Whiskey & Gunpowder

http://www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com/survey/WG_email_survey.html

November 18, 2008

By Greg Grillot

Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.

Cure Cancer with Eggplant?!

Dear Whiskey Shooter,  

The truth about healing that we all tend to forget is that the body heals itself; it just needs the right tools.

I can certainly understand if you have come to believe that man-made drugs are necessary for healing ... because there is a multi-billion dollar industry that profits from creating that impression (AZ Moderate Note: the essence of Flimflam.).   

Billions of dollars are spent each year in order to convince the public that man-made concoctions  are necessary to preserve health and combat disease.    

[…] 

If you’d like to find out more, just click here…  

Whiskey & Gunpowder

As a point of reference, you may remember Alvin Toffler as the author of Future Shock, a bestseller in the 1960s and 1970s, and who wrote The Third Wave which became a best seller in the 1980s. 

The Third Wave is of particular interest to the focus of this article: marketing = flimflam. 

In a nutshell, Toffler postulates three major identifiable transitions in human development:

1.    Hunter-gatherer societies were replaced by agricultural societies;

2.    Agricultural societies were replaced by industrial societies;

3.    Industrial societies are being replaced by the knowledge societies. 

If you have not read these two books, I would heartily recommend them to anyone that is trying to understand how we got where we are today and what is happening – and where we might be going.

I would like to expand on his two books separately in the future, but the laser point for this article is that:

·        In the hunter-gather dominant periods humans consumed what they themselves produced;

·        In the industrial revolution, production and consumption were compartmentalized, and because of this a market economy evolved – the producer produced for others to consume.

The evolution of that marketing economy is well advanced and global today, and what we see and live with represents the full blossoming of that interface between production and consumption. 

It has become flimflam in its powerful maturation because it has taken on a life of its own.  It no longer simply supports production and consumption: it drives it, and that is where the temptation for flimflam by the sideshow barkers of the “free market” economy has proven irresistible. 

Of course I could go on and on, but I will spare you that agony.  Let me leave you with a small challenge: if you are interested, try to climb out of the advertising cocoon that has been spun around you by just one medium – television (forget about junk mail, billboards, movies, etc. – TV is the storm trooper of flimflam).  Measure the percentage of commercials that try to plant the seed of dread and even fear in you, and of course provide you with the remedy, at a price, for that unsettled subliminal state that it has generated.  (HINTS: has your credit score flat lined beep beep beep?; you walk out of the hospital after a heart attack and a gurney follows all over town reminding you that you are a walking time bomb; cholesterol is silently building concrete walls in your arteries; Beautiful woman says “Men, we know it’s not your fault that you cannot get a hard-on, but ...”; whatever life insurance you may have, it is not enough to send your kids to college you bad man; etc. etc. etc.) 

Of course marketing has been and is essential to this phase of our development.  My point is simply to beseech each and everyone of us to be conscious of when the marketing/propaganda line is crossed – a condition that is increasing daily – and just how much of an impact it has on your sense of well being.  

But don’t get me started.