Advertising and Authority

Tao is unadvertizable because the Tao is separate and unique to every one who walks it.
Every conscious path is unlike any other path. Tao is the purest identity of the human psyche. It’s the creature that finds its path equal its goal, and is constantly surprised to learn what else it turned out to value.

He who advertises Tao is furthest away from it.
Man comes to the one who walks, his instinctive path leads him to the conscious path.

Buddha is inconsequential, the formation of birds is the Buddha nature. The silence of the Geese is the Buddha nature. I wait, Buddha nature suspended. There is a tree that fell on a boat near where I suspect the Geese hide now from my mind.

Buddha nature is that the biker did not throw his shoes over the power line across the bridge, where also the tree is who fell.

Buddha is the owl who closes his face to me by staring
He who knows not his own gaze is Buddha
innocence is impossible and to laugh at this is …

our home. German huts and my vision is blurry
mud

Heidegger

Rock, skewed wood
more rock, moss, grass, little of everything, tree in the distance, high, tall and thin trees… waving slowly with the unfelt wind…

I disappear in non-Buddha - Tao takes over.

But then Buddhism has not brought man closer to the Buddha.
Man walked the Tao long before Buddha gave it his name.
Even as hordes of multitudes root around in uniform formations, many humans walk a path. The Earth is weird.

Is Buddha weird, or does it lack weirdness?

Avertizement is weirding out the Buddha nature.
Skewing the Buddha perspective and obscuring it by saying that Buddha is a reward.

But to create advertisements - this can be Buddha nature.

Perhaps we need to develop a Buddha nature vis a vis advertisements. Value ads in terms of the Buddha.
As a flock of geese, as a fallen tree, as a fool in the dark.

In the current economic climate, I would still feel like I was being sold something.
It’s a good antithesis though, isn’t it? Tao…

Advertising is the greatest form of art of the 20/21st Century.

Saying it is a form of violence is like saying that any other form of art is: born from weakness.

The author of this is weak.

Excellent topic, but why was it moved? I almost missed it here.

I would say that even more important than the buying of the Product is the way advertising gives Brains, especially children’s Brains, all sorts of ideas about what is going on, what is important, what a human being is, what to be scared of, what is cool…This all taking Place in the background of the Products. The background of a coke Commercial often includes all sorts of messages about what emotions one should have, how the men and women should dress and relate, what happiness is, what is cool. This is poured into the brain and then associated with the Product. Sure, it is unpleasant if people buy sugar water, but what they are being taught about Life is even more damaging.

Sure. Or cult training.

I am very skeptical About this claim. They may not buy a toyota because of the latest advertising, but the background messages will reinforce brainwashing they got as kids and they are very likely not immune to that. They Think they are not influenced because they Think reality is the way it is presented in advertising. Their skepticism gets aimed at the Product - though even here I Think people are more influenced than they realize - but Corporate ideas about what ontology and methodologies ‘citizens’ should have are getting in there and settling in.

[size=150]‘You are (only) your Surfaces and spending more Money on these Surfaces is the way to improve who you are’[/size]

The war around that one is nearly over.

You guys are waiting for MagsJ?

Horseshit.

Advertising is merely a ploy to sell crap.

There are some good ads, no doubt, but I’d rather throw the baby out of the bath-tub if it meant being free of it all.

Are you saying that all products are crap? Are you saying that nobody should know about products that are available? Or are you just against deceit, or ugliness?

The vast majority of products advertised are crap, yes. Cars, perfume, fast food, charities. Crap, crap, crap.

Agreed.

If something is worth buying, it doesn’t need advertising. That is not to say no information is needed about products/services and where to find them, I’m talking about pushing a product/service and manipulation/persuasion.
“Leave ppl the fuck be”.
Can something crafty and stealthy be violent? I’m not sure, but it most certainly feels violating and forced. What was that about negative liberty? I guess it doesn’t apply to mind control.

Even if a product/service is not crap, as soon as it is advertised it suddenly feels like crap to me. And so does the rest of the world of people when they go and buy it. I really don’t want to hate people, and I really don’t want to find material things detestable. Advertising just makes me react this way.

I have a real problem with advertising.
A survival tip I find useful is to mute ones with sound. Then I can look away and don’t feel quite so violated (but I still feel extremely disgusted).

But I know why it’s done: it stretches demand beyond its natural balance, to encourage the maximum possible trade, which is the lifeblood of “growth”. Growth being the rate of increase in profits netted by an economy, which will be positive anyway if left alone - but greed demands cheating and then we all suffer when we have to come back down to reality during each bust that follows every illusory boom.
Advertising is just another thing that makes us all suffer all the more for each recession.

Advertising is a disease that sickens the soul.

I think we all are.

That has no bearing on what I said.

To persuade someone is an art form. The highest art form.

People are the canvas nowadays. Only the strong can make art on such a canvas.

I came here looking to expand on my pre-formed ideas through debate with others but haven’t achieved that here… hence my joining PhilosophyNow in recent weeks.

Through manipulation… the classicists were very good at it. DaVinci has to be the epitome of the artist/scientist, without the manipulation angle (I think) and the person I have the most admiration for due to that combination. Then there were The Impressionists…

It’s worth is in the conceptualisation process… helping to draw up a concept to have maximal impact upon release, which is exponentially linked to cost.

I’d call the philosophy that’s linked to Media/Advertising a surface philosophy, as they only require what works and discards what doesn’t, and any allegiances are also discarded along with that… hence those industries being deemed shallow.

