Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that inhaling cigarette smoke into their lungs all the time is a nice thing to do.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that Mountain Dew is something they should put into their bodies.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that Madonna should be famous.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to women that they should always feel somewhat to severely uncomfortable with the way they look.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to women that slicing apart their bodies to be more attractive is something sane that they should do.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that women should not have pubic hair.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to men to spend hours at the gym building up muscles they’ll never actually need to use.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that they need to drive their car to a room where they run in place for thirty minutes and then drive home again.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that fabric designed to cover the body can go “out of style”.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to believe in an invisible patriarchal god whose church must be believed and funded on pain of eternal torture.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that being overwhelmed at work means they need better stress management instead of better unions.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that widespread depression and anxiety are a sign that they need to take more pills instead of a sign that they need to drastically change society.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that something which grows in the ground should be illegal.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that anyone should be locked in a cage for having an addiction.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that you could own land that you don’t live on and tend to.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to worry about nations on the other side of the world who have never harmed them in any way.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that they should accept their nation’s wealth and resources being continuously used to kill strangers in endless wars.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to anyone that murdering human beings in other countries is a good career path for young people.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that opaque military powers brandishing armageddon weapons at each other all the time is something we should allow to continue.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that deliberately starving children whose government disobeys their government is no big deal.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that human life should be spent and gambled like pennies over elite struggles for unipolar planetary domination.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that it’s normal for some of them to become homeless or go without medical treatment because they don’t have the right amount of imaginary numbers in their bank account.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that it’s normal to spend eight hours a day doing something you hate to no benefit other than the imaginary numbers in the bank accounts of shareholders.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that humanity’s collective behavior should be governed by a desire to add more imaginary numbers to one’s bank account.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to throw the entire ecosystemic context in which they evolved into the gears of a machine which generates imaginary numbers for their bank accounts.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that scores of species going extinct forever every single day is not cause for extreme alarm.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that a two-party system which promotes the same policies in both parties should be called “democracy”.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley should control how humans communicate around the world.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that in order to give money to poor people, you should give it to rich people.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that it’s fine for someone who works no harder than they do to make a thousand times as much.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that their governments should pour money into massive corporations and the military but not into taking care of their own citizenry.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some humans are superior to other humans.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some people ought to have power over other people.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that a few rich people should control the information that people consume which governs their thoughts, actions and votes.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that any of this is normal.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that the young should spend their childhoods in buildings where they are trained to believe that all this is normal.

Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that they should spend hours staring at screens which train them to believe that all this is normal.

Without extensive marketing, none of this madness would be possible at all.

_____________________________

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66 responses to “Humanity’s Madness Would Not Be Possible Without Extensive Marketing”

  1. Joe Van Steenbergen Avatar
    Joe Van Steenbergen

    So few people understand the world as Caitlin does; even fewer among those that do are able to articulate that understanding as cogently and articulately as she does. When did we en masse surrender our ability to see and understand? When did we surrender our free will?

    1. Softly, softly, catchee monkey…

  2. There is no eternal torture, God’s not evil and most churches have departed from God’s word, wonder after the beast, and will send you to hell. Hell is complete and utter destruction, the second death, which is eternal separation from God. Eternal torture is one of the many false Babylonian Pagan doctrines propagated by the Roman Catholic Church and many other so-called “Christian” churches wondering after the beast.

    https://www.biblebc.com/Roman%20Catholicism/roman_cath_main.htm
    https://www.end-times-prophecy.org/the-whore-of-babylon.html

    God is a God of mercy and forgiveness and patience and love and justice and righteousness. God loves you, but He must destroy the wicked or else he wouldn’t be just and righteous nor would it be fair to those who are. God made man in his image, as a moral agent with freewill and people must be held to account for their freewill choices. No other being on earth believes in justice and court systems. Heaven would be no different than earth if all the murderers, rapists, pedophiles, thieves, liars, tyrants, etc were allowed in. God also redeems the righteous and all who’ve repented of their wicked ways and returned unto the Lord.

