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THE SOCIAL FUTURE: PART 2: The Business of Deception
With the persistence of a military campaign, ants invade my
porous Victorian house, quivering lines of them tracing the trash
sacks, or sometimes trucking merrily to a big dead fly. When they
get too intrusive - as when they traverse the back of my sofa,
and thence my neck - I have to put down "ant stakes". These are
preferable to Black Flag, which poisons the user. Ant stakes have
a small amount of toxin, in their shiny metal chambers, highly
diluted with a sweet goo. The ants scarf the sweet goo, carry it
back to the colony, and feed it to their First Lady; thereafter,
rather neatly, the whole colony dies, in a day or two or three.
We're the same. We get word that something tasty is at hand;
we march in merry lines to it, and we confidently suck in the
sweet goo. We nod to one another, acknowledging: No problem.
We're fine. But slowly the trace toxin eats away at us; by
degrees it kills us. Sometimes it's literally a toxin; sometimes
it's simply lies.
- - - -
Lying is integral to our higher social structures; to
business and government. Deception is the way we do business, and
deception's got the official seal of approval. There are people
who take it too far: some sociopathic joker in Florida was
selling lists of "employers known to be looking for employees" to
the unemployed, who presumably spent their last $700 on this list
- and every company on it was fictitious. That's against the law,
yes, when the whole process pans out. In a way, that particular
grift is illegal because it's not deceptive enough. It's flat out
grifting; it's not the more deceptive half truth or glossy lie
that we find acceptable.
Among the most common, socially acceptable deceptions, are
those based on implication. They deceive by laying down (as the
pool hustlers say) a false implication, designed to deceive
those who don't look closely enough. Billions of dollars are made
- and squandered - this way.
Let's start with the smaller ones and work our way up.
You get an envelope with Ed MacMahon's picture on it. The
deceptions start on the envelope itself, with its declaration
that you may already have won millions of dollars. Or maybe a
Jaguar. You open it up, and its chock full of false implications.
There are letters seemingly to you personally from someone,
though of course they're not, implying that it's desperately
important that you pursue this contest with all your attention,
because many are the sad tales of their having had to give the
millions of dollars to someone other than the Big Winner. Of
course, in pursuing the contest you are exposed to more and more
exhortations for the true purpose of the mailing, the selling of
multiple magazine subscriptions. The key to this marketing device
is the repeated implication that if you buy magazines your
chances of winning are greater. This is not something they state
outright - they merely imply it. They imply it quite legally. The
implication is itself, a lie: your chances of winning are,
factually, not at all greater if you buy a subscription.
They lied only through implication. That's legal. Lying by
implication is a window of opportunity for fraud; the raw,
sleaziest smalltime "entrepreneurs" use it; the big, shiny
companies use it too, and constantly.
Sears, Encyclopedia Brittanica, various lending
institutions, insurance companies, scores of big, reputable
companies - and hundreds of smaller ones - use another
lie-by-implication in the mail: a disguised envelope. They make
the envelope look as if it might contain either a check, or an
Official Government Notice of some kind. They use a certain kind
of paper, a certain kind of printing, they may even decorate it
with an American Eagle in a way that implies that this is an
official document. Then it turns out to be simply an
advertisement. Sometimes there's even a window in the envelope
showing what appears to be a check inside...but isn't.
This is legal, and you are not surprised to read about it
here. You've noticed it yourself. It's normal. That's the point.
Deception is a normal and acceptable business practice.
As for Publisher's Clearing House - it's huge. Millions of
mailings go out, with the blessing of the postal inspectors, and
the fond hopes of all the publishers involved in selling their
magazines that way. Time-Warner and every other respectable name
in magazine publishing participates in the implication fraud.
Well, why not? All these mailing scams are merely exploiting
the dim-witted, or the hasty, or the naive. And those are sheep
to be shorn. It's okay to rip off stupid people. They are fair
game. In fact, next time I'm short some cash, I don't see why I
shouldn't pop down to the local school for mentally retarded
adults, and talk a few dozen of them out of their government
assistance checks. After all, the Lottery does it every day.
The California Lottery - sponsored by, and profiting, the
State of California, with the approval of the governor and the
legislature - runs television spots implying that your chances of
winning the State Lottery are quite good. Implying that there are
numerous winners. Implying that all you have to do is take
advantage of this opportunity. Implying that prosperity is just
around the corner - if you buy a Lottery ticket. They feature
actors playing the part of Lottery Winners: happy, carefree,
wealthy people on their rolling lawns with their vast mansions
behind them, or relaxing on yachts. The style of the thing
appeals, its seems to me, mostly to the poor and ignorant - and
recent immigrants who bought into the America-as-Promised-Land
deception.
