Thought Manipulation: The Use and Abuse of Psychological Trickery (10 page)

Erich Fromm’s description suggests a clear distinction between two participants in the manipulative interaction: the active manipulator (the advertiser) and his passive target (the consumer). It seems to be not too much of an exaggeration to claim that Fromm draws a mechanistic image of human beings that can be molded into consumers without any shadow of independent consideration. According to this description, the impression is that the art of manipulation is simply finding the right “buttons” to press.

No doubt, many liberals, especially individualists, will never accept such a mechanistic model of humanity. Most of them will emphasize the individual’s ability to choose, which makes him responsible for his decisions, behavior, and actions. If a person is stupid enough to believe in an externally made fantasy, this is his personal problem and he should bear the consequences.

Of course, the emphasis on the individual’s ability to choose is only part of the picture because advertising and sales promotion, at least in open societies, play an active role in the dynamic crucible of a competitive market. A competitive market has its own rules, written or unwritten, that give constraints and boundaries to the manipulative game.

Generally speaking, the advertising agencies are mediators, usually between manufacturers and consumers, creating manipulations for whosoever is willing to pay. The crucial point is that the advertiser has his own interests that do not always overlap with the ambitions of those who hire him. For example, it seems that, often enough, the advertiser finds himself operating between his client’s demand for a magical advertisement that possesses infinite influential power and his own interests to limit the time of the advertisement’s impact and thus renew the demand for more advertising (an important point that Erich Fromm seems to miss).

The advertiser, like almost any competitive actor, wishes to create and sustain a market for his services. Therefore, he must be cautious not to create permanent “fixations” in the consumers’ minds, such as drinking one brand of soft drink forever and without any breaks. The reason is that such an imaginary success of planting in the consumers’ mind the conviction that they are going to drink one specific soft drink for the rest of their life will probably reduce the demand for future advertising services. The advertiser prefers that each profitable campaign will lead to the next campaign, indefinitely. One of the methods to maximize this chain reaction is to limit the time of an advertisement’s influence.

The implication of the last description is that the advertiser manipulates the consumer and the manufacturer at the same time. However, the manipulation of the consumer is mainly emotional, while the manipulation of the manufacturer is mostly intellectual. The advertiser, who motivates the consumer to act impulsively and without any sense of consideration, maneuvers the producer to become dependent upon the advertiser’s services according to reasoning and rational argumentation: the influence of the present campaign has faded away, so it is necessary to start another campaign as soon as possible. The punch line is that the manufacturer takes for granted the advertiser’s human and professional limitations without considering that there might be an intentional strategy of planned obsolescence.

The balance of power between the advertiser and the manufacturer, briefly described here, is incomplete and no more than the conjecture of my own surmise. However, it is beyond controversy that the way from the manufacturer to the consumer’s pocket passes through many “partners,” or more precisely competitors, that have their own independent interests. My schematic description merely serves to illustrate the notion of “competition” in its wide and multidimensional structure. It intends to give a general idea about the role of the competitive market in protecting consumers from damaging influences.

This particular aspect of competition might sound strange and even contradictory to our first intuition because competition is usually associated with the benefit of a small, successful group: the winners. This perception of competition seems to be very clear and concrete to us: sporting contests, elections, chess games, and so on. In the wide social context, however, competition is a broad concept subject to far more complicated interactions, rules, and constraints.

The perception of competition in the global social context and its advantages and disadvantages belongs to the wide debate on how to conduct a decent social order. This fundamental dispute is reflected in any political and moral discussion dealing with manipulative behavior in general and the advertising market in particular. For example, many of the free market economists claim that a competitive free market is able to spontaneously solve, or at least diminish, the kind of problems Erich Fromm raises. Before introducing solutions such as free competition, however, it is first necessary to formulate problems and dilemmas concerning the influence of modern advertising on the course of our life. Therefore, I will come back to this important issue in more detail in the last section of this chapter.

ON THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA

Generally speaking, the competitive market is far from being a laboratory that facilitates experiments in hypnosis and human design. Therefore, Erich Fromm’s description of modern advertising’s overpowering impact on human behavior seems to be unrealistic and something of an exaggeration. However, it is hard to deny that many times it is almost impossible to find the logic behind the functionality of many advertisements. We can be impressed by the creativity of an advertisement and also astonished that we do not identify the message used to promote sales. Ironically, our inability to understand the “mysterious” marketing themes does not stop us from being consumers who constantly buy things that we do not need. Therefore, it might be our very ignorance and inability to read between the lines that play a major part in the success and flourish of advertisers who produce those mystifying marketing messages. Let me clarify the puzzle by using an absurd example.

Selling black olives as libido enhancers sounds like a Marx Brothers’ joke. Indeed, as Koestler noted, the mechanism of jokes is based on connecting two different dimensions with an absurd idea. In our instance, the key that opens our routine and ordinary life (one dimension) to imaginary divine sexual satisfaction (another dimension) is black olives (an absurd idea). As it is well known, the wall that separates reality and comedy can be very thin. In this respect, laughter is some kind of automatic reflex of emotional activity, at least under our classification (as a “real” good laugh seems to be a spontaneous reaction). Therefore, it would not be too much of exaggeration to wonder if a mechanism that makes us laugh could similarly encourage us to buy.

In any case, it is easy to assume that black olive growers will not object to us gladly buying their product, and for us, the consumers, it is much more fun to buy out of entertainment. Still, the more serious riddle remains: Are such “amusing” and “irrational” strategies effective and profitable?