    The movie “Genesis: Paradise Lost” has a lot of good arguments I can’t summarize into a single post, but it’s definitely worth watching for those who want to learn or get the Christian perspective on a lot of controversial topics. “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977) is also worth watching to understand what is Christianity, but it doesn’t give you the full scope; you’d have to read the Bible to get that (and frankly, many so-called “Christians” don’t ever the Bible for themselves, they just rely on wolves in sheep’s clothing in apostate churches to think for them — much like people rely on “fact checkers” today to think and research for them).

    In fact, extensive marketing was put in place to try burning all the Bibles and killing every last God-obedient Christian by the Roman church during the dark ages. That’s the primary reason why most pilgrims came to America, it had nothing to do with taxes (proof of that is seen in the extremely high taxes today), they wanted to escape persecution for their beliefs and oppression. In the world today, a Christian is martyred for their faith every five minutes on average and practically none of the “social justice” warriors care, none of the “minority defenders” care about the young Christian girls abducted and forced into marriages with aged Islamic men, and certainly none of the rich “philanthropists” who just want to enslave you while masquerading as good men/women care. Practically all the mainstream media denounces and all technocrat social media censors Biblical truths as “hate speech” and “intolerance” — well, maybe they’re right to call it hate or intolerant, because God and Jesus both hate sin and wickedness and they won’t tolerate it on the great and terrible day of judgement, but they’re not right to denounce or censor it. Today’s churches, try to be conformed to the world which the Bible warns against. Jesus called for people to be the salt of the earth to make it tolerable to live in, but if the salt has lost its savor it’s good for nothing like the apostate Christians who won’t name sin because it’s “politically incorrect”. The Bible, God, and Jesus aren’t even allowed in public schools despite references to God being in the Declaration of Independence and also all 50 state constitutions. There is no mass marketing campaign for Christianity, the only mass marketing you’ll see for religion today is the false Babylonian religions and the Catholic Church (which is always in some scandal for molesting kids or some other wickedness — real God-fearing obedient Christians would never do these things).

    You don’t even need to attend church to obey God, but there are plenty of online ministries with truth and preacher videos online that align with the Bible (always verify for yourself though, don’t blindly trust anyone — even me — and that goes for more than just the Bible). And most churches today are conformed to this world rather than the renewing of their minds. They think they have to be like the world to win the world over, but that will never work.

    A compilation and some good sermons for those interested (I do realize Ravenhill misrepresents hell in the compilation as eternal torture, but the overall message is still good in calling out America’s hippie jesus who doesn’t hate sin and wickedness and evil and apostate churches that don’t name sin).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdaN_9O2Go
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGp_p8vScYo
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR5QYOqfXo
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHk-9aX7O8I

    Widespread depression, anxiety, and suicides are a result of people living without God in their life. I was depressed and suicidal before I accepted Christ after being raised in a very secular atheist family, before I opened the door for Jesus. You see, Jesus stands at the door and knocks, you have to make a freewill choice to let him in. And no mass media or marketing convinced me to allow Christ into my life. I’m the kind of person who intensely studies everything before making a definitive statement (I’ll even look up a word I’ve used often to make sure I’m using it right if I feel I might not be). It’s my own studies which have lead me to love men like Ron Paul, Bill Still, James Corbett, Dr. Leonard Coldwell, etc for sharing truths you simply won’t find in any mass-marketed campaigns. I don’t agree with them all 100%, but you never will agree with anyone 100%; not all of those men I mentioned are even Christian, but they’re still truth-seekers and truth sharers. Bill Still has a great documentary on the monetary system (The Money Masters) which is also definitely worth watching if you want to understand why voting doesn’t change anything.

