Thank you Adam for another informative and thought-stimulating article.
As an English major who flirted with advertising right after graduation, I spent time reading Ogilvy and others who were considered luminaries. I'm thankful that it turned out I wasn't really any good at convincing people to buy things I didn't believe in myself, which is how I wound up fundraising for higher education. Copyranter and other insiders have done what Confessions of an Economic Hitman did for so-called global development, shining a light on sins and abuses of the advertising world NOT that it was really hidden (what could our democracies be like if we were not allowed to advertise for politicians? The mind boggles.). We live in a panoptoconic consumer-advertising environment that is almost impossible to escape.
Language matters, and as you've written, representation through language matters. We've learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer and other writers informing us of indigenous ways of being in the world, that our language is greatly impoverished by its insistence on making so much of our reality nouns, and emphasizing separate-ness. This brief article gets to the crux of what we lost and can reclaim in terms of the Presencing you describe. The Mystery as a verb - the Great Mysterous-ing:
"From the Native American point of view, the word “god” as a noun is a grammatically induced hallucination, like the dummy “it” in “it is raining.” The closest Lakhota equivalent is tanka wakan [thãka wakã] (sometimes reversed in sacred speech), which is an adjectival-verbal construction. This phrase has routinely been mistranslated as the “Great Mystery” but is better glossed as “the Great Mysteriousing.” Such mistranslation is not trivial as it obscures the deep differences between a verb-based and noun-based worldview."
Your description of Bucky's integrities: "But the movie is not just you in reverse, but all of the things that are part of your journey. So the food that you ate at breakfast would be played back to the very farms where it originated. He even suggested journeying backwards with the components of your breakfast to the elemental forms that brought them into being such as the rainwater, solar radiation and minerals necessary for plant growth. By imagining this backward flow, we can begin to sense the pattern integrities and build an integrated consciousness and vision for how we might redesign our systems according to what can be found in Universe." Reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on Interbeing through a piece of paper:
"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.”
I find it infuriating that for decades there have been people who have know what is the right thing to do and it gets stiffled or subverted by the quest for money. Thus reinforcing my mantra that “Being right isn’t enough.” We need to leverage tools used for evil for good. We can just as easily use the tools of advertising and PR for the right side of the issue. Although one needs money or innovative resources by which to do this.
I heard a CBC interview with a botanist who mentioned she apologized to a recent PhD grad that after 40 years in the field she thought we would have been much farther forward on a known and proven issue. Instead of the student being down she told her prof that there was no better time to bring this fixed and working on this issue. I paraphrase but... at a time when we are on a precipice, there is no better time to know where you stand and to make an impact by showing others where to stand on the teeter totter. I just loved that optimistic view. And for us all to keep fighting.
Another thought I had related to reading Homo Sapiens. I have no doubt you have read it Adam, as you seem to have read everything. It really drove home to me the positive and negative in every new scientific step we take. If only we examined these polar positions and the continuum of discoveries in advance of using them or releasing them to “the wild” perhaps we could stop or at the very least be more away of nefarious uses and applications. AI is a good example. Hopefully the horse hasn’t left the barn in that case but even if it has, we have the capability to corral the horses.
Lastly, I need some guidance on your Sylvia Plath quote near the end. I don’t think I connected the dots on that.
When I imagine great illusions, I think of stage magicians who practices tirelessly to perfect sleight of hand and graduate to levitation, disappearance and telepathy. Honed through repetition, their craft exploits an understanding that humans’ focus is relatively easily distracted such that illusion seems real and in our collective desire for wonder, we willingly surrender our full faculties. This is not to say we might not remain curious or doubtful but the idea that magic exists in a world of process and progress answers a deep hunger for a life that still holds mystery, unexplored frontiers and mystical energies.
Like the Magician, the stage craft of advertising has worked hard, practiced and perfected in an attempt to create a show for which the audience will pay. We are the paying audience; even those among us who attempt to see past the magicians tricks have paid for their seat and the opportunity to argue the distortion.