You cannot sell the Tao, but you sure as shit can make Money Selling the Tao.
And the number of Products proclaiming to sell you the Tao is rather large.
And if we take the tao as something that could, say, enhance the presence of someone hooked into it, man they will sell t-shirt with his photo
or tv Movies with her Life story.

“Persuasion” is a stretch, ‘manipulation’ would be more accurate. Note, I said “stretch” not ‘wrong’. I do concede that there is some skill in manipulating someone’s mind, but it’s a damn shame to have it in existence. The world, and I’m not being hyperbolic here, would be better off without advertisement, whereas the same can’t be said so much of other art forms. So, I call BS on your second claim, too.

“Only the strong! Only the strong!”

Is that a quote from that movie? Y’know the one with the Greek guy with the 12-pack airbrushed onto his abdomen…I think it is…I sounds kinda Spartan. I know that stuff’s all in vogue nowadays anyway…maybe there was an ad for it…

I don’t know about that. Seems like this is an inevitable progression and some people here are trying to hold onto the past.

Most posters have impulsively chosen sides in a moral question that I did not actually raise. I tried to find out if advertising is a-moral or if there is a morality implicit in it - but I wasn’t suggesting that the lack of morality necessarily implies an evil.

I agree that advertising has the power to treat man as a canvas, but I’ve rarely seen an advertisement creating a beautiful thing out of man. Ads usually seem to speak to man on very base and narcissistic levels, driving him to do impulsive and pointless things and consider them important, realizations of happiness and completeness.

Completeness has never been so close. And so pointless.

However advertising is only a means. It might be used to very different ends. Of what can man be persuaded? Of almost anything. It’s not that there is news or sitcoms in between the ads, these are ads in between the ads - ideological campaigns in between sociological ones all littered with references to the consumer market

The basic form of the art of persuasion, the one selling specific products, is by far the most truthful of the lot. What held in Jefferson’s time still holds today: “Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."

Violence is not avoidable - man will be persuaded, of something, of anything. He craves it… I’m not making this up. We can’t ‘stop the violence’. But I will say that since a year I don’t have a tv anymore, and I haven’t missed it for a second. Whenever I turn on the tv my eyebrows keep rising in disbelief, about how much worse it has gotten since I last checked, and turn it off when my head begins to hurt. Usually after about 30 seconds of zapping I’ve seen so much stupidity that it almost makes me laugh in utter dissociation.

The worst of it is not at all the advertising. The shows programmed around it are often ten times as disturbing in the assumptions they make about the stage of the viewers lobotomy.

Within advertisement, due to the sheer production value and the talent and will required to produce them, I see a great danger because I see a great power.

Is violence not the original “art of persuasion”? I certainly recognize that advertising is very persuasive. To the point even that I compare it to violence. I don’t see how that has to do with weakness except that advertisement is generally used to make people weak, to weaken them in their instinctive self-value and releasing uncontrolled vitality to compensate for that. Impartially I can view it as a spectacular process. I just don’t think it has become art yet.

Interestingly that site is evidently designed with the purpose of advertising itself.
I find such layouts distracting - I am being told what to value. This is very difficult to reconcile with my philosophical mindset.

Could you post and impressionist image as an example of something that might work in an advertisement? Since you have practical experience.

Interesting. What would be one concept that has been maximized for impact in a way that was very costly?
For example, is “Just do it” an expensive concept?

There must be some kind of depth to it. Which employee, in a typical agency, would you say is the most profound thinker, the deepest mind?

I agree. In this sense it’s a continuation of religion - but rather a heathen liberation from the Christian sexual and modesty mores.

Exactly.

It works in two ways. The ad man tries to read the mind of the viewer, and connect the product to this mindset. At the same time he will be stimulating and perpetuating the mindset that allows him to be persuasive.

In principle, we could make use of this pre established ‘blank stare’ in any way we’d wish.

Because money is running out. People find that they can not be how they’ve been trained to value themselves. Mass cognitive dissonance, an urge to return to reality, but a complete lack of capacity to interpret reality in any way except the pleasure principle. That’s how it stands - in this turmoil I’m thankful to be trained in using my imagination to persuade myself of what I’ve decided is true. There is no more reality that is handed out without a price.

The trick to selling a truth is to make it seem like a luxury and a privilege. Often that means making it expensive. In more interesting cases it means that only a certain audience is permitted to the product. Any truly thing of power being advertised must discard a lot of people by simply making itself known.

I’m not talking about Mercedes but it’s not entirely unrelated.

But what Nietzsche leaves out here is that the Greek surface is beautiful because the body is superabundant.

I would guess there are even mixed messages in their, some judging sex. But more importantly, I see primarily anti-lliberation messages. YOu are a Surface. You need to have the perfect Surface or you will not get X, y and Z. Bad people have negative emotions. Losers are like ________. You can buy your way to happiness. If you do not own X you will not be happy. Men and women interact like _____________. To be the right kind of man you are like ____________ To be the right kind of woman you are like ___________You are the sum of your Products. If what you have is old but not yet an antique you are ______________[negative evaluative term] And much more constraining, judging, manipulating, distorting and severely limiting and causing a lot of fear and confusion about what one is.

and in most cases they have been a third parent, often, perhaps most often, having more time to beam messages into that child’s mind than either parent or both has had.

As much of the West gets poorer it will be interesting to see what the advertisers do and what Products the lower classes and the precariat have aimed at them.