    Also, that “plant” you mention is no good for you in the sense I assume you mean. It’s a wonderful crop, sure, it’s very versatile and better than trees for paper or cotton for clothes or many other uses. It does have medicinal uses, but using it to alter your state of mind to “feel good” won’t make you happy and won’t fill the God-shaped hole in your life. And before someone says “but God put it here”, God also put poison ivy here and you wouldn’t smoke that. No amount of mind-altering drugs will ever make you truly happy and filled with joy. No amount of nicotine, alcohol, meth, coke, etc will ever make you happy. You might feel good for a season, but the feeling passes and you just begin chasing that feeling or pleasure of the flesh rather than seeking true joy by accepting Christ. It’s not called “living with the joy of the Lord in your heart” for no reason. Also, one of the first things God did was make a plant illegal (the tree of knowledge) and look at the madness and wickedness in the world around you to see the result of disobedience.

    As for over priced medical treatment, most of it is a complete and utter scam. There are over 300 known cures to cancer, but none of those are allowed to be prescribed by licensed doctors or else they lose their license, even if they know better. A doctor must prescribe chemo (mustard gas chemicals and radiation) or surgery for cancer patients, even though they know it has an extremely low “cure” rate. Anyone who’s cured while on chemo was not really cured by the chemo, I can tell you that much. I’d recommend looking into Dr. Leonard Coldwell for some more information on that, he has a good website and shares a lot of good information in his lectures (many of which are found online for free, some on his website).

    https://drleonardcoldwell.com/
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qASSlRtLgmc

    And the scores of species going extinct forever every single day is simply a sign of the times. We’ve been in the last days for many decades, since the late 1800s, and it’s just one of the many things that will happen before Christ returns. We’ll see many more disasters, tornadoes, pestilences, locust swarms, wars and rumors of wars, and it’ll only get faster and more hectic. Eventually Christians will be blamed for obeying God and not man and they will be beheaded for their witness of Christ. Why do you think there’s all this talk of guillotines or why prisoners on death row can be beheaded by guillotine in some places to preserve their organs for harvesting? All prophecies of the Bible have either already come to pass or are yet to come, there are no prophecies that were a mistake or didn’t happen. Some say this means we don’t have freewill, but a prophecy coming true is very different to every single choice made by you being pre-chosen for you. If God wanted a bunch of obedient slaves who never did evil, he’d have made them, but he didn’t. He made man in his image, a moral agent who can make freewill choices. People also say “if God, why does evil exist” and again, this is because mankind has freewill and many choose to do wickedly.

    My thoughts are kinda rambled here, didn’t put that much time into formatting this post or proof-reading it for typos or transitions, but I’ll finish with a couple comments I was going to post elsewhere:

    I think it’s just sad that there are people who truly believe that without big pharma medical intervention/products they cannot be healthy or without government taking away people’s rights (often for countries they don’t even live in) they cannot be safe.

    Look up the original Hippocratic oath and compare it to the “modernized” version of it, you might be surprised at what you find changed (or not if you’ve ever looked into the realities of the profit-driven medical industrial complex and corrupt FDA). As for tyrannical governments, C.S. Lewis said it best: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

    p.s. hopefully all of this rambling is posted too, I know someone out there needed this

    p.p.s. A final note to the site admin, Google reCaptcha is spyware (it’s also extremely broken if you try to take internet privacy seriously or you’re on Google’s “naughty list” for thought crimes). You should look for some alternatives.

    1. Thank you. I can appreciate that your assertions related to God and Jesus are well-supported by holy scripture. I also understand why you left out the Biblical references. (I think that just about everyone who visits this website has a heart which will make them useful to God in what is coming, but most of them are so repulsed by the record of traditional Christianity that they just don’t want to know any more about the subject.)
      .
      I have made a remarkable discovery concerning the origin of Christianity which I feel sure you will find quite interesting. I have written a book about the discovery and some of its consequences which is available at the Amazon online bookstore. (The book is called “The Tomb in the Garden, the First Easter and a Gospel of Jesus.” It currently costs 99 cents but Bezos lets me offer it free for five days every three months. I think I can offer it free for five days this coming Christmas. If you would like a free copy and don’t want to wait until Christmas, send a request to my email address at andrews53@outlook.com and I will send you a pdf copy of the ms.)
      .
      Some of what I have discovered is shocking. (I wish this weren’t so but I didn’t get to decide what to discover.) It may lead some traditional Christians to (temporarily) lose their faith. But it will eventually permit everybody on the planet (including Jews and Muslims) who doesn’t have the mark of the beast in their forehead (that is, who doesn’t have money – in particular the United States dollar – on the brain) to understand that the historical Jesus was indeed the Messiah prophecied at several places in the Old Testament. And it will no longer be asserted by educated and intellectually capable people (such as the people attracted to this website) that “there is insufficient empirical evidence for the existence of God.”