Our daily lives in the western world are a constant barrage of modern magic. We marvel at the relative ease with which we enjoy comfortable existence. Running water, electricity, a telephone - back a few hundred years and these would all have seemed magical. Today’s conveniences of online shopping, personalized feeds, steaming content and handheld AI are yesterday’s science fiction but they still exist on a backbone of illusion. These presuppose our willingness to appreciate the magic without asking to see behind the magicians apparatus. We are still the audience, paying others for awe and wonder.
In this issue, Adam tackles what is perhaps the greatest challenge to climate action; the nefarious efforts of advertising (corporate narratives) to conjure illusions on behalf of clients motivated by the accumulation of wealth and power. The challenge is that so many of the illusions, or disillusions of climate change seem both obvious tricks but incredibly complex in their unraveling.
When the temporal nature of the show become the persuasive reality of our daily lives, the magic is normalized and we accept it as fact. The omnipotent reach of tech, personalized media feeds and data driven marketing (that knows us better than ourselves) makes us an audience for whom the real illusion is our belief in self-determined choice. We might now ask if the auditorium is growing; can we even opt out of the show?
Is there a different theatre? If we feel that the magician is lacking and instead we attend the theatres of climate awareness and ecological embrace - are we able to break free of capitalism’s spell? I’m challenged by the fact that even the most ardent climate change realists exist in a world where they communicate through mass media’s channels, fund themselves through elite philanthropy, decry the idolization of greed and ambition but ultimately, too often fail to escape the system they rail against. We crumble to convenience, cost savings, entertainment, comfort and conformity. We become theatre within theatre where the magician simply uses the alternative realities as part of his illusion. Think of Green washing, toothless sustainability initiatives, recycling, corporate social impact statements, political posturing and triple bottom line accounting. They all assume that we are capable of simply modifying the show to make it palatable, to extend the run. No longer filled with wonder, I’m convinced I am more aware of the illusions being presented but I’m still in the audience.
I’m not sure how to leave the theatre but I’m more and more convinced that we have to stop watching, to stop providing an audience and run. As I inch for the door, I fear being left with only a ticket stub and fleeting memories. But I fear that as theatre falls around us, the show will go on.
Thank you Adam for another informative and thought-stimulating article.
As an English major who flirted with advertising right after graduation, I spent time reading Ogilvy and others who were considered luminaries. I'm thankful that it turned out I wasn't really any good at convincing people to buy things I didn't believe in myself, which is how I wound up fundraising for higher education. Copyranter and other insiders have done what Confessions of an Economic Hitman did for so-called global development, shining a light on sins and abuses of the advertising world NOT that it was really hidden (what could our democracies be like if we were not allowed to advertise for politicians? The mind boggles.). We live in a panoptoconic consumer-advertising environment that is almost impossible to escape.
Language matters, and as you've written, representation through language matters. We've learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer and other writers informing us of indigenous ways of being in the world, that our language is greatly impoverished by its insistence on making so much of our reality nouns, and emphasizing separate-ness. This brief article gets to the crux of what we lost and can reclaim in terms of the Presencing you describe. The Mystery as a verb - the Great Mysterous-ing:
"From the Native American point of view, the word “god” as a noun is a grammatically induced hallucination, like the dummy “it” in “it is raining.” The closest Lakhota equivalent is tanka wakan [thãka wakã] (sometimes reversed in sacred speech), which is an adjectival-verbal construction. This phrase has routinely been mistranslated as the “Great Mystery” but is better glossed as “the Great Mysteriousing.” Such mistranslation is not trivial as it obscures the deep differences between a verb-based and noun-based worldview."
From: https://www.dailygood.org/story/2642/lessons-in-the-old-language-matthew-c-bronson/
Your description of Bucky's integrities: "But the movie is not just you in reverse, but all of the things that are part of your journey. So the food that you ate at breakfast would be played back to the very farms where it originated. He even suggested journeying backwards with the components of your breakfast to the elemental forms that brought them into being such as the rainwater, solar radiation and minerals necessary for plant growth. By imagining this backward flow, we can begin to sense the pattern integrities and build an integrated consciousness and vision for how we might redesign our systems according to what can be found in Universe." Reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on Interbeing through a piece of paper:
"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.”
I find it infuriating that for decades there have been people who have know what is the right thing to do and it gets stiffled or subverted by the quest for money. Thus reinforcing my mantra that “Being right isn’t enough.” We need to leverage tools used for evil for good. We can just as easily use the tools of advertising and PR for the right side of the issue. Although one needs money or innovative resources by which to do this.