As no doubt you know, your chances of winning the Lottery
are astronomically lousy. There are few winners. Buying a
lottery ticket from the State is not going to change your life.
You'll simply be a dollar poorer.
They even lie about how much you get if you do win. Ten
million dollars? It's paid out in relatively small increments,
year by year. All in all, the Lottery is another way to tax the
poor.
But again, it's alright to rip off the foolish. That's why
they call them foolish.
(And there are some amazingly dimwitted people out there,
with family and jobs and cars. Recently a museum had a show
called Dinosaurs Alive! featuring big mechanical dinosaurs. A
visitor demanded his money back "because the dinosaurs aren't
alive! I paid good money to get my kids in here and I want to see
live dinosaurs!" An inadvertent deception.)
We know about these deceptions; we accept them. We know that
billboard cigarette ads are lying; we know that most television
ads are lying. It's common knowledge that Madison Avenue
routinely pushes our buttons, manipulates us with implication,
exploits our fears and anxiety. Deep down most of us know that
drinking Diet Coke or Bud Lite won't put us in the middle of a
giddy social whirl, won't get us laid or even liked, won't keep
us young or slim. To some extent we collaborate with this kind of
manipulation, playing along with the fantasy, the implication
that if we buy a certain product we'll get something more than
the product. Like a daydream, it eases our anxieties. We'll play
along, and pretend it'll work for a moment.
Lots of us know commercials lie. But it's Business as Usual.
Nothing wrong with it. The deception by implication is a
mechanism that supports millions of professions, from the bottom
of society...to the top.
Sydney Schanberg wrote a piece in Newsday about "companies
who spread pollution and disease and other things that are bad
for you, who have formed 'front groups' and disguised them with
names just like the ones the Nader folks (and environmental
groups) give to their own organizations - names that comfort you
and tuck you in and brush away your fears..."
What could be more reassuring than the name FoodWatch, an
outfit which supposedly tells you what foods are safe and good
for you. "Too bad," Schanberg tells us, "that FoodWatch's real
slogan is: We never met a pesticide or a chemical preservative we
didn't like." Who pays for FoodWatch? Du Pont, American Cyanamid,
Dow Elanco and Monsanto.
American Cyanamid and Anheuser-Busch and Philip Morris are
also contributors to "Consumer Alert", which seems to feel that
product safety is simply too expensive. Consumer Alert has fought
against requiring air bags in cars and safety seats for babies on
airplanes.
Then there's the American Council on Science and Health
which has, as Schanberg points out, "just about everything in it.
America. Science. Health. All things good for you." Its' big
money comes from pesticide producers like Uniroyal Chemical, Dow
and Du Pont; other funders are American Cyanamid, Coca-Cola,
Pepsico, NutraSweet, Kraft and General Mills. The director of the
American Council on Just About Everything Good is Elizabeth
Whelan, PHD, who has been quoted as saying "there is no such
thing as 'junk food'." And, "there is insufficient evidence of a
relationship between diet and any disease."
A large percentage of the population is aware that much of
the food we eat is dangerous. But - it looks good, tastes good,
so we march in lines to consume it. Why not? We don't just keel
over and die when we eat it. True, the ratio of people with
cancer is way up since the advent of pesticides and herbicides -
found in most of our foods and often in our water - and true, the
sulfites and other chemical additives, like nitrites, cause a
variety of problems, from subtle behavioral problems all the way
to death in some people. Even the EPA has recently warned us
about the wholesome potato, which is almost invariably sprayed
with a nasty chemical that retards the growth of eye-sprouts on
spud skins. Recent EPA tests have found 72 times the "allowable"
amount of this carcinogenic toxin on potatoes. But FoodWatch and
friends inform us that the food is wholesome; Safeway touts their
wholesomeness in commercials. Hell, the store is called SAFEway,
isn't it? We can trust them. I'm sure of it.
We can trust Dixie Lee Ray, the former governor of
Washington, with our environment. Notorious right-wing extremist
Dixie Lee Ray has helped her anti-environmentalist cronies form a
group called (if I remember rightly) Wise Use, which seeks to
promote, supposedly, the "wise use" of the land, by the simple
expedient of advocating that all regulations on industry, lumber
companies, et al, be stricken from the books.