    2. Thank you. I can appreciate that your assertions related to God and Jesus are well-supported by holy scripture. I also understand why you left out the Biblical references. (I think that just about everyone who visits this website has a heart which will make them useful to God in what is coming, but just about all of them are so repulsed by the record of traditional Christianity that they just don’t want to hear any more about it.)
      .
      I have made a remarkable discovery concerning the origin of Christianity which I feel sure you will find quite interesting. I have written a book about the discovery and some of its consequences which is available at the Amazon online bookstore. (The book is called “The Tomb in the Garden, the First Easter and a Gospel of Jesus.” It currently costs 99 cents but Bezos lets me offer it free for five days every three months. I think I can offer it free for five days this coming Christmas. If you would like a free copy and don’t want to wait until Christmas, send a request to my email address at andrews53@outlook.com and I will send you a pdf copy of the ms.)
      .
      Some of what I have discovered is shocking. (I wish this weren’t so but I didn’t get to decide what to discover.) It may lead some traditional Christians to (temporarily) lose their faith. But it will eventually permit everybody on the planet (including Jews and Muslims) who doesn’t have the mark of the beast in their forehead (that is, who doesn’t have money – in particular the United States dollar – on the brain) to understand that the historical Jesus was indeed the Messiah prophecied at several places in the Old Testament. And it will no longer be asserted by educated and intellectually capable people (such as the people attracted to this website) that “there is insufficient empirical evidence for the existence of God.”

  3. Marketing can make people stupid but people can be stupid all by themselves.

    Concerning consequences, marketing is never an excuse. Unless you are a Leicester Longwool, a Merino or some other variety of mutton.

  4. 1. Misogynist
    2. Racist
    3. Serious allegations of sexual assault against women
    4. Family collusion with Russia
    5. Corporate tool
    6. Consummate liar
    7. Mentally unfit to serve as president

    Brand A: Trump
    or
    Brand B[iden]

  5. Caitlin, this column is wonderful. I enjoy everything you write, and today, this one is a standout. What a creative way for getting us to see the complete insanity we live in, and gee…why those of us who are conscious-enough to be trying to figure out what in the fuck is wrong, are so miserable. You give me a few minutes of sanity every morning when I read your work. It means so much to me. Cheers from Denver, CO.

  6. All this is why we really don’t want Scotty from Marketing running the place.

  7. Even though, of necessity and the need not to go homeless, my last job before retirement was in advertising – I’ve been saying the same things as Caity for a long time. The purpose of a car is to get my butt from point A to point B, not to buy it so I can trade it in regularly. I don’t throw a way shoes, shirts, pants, etc, that are perfectly good because, as I see it, they don’t age out of existence. I could go on, as I sit here typing in a pair of faux jeans that I bought 12 years ago, on a perfectly good computer that I bought 9 years ago, as I drink water that I filter myself – from mental containers I bought several year ago. I’m not a fan of planned obsolescence. That much should be clear – and every time I get out of the shower, I check both butt cheeks. I’ve yet to find an expiration date on either one.

  8. Boris Alotofcrap Avatar
    Boris Alotofcrap

    Boris think Caitlin work too hard. Is needing vacation. Go on walkabout. Have fun. Throw boomerang at kangaroo.