I heard a CBC interview with a botanist who mentioned she apologized to a recent PhD grad that after 40 years in the field she thought we would have been much farther forward on a known and proven issue. Instead of the student being down she told her prof that there was no better time to bring this fixed and working on this issue. I paraphrase but... at a time when we are on a precipice, there is no better time to know where you stand and to make an impact by showing others where to stand on the teeter totter. I just loved that optimistic view. And for us all to keep fighting.
Another thought I had related to reading Homo Sapiens. I have no doubt you have read it Adam, as you seem to have read everything. It really drove home to me the positive and negative in every new scientific step we take. If only we examined these polar positions and the continuum of discoveries in advance of using them or releasing them to “the wild” perhaps we could stop or at the very least be more away of nefarious uses and applications. AI is a good example. Hopefully the horse hasn’t left the barn in that case but even if it has, we have the capability to corral the horses.
Lastly, I need some guidance on your Sylvia Plath quote near the end. I don’t think I connected the dots on that.
LOVE these. Great work Adam.
Note: I apologize in advance for the extensive metaphors; creative flow took over but as always, I'm thankful to Adam for asking us to think deeper.
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When I imagine great illusions, I think of stage magicians who practices tirelessly to perfect sleight of hand and graduate to levitation, disappearance and telepathy. Honed through repetition, their craft exploits an understanding that humans’ focus is relatively easily distracted such that illusion seems real and in our collective desire for wonder, we willingly surrender our full faculties. This is not to say we might not remain curious or doubtful but the idea that magic exists in a world of process and progress answers a deep hunger for a life that still holds mystery, unexplored frontiers and mystical energies.
Like the Magician, the stage craft of advertising has worked hard, practiced and perfected in an attempt to create a show for which the audience will pay. We are the paying audience; even those among us who attempt to see past the magicians tricks have paid for their seat and the opportunity to argue the distortion.
Our daily lives in the western world are a constant barrage of modern magic. We marvel at the relative ease with which we enjoy comfortable existence. Running water, electricity, a telephone - back a few hundred years and these would all have seemed magical. Today’s conveniences of online shopping, personalized feeds, steaming content and handheld AI are yesterday’s science fiction but they still exist on a backbone of illusion. These presuppose our willingness to appreciate the magic without asking to see behind the magicians apparatus. We are still the audience, paying others for awe and wonder.
In this issue, Adam tackles what is perhaps the greatest challenge to climate action; the nefarious efforts of advertising (corporate narratives) to conjure illusions on behalf of clients motivated by the accumulation of wealth and power. The challenge is that so many of the illusions, or disillusions of climate change seem both obvious tricks but incredibly complex in their unraveling.
When the temporal nature of the show become the persuasive reality of our daily lives, the magic is normalized and we accept it as fact. The omnipotent reach of tech, personalized media feeds and data driven marketing (that knows us better than ourselves) makes us an audience for whom the real illusion is our belief in self-determined choice. We might now ask if the auditorium is growing; can we even opt out of the show?
Is there a different theatre? If we feel that the magician is lacking and instead we attend the theatres of climate awareness and ecological embrace - are we able to break free of capitalism’s spell? I’m challenged by the fact that even the most ardent climate change realists exist in a world where they communicate through mass media’s channels, fund themselves through elite philanthropy, decry the idolization of greed and ambition but ultimately, too often fail to escape the system they rail against. We crumble to convenience, cost savings, entertainment, comfort and conformity. We become theatre within theatre where the magician simply uses the alternative realities as part of his illusion. Think of Green washing, toothless sustainability initiatives, recycling, corporate social impact statements, political posturing and triple bottom line accounting. They all assume that we are capable of simply modifying the show to make it palatable, to extend the run. No longer filled with wonder, I’m convinced I am more aware of the illusions being presented but I’m still in the audience.
I’m not sure how to leave the theatre but I’m more and more convinced that we have to stop watching, to stop providing an audience and run. As I inch for the door, I fear being left with only a ticket stub and fleeting memories. But I fear that as theatre falls around us, the show will go on.