Trying to sell physical goods by attacking or even creating mental deprivations seems to be synonymous with producing artificial demands. To put it differently, manipulative advertising is designed to disturb the rational evaluation of a product by creating the illusion that the product can satisfy desires that it probably cannot. In our previous example, the advertiser is simply trying to take advantage of a person’s depressed sex life in order to turn him into a fanatical consumer of black olives.

Milton Friedman, the well-known economist, argues that employing Erich Fromm’s psychological techniques is inconsistent with the basic rules of the competitive market: supply, demand, and maximizing profits. In a competitive market, Friedman argues, it is more useful, effective, and profitable to approach “real needs” than create artificial demands. He believes there is not much economic sense in using Erich Fromm’s irrational methods of influence.

In spite of Friedman’s economic calculations, however, many times it is hard to find a direct relationship between the physical functionality of goods and their appearance in advertisements. For example, the connection between soft drinks and eternal youth, as is the latent message of many advertisements, is not valid. Nevertheless, it seems that this irrational claim, which has held for so many years, is quite profitable for certain soft drinks companies.

Professor Friedman, who is not blind, notes that even if certain advertisements indeed manufacture “artificial wants,” at least to certain level it is always necessary to compare alternatives for dealing with this issue. The alternatives at stake are free advertising and advertising that is under governmental control. According to Friedman, the first alternative is out of a bad lot, and the second one is a complete disaster.

ADVERTISEMENTS, REGULATION, AND DECENT SOCIETY

The controversy over the regulation of advertising in a modern economy is part of a wider dispute concerning the question of how to conduct a decent, stable society. Erich Fromm and Milton Friedman come from two competitive traditions. Fromm’s ideas are rooted in the socialist Frankfurt school, while Friedman believes in a capitalist society conducted as a free, competitive market. The capitalist approach is more relevant and more dominant at the present time. Therefore, I focus most of my attention on the liberal side of the social-political map, but without ignoring criticism from the left.

When discussing capitalism, it is almost inevitable that Friedrich August von Hayek—a well-known proponent of the free market system—will be mentioned. Hayek’s work is identified with the rebirth of classical liberalism in the twentieth century, and his polemical treatise,
The Road to Serfdom
, is a watershed in the debate over the question how to construct the foundations of a good society. This short political pamphlet contributed to the shift in attention from modern socialism, the rational conduct of society, to capitalism, the free market system.

The most severe social issues in the beginning of the twentieth century were the rise and flourish of totalitarian regimes. Towards the middle of this century, the most critical problems were encompassed under the following questions: How does a society prevent the resurgence of tyranny? How it is possible to stop manipulative, vicious demagogues from gaining popular support and public appealing? How does society prevent the repetition of the same mistakes?

Around the end of World War II, the intellectual mainstream, including the likes of the well-known sociologist Karl Mannheim, was occupied in searching for rational ways to prevent such social crises. The core of the scholars, who overestimated human intellectual power, believed in the possibility of creating a better world by the rational constructing and marshalling of society. They were entrenched in the utopian belief that every social problem can be solved rationally. Modern socialism, defined as the rational planning of society, became the ultimate alternative to fascism, while capitalism became vilified as almost synonymous with the tyranny of capitalists. Hayek’s work provides a conclusive attack on the socialist paradigm while laying the foundation for an opposing capitalist vision.

Hayek’s political philosophy is extremely important with regard to the study of manipulative behavior, this mysterious and elusive phenomenon. Aside from Hayek’s struggle against fascism, his thought provides the theoretical background to limit governmental regulation in general and to block regulation without objective criteria in particular. (There is no objective test to quantify the damages of manipulative influences.) Based on his theoretical framework, his followers were able to argue that regulation according to abstract criteria, or more precisely regulation without an objective standard, is likely to develop into unlimited regulation that endangers liberty.

Before proceeding to the discussion on regulation in the advertising market, I briefly sketch a necessary general background that is intended to clarify the basic ideas behind the extreme suspicions of Hayek, Friedman, and other protagonists of the free market system regarding government regulation in the murky area that manipulation in general and advertising in particular operate.

LIBERTY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND “MENTAL FREEDOM”

Hayek’s political thought turns on the dichotomous distinction between two spheres: the mental dimension and the physical one. Generally speaking, thoughts and feelings are personal to each individual, while the worldly domain is common to everybody. To sharpen this distinction, I propose labeling the mental or cognitive sphere the subjective world and the physical dimension the objective world.

We can say that every person recognizes two worlds, each of them subject to different sets of rules and mainly dissimilar terminology. We observe, examine, and analyze the objective framework in terms of substance and energy, while the subjective system is subject to principles that we do not fully understand. (Part of the reason is that we do not identify the mental world in terms of substance and energy.) Therefore, using terms from the material world to describe the mental one— mental blocks, airhead, and brain freeze, for example—is meaningless unless we regard them as metaphors. This is consistent with Hayek’s view on the term “mental freedom,” or as he calls it, “inner freedom.”

According to Hayek, freedom has only one meaning—lack of coercion. The term belongs to the physical sphere and not to the mental one, which is, of course, connected to a different frame of terminology. The practical meaning is that choices or decisions, in the mental meaning, might be subject to influence but definitely not to coercion. Therefore, “coercion of thoughts” might be a metaphor, but literally it is a meaningless sentence. Accordingly, putting manipulation and coercion in the same category is confusing and valueless. The severe result is that muddling terms, such as “coercion of thought” or “subject the will,” encourage individuals not to take responsibility for their lives and decisions. Such terms indicate that people have limited ability to oppose external influences like manipulative behavior— an assertion that, according to Hayek, is not true.