  9. Christian J. Chuba Avatar
    Christian J. Chuba

    Any particular reason you chose a caption of someone in the military who could pass for a young Woody Allen?

  10. And without extensive marketing it would never have occured to people that the corona virus/ covid 19 is a pandemic.

    1. PT Barnum's Prostate Avatar
      PT Barnum’s Prostate

      Shhhhh. Don’t make Caitlin have to do real journalism: It’s too much effort. Misanthropic caterwauling about a decadent empire when the climate is going to kill us anyway doesn’t require getting up from the chair.

      Ohhhhhhhhhhhm….

  11. Are our problems due to our failure to organize a successful society or are they due to a fundamental flaw in human nature? Many species on earth have gone extinct and things don’t look good for us. Can we learn to accept the death of our species as we can learn to accept our own personal deaths? Can we care for humanity as we care for one who is sick and dying?

    1. Sometimes I think we are like a herd of sheep and at other times a herd of cats. It is when we become a herd of stampeding elephants that you had better watch out.

  12. The defining characteristics of modern society are egoism and narcissism…Paul Shepard (1980s)

    How now, with big screens blaring propaganda and advertising and everything a calculation to entice? For those now desiring a return to normal, how normal was that? Habituation came in increments. To what are you being habituated now?

    The millennial generation is weakened from growing up as junkies with screens and being inundated with poisons. Weak of body and weak of mind, male testosterone levels have fallen by nearly a quarter. It is a different sort of people than have ever been and it is an evolution to species suicide.

    The evil ones at the apex are better fed, have better medical care, and can afford to ameliorate somewhat the poisons of air, water and food. But they are even less free than those they oppress. They are at once powerful and eminently fearful of that loss. The myth of fulfillment through consumption rules them more thoroughly than any algorithm. They are no less susceptible to the ubiquitous electronic addiction and probably much more so, being much more invested in the outcomes. Fake bodies and fake minds and this is what the hoi polloi aspire to. The lies necessary to maintain such a high profile exploitative facade beggar any subset of decency. The elite are inspiration to no one.

    It’s not their fault. If you remember Mark Zuckerberg and wife, having rather suddenly come upon fifty or sixty billions, announcing in 2015 that they would give away that fortune only keeping a couple billion for themselves. They said that nobody needed so much. Two years later he was thinking about running for president. Two more years and he was censoring free speech. It’s that quick, the loss of those last shreds of humanity. Kept every penny but for the obligatory show of charity, mind you. Joined hands withe the diktats of the dictators. We would behave no differently, you and I. Give any one of us such a windfall and shortly we too would have private jets, security teams and bug out refuges. Everyone gets compromised because our endeavors are beyond the scope of our abilities. Finite beings in a finite world. Recognition of this, our actual nature, swept away into a systemic fantasy of self aggrandizement.

    1. Spot on No name

  13. Is “marketing” the right word, a strong enough word, a deep enough word, for what Caitlin is getting at? What lies behind “marketing?” Might it be a view of self and the world which sees nothing transcendent, sublime, or eternal, sees nothing but the present, the material, the ephemeral appearances of time and space we directly and commonly experience? So indicated Frederick Myers in his forgotten magnum opus called “Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,” a classic statement of the positive results of psychical research undertaken by a group of eminent scientists and scholars in the late 19th Century. “The pessimist holds the view that sentient existence has been a deplorable blunder in the scheme of things. The egoist (including Caitlin’s marketer) at least acts upon the view that the universe has no moral coherence, and that ‘each for himself’ is the only indisputable law.” In understanding and evaluating human conduct, must we not take into account the overarching context in which it occurs? And if we do, on what moral basis can any of us in this deconstructed neoliberal world disparage either the sellers or the buyers in Caitlin’s long and perceptive list? The questions come easy but not, at least for me, the answers, which I want to believe, will to believe, do exist…but on a level far more fundamental than “marketing.”

