Notes on Fear

Fear, if you don't know, is how they sell you things.

Clorets are a good sample case for this. They're good partially because they're both absurd and very smart. The absurdity is that almost any minty chewing gum is sold, I would assume, to people who in part fear having un-minty breath. The genius is that they jumped into that fear of bad breath with both feet and created a product specifically targeted at that fear.

Now in Toilet Brush Flavor!!!

As mundane as this example is I think it proves a larger point that marketing, generally, is based on a modified incarnation of the Underpant Gnome Economy:

1) Provoke a particular fear or insecurity in the target demographic.

2) Offer the provoked subject a product that assuages or removes the fear, temporarily.

3) Profit.

If this scheme seems banal, boring and deterministic well, it is. Long ago the spotless air-conditioned rooms full computers replaced the thoughtful, gifted empaths like Don Draper.

Not only that... they replaced a lot of stuff.

What we know today as "Big Data" or any of the other adjectives that are pasted on the lifeless hulks of computational units, servers and routers that lurk in dark bunkers all over the world like Cthulhu, began not long after WW2.

The RAND corporation, originally a creation of the Air Force (that stood for Research ANd Development, by the by.) developed Rational Choice Theory based on the mathematical ideas of John Nash (Yes, the Beautiful Mind guy). These ideas turned the individual person, the communities that they live in and their larger societies into "Consumers" that chose between one thing or another based on what seemed "rational" for them to choose. Thusly the individual or the multitudes could be manipulated into "choosing" things based on what was known about the things that mattered to them.

While one could certainly go on for hundreds of thousands of pages detailing all of implications and technologies that haven fallen out of the above paragraph I'll offer my own short digestion.

1) You and I are considered consumers, not just by marketers, corporations and ad agencies but by think tanks that influence political strategies and campaigns on both side of the aisle as well as the military and intelligence services.

2) These so-called consumers can be manipulated to make choices based on provocations that produce fear in the target demographic(s). 

Handbook for 18 year-old virgins

 As an only child I was a shy early on, afraid of talking to people I did not know intimately. I preferred to hole up with a Golden Book about insects or loiter in the kitchen during holiday parties and other get-togethers. The orginal target market for the Well for Boys, as it were.

This, of course, very much rubbed my father (who, among many of other things, had once killed a Vietcong sapper with a drywall hatchet in an alley during the Tet Offensive) the wrong way.

He would go out of his way to make me interact with strangers, mostly by sending me to pay for stuff like the bill at a diner or gas at the gas station, as a way to confront my fears.

More importantly, it worked. I grew to become a confidant young man one knock-knee'd trip to the register at a time. A man who has kicked through an unending rain-forest of dicks to reach my present age of 40.

I relate this not simply out of my own desire to self-aggrandize but to relate to you a sort of "Fear is the Mind Killer" mantra my father would repeat to me each and every time he would send me to a register with a 20 dollar bill or the yard foreman to order four dozen bags of sheetrock mud: "They can't eat you."

"And three dollars and sixty-three cents is your change.."

 If this seems both a) an inaccurate representation of potential outcomes and b) vaguely humorous it's because it was meant that way. He, after all, was the man who told me about the man-eaters of Borneo and their penchant for "Long Pig". His point was that fear, like the idea of a 48 year-old waitress eating me at the worn Formica register counter, was patently silly.

Well, that and that he couldn't always trot out the melodramatic "A coward dies a thousand deaths. A brave man, only one." he saved for moments when I was like "Not only no, but FUCK NO I'm not giving that woman the money and WHY, exactly, are we in this Santeria shop in the first place?"

Anyway, pay the bill but let them know that you aren't buying. They can't eat you.