It’s astounding how much money and effort companies put into the various means of advertising, such as collecting tons of personal data and using AI for targeted ads, and just the sheer number of commercials they show and all the productions they sponsor, just trying to get people to buy their products. This indicates a vast inefficiency in consumption, in that the profit margins are high enough for them to afford all of that, and also high enough to motivate them so much to try to sell more things. And the profit margins are also responsible for the extreme wealth imbalance, and the measures they go to sell products are responsible for consumer culture.
And there’s so much pressure on efficacy in advertising that advertisers routinely resort to unethical means of psychological manipulation to achieve their goals. The machinations of advertising get worse and worse over time, because it starts out with natural innocence and morality, and then every now and then an advertiser introduces a new machination to the mix, and everyone copies it, stooping to their level, and becomes the new norm. A little bit more innocence is lost, each time.
But things are still extremely innocent in comparison to what’s to come. It’s almost quaint what we have now. There’s so much money to be made in consumption and commerce that it’s inevitable that they’ll find ways around the relatively innocent paradigm of having to cajole us into buying their products and services, being essentially powerless over our decisions. They’ll short-circuit the process so that there’s no longer the gap of our free will between their desires and our actions, or in other words our money, and/or possibly even our labor.
The way they’ll do this is by buying out politicians in order to effect legislation that will force us to purchase certain products and/or services. The more time passes, the more products and/or services we’ll have to pay for. Large corporations are already in bed with the government, and as their wealth increases, partly as a result of their influence over government, they’re more and more enabled to influence government legislation, which in turn increases their profits, etc. etc. It’s a vicious cycle. So, eventually they’ll have enough power to do away with our rights to choose how we spend our money.
And don’t assume they wouldn’t be so brazen; if you know anything about the history of large corporations, you’ll know that they’re completely without scruples and will do anything and everything to maximize the bottom dollar. The only thing between them and the most diabolical acts of evil is government regulation and other legal protections. Everything ostensibly good or wholesome they do, they do for the sake of public relations and image.
The only reason I’m explaining all this that we must do something now to stop it, to nip it in the bud. What exactly it is that we have to do, I don’t know. Somehow, we have to get corporations out of bed with the government. I suppose the only way to do this is to vote in honest politicians, and maybe then to lobby for, or also vote in people who support, more stringent government regulations, reversals of certain laws that better enable corporations to influence the government, new laws that prevent the various ways corporations buy out politicians, illegalization of paid lobbying, campaign reform to stop donations from wealthy people and corporations from being a factor in who wins elections, etc. Stopping voter suppression laws and gerrymandering, and not to mention doing away with the electoral college, would also help.
One problem with voting in honest, good politicians, at least/especially presidents, is that they’re always the underdogs, so even people who would want them in office don’t vote them for fear of wasting their vote; they vote for who’s most desirable out of those that have a chance to win, so it becomes a vicious cycle: to some degree, people don’t vote for the underdog because they’re the underdog, and they’re the underdog because people don’t vote for them.
The only way I can see to remedy this problem is to create and popularize a system, most likely a website, whereby people can promise to vote for a given candidate, if and only if N number of other people also promise to vote for them. That would defeat the vicious cycle of the underdog.
Even this system is problematic, though, because people can’t agree in a sense of “if N number of other people don’t promise vote for candidate X, I promise to vote for candidate Y instead if N number of other people promise vote for them,” and so on, in a way that allows for optimal selection of a final candidate that reflects people’s actual preferences. I’m not sure exactly how the optimal system would work. Perhaps everyone could do ranked choice voting, then the system could select a final candidate for everyone to promise to vote for using the Condorcet method or something.
This would effectively act as a solid replacement for the state’s dismally inferior voting system, to the degree that people actually use it.