Then there's the practice of pummeling the public with
something some people call "inversion ads"; these are ads on
issues of policy and politics, which advocate the inverse of what
they at first seem to advocate. They're usually paid for by
business interests pretending to be something else entirely. For
example, the recent spate of ads warning us about the new
regulations that would supposedly "promote higher cable TV
rates." This very slick, incredibly cynical series of ads came
off as if it were coming from some nonprofit group when in fact
it was created by the cable TV industry because in fact the
regulations going up for congressional vote will lower cable TV
rates. A series of TV and radio spots and billboard ads may warn
of "higher taxes! A bill you can't afford to pay!" when in fact
the taxes being proposed are only for the special interest group
that paid for the ad. The lumber industry floats ads claiming
from, say, "Concerned Citizens for the Forests", claiming to be
warning in the "public interests" that a law banning cutting down
old growth forests "will actually increase deforestation" - but
when you read the small print it turns out the "increase" will be
on acreage of planted trees already slated to be cut down.
In short, they're all lying. This sort of advertising is
legal, accepted, normal, and entirely dishonest.
Pretending to be something you're not is a common public
relations practice, even in the news media. NBC news ran a
"documentary special" called "NUCLEAR POWER: IN FRANCE IT WORKS".
The show was utterly pro nuclear power - it was one side of the
coin and one only. The "documentary" presented a wholly rosy view
of Nuclear Power in France, not mentioning the accidents they've
had, or the fact that they have the same dilemma we do with
nuclear waste. They also failed to mention that the show was
presented under the auspices of the owners of NBC, which is
General Electric...which just happens to have hundreds of
millions of dollars sunk into nuclear power.
The show was actually an hour-long television commercial. In
spirit it was very much like those new thirty-minute commercials
which masquerade as talk shows - but which are in fact blocks of
time bought up solely to promote a single product, and for no
other reason. If you asked the station, they'd say, Yes, that
show is a long television commercial, "in the style of" a talk
show. But if you asked many of the more distracted or dimwitted
viewers, they'd tell you it was a talk show...one that just
happened to be focused on guests who're all enthused about "this
fabulous new wrinkle remover!"
Relax. It's okay to deceive those people. They're not bright
or they're not paying attention. So you can lie to them. It's
permitted.
A friend of mine, desperate for a decent job, found an ad in
the Help Wanted asking for people to fill "Managerial" positions.
Big opportunity, dozens needed, apply now. On applying he found
that it was the HerbaLife company (under a different name -
because they were busted a few times under the old label for
their business practices), recruiting salesmen for its pyramid
scheme. They subjected him to an hour or more of high pressure
seminar where glib salesman after glib salesman claimed that
they'd made Big Bucks selling their rejuvenative health products.
In talking to them later, the stories they told turned out to be
mostly fabricated - and there was a $70 "application fee"
required and...he split. He complained to the classified
department of the major newspaper where he'd seen the ad, telling
them it was deceptive, the ad hadn't mentioned anything about a
fee and there was no real management job available. They shrugged
him off. They continued to run the ad, unchanged. All that
mattered to the newspaper was the ad revenue. "That's just
business," they told him, verbatim. He saw the same ad later in
numerous big city newspapers. The people at the newspapers know
by now that the ad is a lie; they don't care. It's all right to
lie to the public in the classifieds. It's normal. It's
"salesmanship".
But of course, newspapers - supposedly the nervous system of
social responsibility - commonly run big display ads for "good
luck amulets" and "proven methods of getting rich". They know the
amulets and wealth schemes are useless. They don't care. They
need the ad revenue and they know that only stupid people will be
ripped off and...that's okay. It's alright to steal from them.
The government sometimes prosecutes frauds, yes. The FDA
moves against medical frauds - when they're not perpetrated by
the pharmaceutical companies. It's been well demonstrated that
major pharmaceutical companies exaggerate the benefits of many
remedies, and that prescription drugs some are downright
dangerous, even deadly, under the right circumstances. Halcion
has been clearly demonstrated to be a danger to a significant
portion of the people who'd take it. Ditto, Prozac. The
pharmaceutical companies have been caught cooking the books on
the research, hiding research that contradicts their claims, and
lying about it to Congress and the public. When they're punished,
it's a slap on the wrist.
But the FDA is now advocating going tooth-and-nail after
those devils who promote vitamins as cure-alls. Why? Because they
make deceptive claims. True, many purveyors of health products
are con artists. Herbalife isn't the only one. Durk Pearson and
Sandy Shaw are raking it in with an ad claiming that their book
provides "a true fountain of youth". The only thing about Durk
and Sandy that'll live eternally is the lie they're selling.
But some vitamins and supplements are valuable, up to a
point, and it looks as if the only reason the FDA is targeting
these people and leaving the pharmaceutical companies alone is
that the pharm outfits are bigger business - in competition with
the health products people - and the drug-makers have a thousand
lobbyists yammering away in Washington. Generally speaking,
deception is business as usual.