    1. Wisdom comes from embracing the spirit. Despair is the demise of those who embrace thd physical. It is only from a spiritual perspective can one even begin to understand the physical world. No I am not speaking of religion. Religion is the physical organization and corruption of those who seek the spiritual. Think of religion as the marketing of faith. Perhaps that is why Jesus detested the Sadducees and Pharisees.

      1. I don’t always or even often agree with you, Khatika, but this is a wonderfully perceptive comment. While the physical world can only begin to be understood from a spiritual perspective, much of religion is, indeed, “the marketing of faith,” and the problem is clearly presented in the religious opposition to Jesus by the religious “authorities” of his day. I’d like to learn more about your particular take on spiritual things, so perhaps you might offer a longer post or informative link when the opportunity arises. If you’ve already done this, please point forgetful me in that direction.

  14. subcomandante felix Avatar
    subcomandante felix

    Jean Kilbourne – author of “Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel” – has for decades been sounding the alarm about the connection between advertising, addiction and patriarchy. A recent interview with her in Counterpunch demonstrates how relevant and timely her analysis remains. Advertising vs. Democracy: An Interview with Jean Kilbourne, By Hugh Iglarsh October 23, 2020
    URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/advertising-vs-democracy-an-interview-with-jean-kilbourne/

    1. I read that book three years ago. Very enlightening all the manipulations and psychopathology of the advertisers and their willingness to subvert the masses.

    2. Read the article. Advertising is just a form of propaganda. It has always been with mankind. What makes it all the more terrible now is technology which has supercharged it. Technology not advertising is the true enemy of mankind. We have created a monsterous creature and put it in the hands of psychopaths to wage war upon us. The antichrist of the bible is not a person but a thing.

  15. All true. Most people have absolutely no idea of the extent to which their thoughts & perceptions are controlled by conditioning & propaganda and will become extremely angry if you suggest any such thing to them.

    1. People cherish their paradigms.

  16. Back in the ’80s I read something by a philosopher that has always stuck with me.
    (these quotes are from my memory but are likely very close)
    ​​​
    “Advertising agencies are the true Anti-Christ. They lie about the purpose of life and the secret of happiness.”
    ​​​

    ​​​
    Secret of Happiness: Sharing
    ​​​
    Purpose of Life: Service
    ​​​
    Those two words, service and sharing, are related.
    ​​​
    Service is not limited to one particular action, but, generally, means anything that raises the consciousness of others (hat tip to Caitlin). Raising consciousness can apply to a wide range of actions, for example, creating a job for someone, a job that requires focus and concentration. Many are beyond the need to improve focus and concentration but others can gain from such service. Again, this was just one example.
    ​​​
    Sharing is also wide open to applicability and understanding, a smile is a simple example.
    I shared these ideas and that, I trust, was a service for those that read these words.

  17. The headline is profoundly true.

  18. Julius Skoolafish Avatar
    Julius Skoolafish

    Supplementary viewing and reading:

    The Century of the Self – Bernays et al

    https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/

    Of course Bernays is just one cog in the wheel

    John Coleman – The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

    https://archive.org/details/Tavistock_201601

  19. It’s always an amazement to me witnessing a PR man with the golden name of Trump as the American President. Without extensive marketing…

    “Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that women should not have pubic hair.”
    Pubic hair has its own beauty, eh? and there’s some kind of relationship between no pubic hair and body tattoos that I don’t understand.
    `
    FYI-
    In 1917, when Woodrow Wilson called on American boys to volunteer for WW I overseas duty, there was a lackluster response from American boys. He hired Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays, who came to be known as the Father of Public Relations, who successfully persuaded young men to volunteer their bodies for mincemeat duty!. Bernays was Sigmond Freud’s nephew and apparently applied Freud’s understanding of the human psyche to successfully persuade a mind with some proclivity.

    For over 100 years now, Western literate people have been bombarded with extensive marketing and the examples given by Caitlin are helpful reminders of how subtle subterfuge can be, and extensive.

    Watch the CENTURY OF THE SELF above which describes Bernays as having the skill to persuade people to buy what they didn’t need.

