black Panthers was the culminating event in his departure from the radical left. He came to realize that these heroes of the extreme left were sociopathic murderers and not merely the victims of a racist society. With their rejection he rejected the entire left wing ideology that produced them. As part of his midlife crisis he rejected all aspects of leftist ideology, reserving his most angry venom for American Universities. He accused them of fostering of affirmative action and promotion of social courses at the expense of more rigorous material. His most venomous charges were the exclusion of conservative faculty. He argued for a student bill of rights protecting the rights of co enervative students. When he accused the universities of promotion of leftist faculty and causes, the schools were non-pulsed and refused to rise for the Horowitz bait. They were apparently suspicious that these charges were not so much about them but were a manifestation of a psychologically burdened man, struggling with his own demons. His pre-occupation with American educational institutions is not explained in either book. Perhaps, his academic background, having received a master’s degree at Columbia University and his authorship of numerous books is an explanation.

    Like other great tragedies, the book ended with a denouement of sorts. He rediscovered his Jewish background and re-united with his family. He buried his mother next to his father. His first wife’s parents were buried there as well. His sister returned from Canada to take part in the burial ceremony. Thus he came to peace with his entire family. However, he remained separate from his leftist upbringing, adopting an ideology, which favored elitism, rather than sympathy for the downtrodden. In this respect, he denied that aspect of his Jewish background, which was rooted in the poor shtetles of Eastern Europe.

Posted by Arthur Banner

Reconforming Our Universities

   Is There a Crisis in Education Today? David Horowitz is a well-known activist and champion of academic freedom on college campuses. He is the author of the Academic Bill of Rights and a founder of Students for Academic Freedom. He maintains that the environment at liberal arts colleges and universities today is overwhelmingly liberal. Liberal administrators recruit liberal faculty who “indoctrinate” the students by presenting liberal political views as facts rather than opinions. Some encourage students to become activists for liberal issues. Horowitz lectures extensively on this subject, and his lectures are often met with demonstrations requiring campus police for protection. 

   Horowitz outlines the problem as he sees it in a recent book entitled “Reconforming our Universities. The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights” (Washington, D.C., Regency Publishing, Inc. 2010). He defines the problem and traces his attempt to formulate an Academic Bill of Rights for students. He aims to have this established in the mission and rules of the colleges and universities across the country. It is of note that in the 1960s Horowitz was a famous leftist radical, Marxist, and editor of “Ramparts” magazine of the New Left. In the 1970s he changed his political views and is now an ardent activist for conservative causes, particularly those related to higher education. 

   Horowitz begins his narrative by defining the problem. In the early days of the country, universities were communities of scholars well versed in Greek and Latin who taught the classics, literature and religion to students from the upper classes that were expected to become the future leaders. In the late 1800s the Industrial Revolution made it necessary to include science and engineering in curricula and to recruit faculty with expertise in these areas. Schools also broadened access to education to those who would be working in such fields, and campus life became diverse. With the Civil Rights and Equal Rights movements in the 1970s, colleges combined courses from different departments to create new fields of study such as “Women’s Studies’ and “American Studies”. These departments were to foster pluralism of ideas, but in fact many simply became centers for political activism. Then they became openly hostile to conservative ideas, regarding conservatives as reactionary, “religious”, “sexist”, and “racist”.

    Horowitz became concerned about the leftist migration of campus thought during speaking engagements in the 1980s and 90s. He found that campus politics of both students and professors was overwhelmingly liberal. He estimates that nationwide about 10% of university professors regard themselves as political activists rather than scholars. In 2003 he and his team documented political party registration of faculty members and administrators at 32 colleges who voted in primary elections. The overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans was >10/1. In many campuses conservative students felt unrepresented and marginalized. Course content was liberal to the point of indoctrination in liberal politics, in Horowitz’s view. For example, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he found a course on how to organize a revolution. He describes a course at the University of Arizona in which students were given credit for participating in political activity. The instructor provided a list of left-wing organizations for the students to join. Horowitz recounts another incident at the University of Colorado involving a student who was a veteran. The student was offended by an exam question ”Explain why George Bush is a war criminal”. The student answered instead why Saddam Hussein was a war criminal and received an F. This story traveled through the local media and details became murky, but Horowitz gives the story some credibility by the context in which it occurred. Some students described outright hostility from professors. An example is the Malhotra case at Georgia Tech University, which achieved notoriety in the media at the time. An honors student, Ruth Malhotra, was to attend a conservative conference in Washington D.C. She would miss one class and asked the professor what she should do to keep up with the lecture. The professor said that if she went to the conference she would fail the course. The incident went to the administration, which backed the professor. The student dropped the course.

    In 2003 Horowitz decided to take action against this unbalanced situation on the college campuses. He gathered a team of supporters, and they devised a strategy to make changes and bring back political balance on the campuses. They formulated an Academic Bill of Rights for students:
   1. Provide students with materials reflecting both sides of controversial issues.
   2. Do not present opinions as facts.
   3. Allow students to think for themselves.

   Horowitz devoted the next years to getting the Bill accepted by universities. He encountered resistance from both liberals and conservatives in the universities. At one of his invited talks at the University of Missouri in 2003 a professor offered students extra course credit if they protested against his talk. Speaking engagements to promote the Bill often provoked demonstrations. He approached state legislatures, but encountered hostility there also, particularly regarding SUNY. Questions were raised about whether the Bill implies that students have the right to dispute their grade, dictate course content, blackball faculty research, etc. Nevertheless, Horowitz has achieved successes over the years, notably by legislatures and university administrations in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The issue of academic freedom and balanced discussion and pluralism of ideas on campuses has become nationally publicized and recognized.

    Is this a solution without a problem, as one of Horowitz’s critics said, or is there something going on that requires urgent attention? As retired persons, we had the opportunity to audit courses from 2008-2016 at Bowdoin College, a small, highly respected liberal arts college in Maine. The students at that time were all Democrats. The faculty was scholars, and their political affiliations were not obvious in their courses or their lectures. The students were totally concerned with their courses and sports. Invited lecturers tended to be liberal, but one lecture by a general ended with a loud demonstration by students in support of Palestine, which was not the subject of the lecture. In 2013 the College and its president, Barry Mills, were attacked along with other small liberal arts colleges in a report by the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. The report maintained that the administration and faculty at Bowdoin and the others promoted exclusively liberal ideas. The attack was vicious and hard to swallow, but some of their criticisms about the minimal presence of political conservatives in debates and invited lectures were taken seriously.

    Our experience as of 2016 resonates somewhat with what Horowitz describes, but not at all to the degree of severity that he advocates. After all, what is a “liberal arts” college? A liberal arts curriculum imparts a broad spectrum of knowledge and ideas to train students to think and form their own opinions about issues. A conservative curriculum stresses traditional values and cautions about innovation and questioning. Thus one would expect liberal arts colleges to have a progressive atmosphere. A pluralism of ideas should include conservative political views as well as progressive ones. Certainly recent events at some schools including Reed and Evergreen State colleges raise concern. Violent outbursts and personal attacks are unacceptable. But our experience suggests that awareness and understanding, rather than action and radical administrative change is what is needed to provide more balanced liberal/conservative debates on campuses. Where is William F. Buckley now that we need him?

Posted by Barbara Banner

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