- - - -
We're not in a depression, we're in a recession. 16 million
people were out of work in the Great Depression; there were
25 million people out of work in 1991. But this is only a
recession. One in eight people goes hungry, some days, in the
USA now. It's only a recession. According to the Statistical
Abstract, 32.5 million people live below the poverty level. It's
just a recession. 61 million people recently went without health
insurance for lengthy periods of time. But it's not a depression.
Trust us.
You can trust the Bush administration. (At this writing I
don't know if Bush is re-elected or not, but I know that his
cronies are sure to be in power still.) Many people trust Bush
even though they know he's lied to them consistently. If you ask
Bush why he got us into the Gulf War, he'll tell you it was to
protect peace and freedom. If you ask the average person - even a
Bush booster - he'll tell you it was to protect Oil Interests.
They don't blame Bush for lying about it publicly. That's
something that simply has to be done because...because...well, it
simply has to be done. It simply is done routinely.
It's September '92 as I write this and most of the reports
on the Presidential campaign I'm seeing are about strategy. One
recent front page report was typical. Bush's campaign, it
reported, "will make Clinton appear to be untrustworthy,
mercurial, dangerously unpredictable"; Clinton's campaign will
"try to portray Bush as a plutocratic friend to the rich at the
expense of the poor". There were other "strategies" noted - all
the same sort of thing. Scarcely a mention of the policies
advocated by the candidates. One has a sense that the public is
interested in the candidates in the way they're interested in a
football game; they enjoy second guessing the strategies. Or
perhaps it's like interest in soap opera characters: their skill
with bending truth and how well they project an image. That is,
how well they deceive.
In this year's coverage of the campaign, the issues are
rarely raised. The important thing is, what's their angle? What
emotional buttons will they push - and will we enjoy it?
- - - -
I think most people knew that the Gulf War was not what it
was supposed to be; many know that the ruling Kuwaitis are
racists, are brutal to servants, willing to subject women to any
indignity; that they are perpetrators of torture, and repulsively
decadent. In short, people know that the Kuwaitis are not worth
defending. But we didn't care. We played the game, went along
with the deception, because we enjoyed the war. It was pretty
spectacular. It gave you a buzz. Doubtless J.G. Ballard got most
of it on videotape.
We also know very well that politicians are routinely lying
to us - our stand-up comics and our cartoonists joke about it
constantly. The untrustworthiness of our leaders is axiomatic.
But we have come to accept it. We can't imagine anything else.
They're all we've got, and they have a certain appeal. If they
entertain us, as with Reagan, they're in.
Reagan deregulated banking and made the S&L disasters
possible. We stopped scrutinizing the Charles Keatings, and we
had come to permit, even encourage, every sort of deception.
Ergo, our economy suffered hugely.
The ants are past feeling queasy. They're beginning to feel
ill. We've poisoned ourselves with lies; it's easier, even
sweeter, to accept lying, to go with that syrupy flow.
Behind the smoke screen of "competitiveness", Quayle's
Council on Competitivenes gutted the Clean Air act by providing
loopholes big enough to thrust a refinery's chimney through. As a
result, more people will get cancer; more people will suffer from
lung diseases. People will quite literally die because of the
toxins we ate along with the sweet goo of his rhetoric on
unhampered competitiveness.
- - - -
The bottom line is this: in nearly every social malaise, the
common denominator is a willingness, by implication or outright
lie, to deceive, and to accept deception.
Only a fundamental change of attitude toward business
practices - and toward honesty itself - can reverse the slide. A
vast new program of emphasis is needed for educating the next
generations, to give them values that matter. To take from them
one of their skills: to make them poorer liars than we are.
If we let people lie to us endlessly, even celebrating their
ability to do so by calling them "skillful politicians" and
"clever in their use of PR", we leave ourselves open for bigger
and bigger deceptions; maybe a return of the Big Lie, and another
version of the man who popularized it.
- - - -
We deceive the dimwitted, the foolish, the distracted, the
naive. Foolish they may be; but so are children at times. Is it
permissible to steal from children? We do that all the time, too:
Camel Cigarettes is stealing health from children, with its ads
aimed at kids; ads between cartoons deceive kids about the toys
offered for sale; we lie to them about life, and death, and what
they may die for overseas, someday.
We also deceive the brighter populace. All that's needed is
their willingness to take part in the sweet deception. Their
desire to collaborate in the lie. To march in waking sleep behind
the other ants to the sweet goo in the shiny metal chambers. It's
simply easier.
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