  20. “Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some people ought to have power over other people.”
    That pretty much sums up the rest of it. It’s a marketing campaign that’s been going on for thousands of years. The notion that we can’t get along without a gang of psychopaths in charge of every aspect of our lives, AKA government. The issue arises that once a sufficiently large population succumbs to that marketing, it encourages others to do the same in self defense, which actually exacerbates the problem.

  21. Look up Tavistock. That is an institution of a combination of British INtelligence and psychiatric elites who have engineered the new world order. They use psychology to manage people, and have been doing it for a century. They have created much of the marketing mess, and have sent out “managers’ all over the world in white coats to tell people how to influence us to thinking as they want us to.

  22. And the first ‘marketers’ were?
    Priests and their ilk of course.
    All modern marketing was/is modelled on religious brainwashing repetition and fear.

    1. The problem is not the marketers but man himself. Look within to find the source of the worlds problems not outward. Man is inherently corrupt thus he is only capable of producing corruption.

  23. Everyone should take a few minutes to read the novella, Flatland by Edwin Abbot. Very short read written in 1884. It is about humanities problem with paradigms among other things. Mostly its message seems to go over most peoples heads. You can read it in 30 minutes or less.

    1. Wonderful book! Not so sure about the [sanitised] film version though…!

  24. Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some humans are superior to other humans.

    Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some people ought to have power over other people.

    1. Nonsense. Its not my fault. You made me that way with marketing. All marketing does is inflame inherent traits. It is hard to admit our flaws as humans when we put all our hopes upon ourselves.

      1. Yes, marketing discovers our weak spots and builds superhighways in and out of them. 5G will be even better, so good that we will have to morph to mesh with it. China is winning already!
        https://www.johndayblog.com/2020/10/5g-for-permanent-president.html

  25. Nothing short of superb, Caitlin. I’d donate [imaginary] money for someone to intensively market this brilliant essay on prime time TV.

  26. Jackson Pollock would be proud.

  27. Butterfly McKensie Avatar
    Butterfly McKensie

    Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that rabid, obnoxious, divisive, misandrist feminism would be an acceptable doctrine for any sane human.

    1. Only a passing societal norm which will fade away once mankind once again fights for existence.

  28. The problem is not “Humanity’s Madness. ” The problem is most of humanity’s willingness to be told what to think and do. Most people are uneducated, not mad nor tuned into Extensive Marketing which is only a part of mind control telling people what to think and do. Educated agents of elite globalists and corrupt politicians tell the rest of society what to think and do.

  29. Spot on the money Caitlin – so you can expect negative “troll feedback” – you pulled the curtain back – they hate that.

    1. An opposing opinion is discussion to the open minded. Only closed minds think of diverse opinions as trolls. Caitlin has diverse opinions and discussions sometimes blunt and heated which is rare for many blogs This site is not an echo chamber which makes it unique and worth reading.

  30. ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY ONE OF YOUR BEST ARTICLES YET!!!! Impossible 2 let u know just how much every sentence of yours really “smacked” my grey matter…PRICELESS!!!
    Expat tom

  31. 1. Sometimes Caitlin, I wonder where you think this crap up. People were rolling cigarettes and smoking them hundreds of years before the marlboro man and the concept of marketing. Why because they enjoyed it.
    2. Excuse me, you think people are complete idiots. I drink diet mountain dew because I like it. Not because some billboard told me to drink it.
    3. So you listen tobmusic because some ad told you to. No. Because youb like it. Madonna sucks for me but some people evidently liked her music.
    4. Sorry to pop your bubble but wonen have been obsessing how they look even in ancient societies using berries to color their lips and hair.
    I could address all rest of your marketing nonsense but I just dont have it in me. Once again you blame an outside agency for simple human behavior.

