The Hidden Persuaders

I think I will take issue with Beagles' idea that history seems to be marching towards people having more rights,  A couple weeks ago I had laid out my idea of an objective physical reality, I'm pretty sure that was it, but it could have been anything really, and the next morning I saw where Old Dog had disagreed with me on almost every point, and I was all like, fer Chrissake.  It looks like he just went over everything I said and disagreed with me.  And then I gave myself pause.  Isn't this what I always do?  Why yes it is.  Well so it goes then.  If you can't take the heat get out of the Beaglesonian kitchen,

As for whether we are moving towards more rights for individuals depends on when and where you put your starting point at.  Certainly as hunter gatherers we had more rights than we did once we discovered agriculture.  Probably we had more rights in the Roman Empire than in medieval Europe.  Western civ is probably doing okay now, but the rest of the world not so much.  Here in America we have broadened out our rights to people who don't own property, women, blacks, and now gays, that's all a good thing,  But the trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer bodes ill since power flows towards money, and then there is the idea that the current all-enveloping media is manipulating us.

I think we're all of an age where we remember The Hidden Persuaders.  One of the ideas there was that there were white-coated scientists in our universities peering over their clipboards at rats running mazes, jotting down data and taking it to their huge clanking and blinking computers and figuring out every last thing there was to know about human beings, and using it, not to better the human race, but to help Wrigley peddle chewing gum.

Fifty years later we really haven't gotten much closer to understanding the human mind, in the sense of having a set of axioms like in geometry to figure out theories.  We seem to have moved more towards the use of focus groups.  I believe I have told my focus group stories, but it has been some time ago so I will repeat them, but at a later date

The villains of The Hidden Persuaders were television, the new all-pervasive monster and advertising.  Nowadays we have the much more pervasive internet, and again advertisers.

I was going to extend this to politics, but here we are at the end of the week so I will let that ferment over the weekend.


I see that my attempts to drag the blog into the internet sewer ala Nicki's backside have failed because Old Dog and Beagles seem to be made of sterner stuff than myself.  Very well, I salute you.