it's our belief (one which we hope to substantiate) that Western society is subtly but completely dependent upon retraumatization as a means for social control. we live lives saturated with advertising; effective advertising, we think, relies upon trauma and repeatedly hitting trauma triggers. the goal of the marketer is to make us want things that we didn't know we wanted, and the secret to that emotional transformation is latent pain.
there's an old book from 1959 about the "psychological" method of marketing, a famous book: Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders", which was a key text for both my elder sibling Frisk and myself. we hope to re-read this text soon; all the emotionally manipulative methods mentioned in that text have surely become ubiquitous and normalized in Western society. Packard tried to warn us but, decades onward, we're still let ourselves be pushed around in the same ways.
the marketer (in all probability) doesn't consciously desire a society in which we're all abused children growing older, scarred forever by the imposition of irrational desires—like the spotlessness of dishes or laundry. rather, they probably think of these things as inevitable. children will always be abused on matters of cleaning dishes and clothes, and therefore will always be vulnerable to ad pitches about spotless dishes and gleaming white linens. advertising requires the embrace of cynicism, the fixed belief that humans and humanity are incapable of change and growth. what if people could stop caring about whether their dishes were perfectly spotless? against this possibility, the marketers harden their hearts. "surely human beings are locked into these behaviors," they must tell themselves. "surely we're all obsessed with cleanliness and purity in exactly the same way. surely this is how human beings are, and I'm just accepting what's true."
what if it's not true?
~Chara of Pnictogen