    1. Or so you believe

    2. Have you watched the documentary, Century of the Self? It sounds like you haven’t but if you do you will see Caitlins point. ✌

      1. Adam Curtis. Excellent.

      2. It comes down to human behavior. When you give humanity too much ecxess time, money and opportunity, they have invariably thought first and foremost about themselves. We have way too much of all three so we dont need a marketing team to turn us to focus on ourselves. The marketing naturally follows. Are we selfish because of our nature or some ourside agency. Man is inherently corrupt and just further corrupted by outside agencies.

    3. Giving free cigarettes to all US soldiers in WW-1 and WW-2 was “marketing”. It worked.

  32. Hope Sheets Sanford Avatar
    Hope Sheets Sanford

    Extensive marketing does create monstrous stuff, yeah, but many, MANY remote and small communities worldwide have also managed to create some hardcore misery for segments of their populace.

    1. Satellite tv of course.

  33. jimmy gulag heights Avatar
    jimmy gulag heights

    without extensive marketing i might not have all this constant craving…and i don’t mean chocolate.
    very poetic piece. thanks same direction pull together!

  34. Ah yes, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the whole truth again and again. Sane rational human beings know that ” our world ” is not ” right “. We have been twisted beyond belief to accept this crazy world as being ” normal “. Sick shit is not normal!

    1. Ron, I don’t think Ms Caitlin speaks the WHOLE TRUTH again and again. I say she is generally on the right track but misses some of the complexities and subtilties. But that is much better than parroting MSM narratives or distracting people with fake news and fake conspiracies.

  35. Blessings, thanks for your writing, brilliant, brave, much needed.

  36. Roundball Shaman Avatar
    Roundball Shaman

    “Without extensive marketing…”
    .
    Society will never be rid of those who try to sell you some product or idea or belief. We can’t go five seconds during the day without being hit by numerous sales pitches of various kinds and different levels of conscious awareness attacking us.
    .
    Like the Devil who goes around collecting souls, these “marketers” are simply trying to get you to do or believe something THAT BENEFITS THE MARKETERS.
    .
    Another word for this entire process is Selfishness (self-interest at its heart and in general). Do what I want you to. Believe what I tell you do. I will benefit. Don’t worry about the consequences for you… that’s inconsequential to what I want out of you. Just do what I say. Don’t think about it, just buy buy buy.
    .
    Not all marketing is bad, though. What do you think marriage is? You’re marketing a product to someone… that product is YOU. And as we all know, sometimes that significant other turns out to be a product you want and sometimes you question your sanity for how could you fall for such a person (What was I thinking?…).
    .
    But we are being “marketed to” far more than we can market anything to someone else. Everyone has something to sell us and just won’t quit. It’s an onslaught that never stops.
    .
    What society really needs are things marketed to you that are BETTER for you, really and honestly better and more positive for you. Maybe in some world somewhere that’s how they do it. And they will be eminently better for it than in our current Sea of Marketing that drowns us all in an endless blur of perpetual nonsense.

    1. Societal norms are a form of social marketing. If society accepts something it becomes acceptable. Thus society collapses during the era of excessiveness. Your comment on marriage is an excellent one. I could give a long list of such and all are highly controversial. Here are a few, voting eligibility, womens rights, homosexuality, slavery to name a few.

  37. You pretty much covered it. However:

    Without extensive marketing, sheep in the United States would not believe that face masks will protect them from a virus.

    Without extensive marketing the population would not believe that a virus that causes the death rate of the flu is worth turning Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York and London into Orwellian Distopias.

    Without extensive marketing, people would not believe that building seven at the world trade center fell down by itself.

    Without extensive marketing people would not believe that Sadam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction.

    And we could go on and on. I do have a suggestion. You are getting a lot of comments, if you had a thumbs up and thumbs down device on your comment section, people might be really interested in reading comments that get lots of thumbs up and lots of thumbs down. People like to read what they agree with, but they also like to read what pisses them off. It might also help give you more ideas about which assholes to fry on you fantastic daily frying pan.

    1. Hey Bill,

      You covered my thought’s precisely.

      Cheers from Down Under

    2. Dont get me started on face masks, you know how I feel about that.

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