Hi and welcome to another issue of my newsletter.
How have you been?
This week has been busy, and wow. It went so fast from resting on Monday, falling ill and recovering through Thursday, and playing tennis first time in a long time yesterday. Here we are again on Sunday.
This week, I went through the first episodes of two documentaries; The Men Who Made Us Spend and The Century of the Self.
Both documentaries explore how we have been shaped through various techniques to desire goods not for their functionality by manipulating our deepest emotions.
From using planned obsolescence to product placement.
While we are being tipped for consumerism discussed these, a general pattern I observed, especially from the century of the self, was that whatever behaviour changes are needed was carried out on groups, instead of individuals, using metic desire. Groups or the masses made the experiment work.
It has been established that information isn’t exactly what makes us buy products, it is what it makes us feel or how we feel about ourselves with the product. The internet has all information but we make desicions with emotions then we find information to justify our desicions.
Before the advent of mass individual data collection and personalised ads, this worked partly because we were more loyal and had stronger bonds within groups.
These groups or tribes became herds where we outsourced our thinking because we favour group loyalty over independent reasoning. We choose to side with the ideas or reasoning of people we want to associate with without interrogating and think it through.
Using this against us, companies understood it was easier to influence groups because we always want to show solidarity to our groups. Groups are easier to control and tickle because the group isn’t thinking but suspending its judgement to what it feels its member would agree to. That’s consensus.
Even with the advent of the internet, it hasn’t stopped; group loyalty only went up and easier to find. You can always find people that would support even the most insane ideas on the internet. You can and will always find your group.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. ― Arthur Schopenhauer
In summary, the group/herd/mob isn’t always right; in most cases, they are wrong.
“Since ideas are invisible, people underestimate the extent to which they can go in and out of fashion. But ideas are like clothing. They change with the times and reveal how much the actions of others influence our decision making. And it’s not just the conformists. Even counter-cultural styles have consistent tropes. This is how culture acts as an operating system for how we perceive the world. It’s the standard we revert to when we don’t think for ourselves. We laugh at the things people in the 70s used to wear, but if we could see ideas in photos, we’d do the same for our thinking.”-David Perell, How Philosophers think.
That wraps it up for this week. See you next Sunday.