In My Father’s House are Many Mansions

People talk about 'character' as if it were as ingrained as eye color. It's not.
Many have heard of repressed memories; we all know we forget things. What is less acknowledged is how extensively our perception of things, and our reactions to them, can change.
We recognize ‘personality attributes’ like timidity, vanity, clumsiness, voluptuousness, sullenness, meticulousness, pretentiousness… in my thesaurus, these are ‘affections’. In reality, they're but transient. Many cues, or triggers, can radically alter personality. Sensitivity training, changes in gut bacteria, meditation, blood loss, sensory deprivation, hallucinogens and other psychotropic drugs, adrenaline, extremely altered circumstance, alcohol or unusual stimuli can open doors to personality change, if only temporarily. Some think psychoanalysis, religious conversion or military training can produce more permanent results (sometimes, anyway). But I think we don’t really have a handle on motivators, mood swings, what we call insanity or anything, really, about personality change. It may be because we believe too much in narrative story that requires characters with attributes (affections, affectations, attitudes, tendencies, characteristics). I say that’s like believing too much in maps or math.
A very small child won’t yet be thought of as sloppy, forgetful or good with money, and without the encumbrance or expectations, has freer rain and thus, often, surprising wisdom. But patterns develop, habits perhaps beneficial for enduring repetitive activities that help one endure. One with senses too wide open may well fail to be sufficiently self-protective to survive.
So aspects of ourselves, not just potential but once and occasionally active, become mostly walled off and forgotten. Eventually we can become hidebound, another danger to survival, in certain circumstances. When life is stable, old habits can be good, but flexibility, too, can be required even if sometimes not available.

Hidden away inside ourselves are, as it were, other selves, or other aspects of our selves, with other understandings, other ways of looking at the world, other attitudes and attributes, if not knowledge and skills. And when you find those alternative selves, you find alternate realities, and can’t be as cock-sure about everything as almost everybody in much of the modern world seems to have come to be anymore! There IS knowledge to be had, but the context and attitude within which it is held is everything.

Stupidity may often be just a form of self-image protection and a way to avoid the swirling confusions of recognizing too much. At the beginning of the ‘psychedelic revolution’ there were ‘trip guides’ to help ‘experimenters’ avoid that kind of confusion, but then quickly thereafter out-and-out self-indulgence became the rage…

In dreams you can experience other personas. I have also dreamt of vastly extensive attic spaces, once or twice with their own further attic spaces, and large underground spaces (I built and own a large rectangular underground house; in the dreams the various underground houses are almost always circular). Not entirely distinct from flying dreams, or ones where I walk or float on levels above other people, or dreams of finding things, these dreams please me. Sometimes it seems one has so little. But actually we have much more than we tend to acknowledge.

Perception manipulation: Information and advertising

From my novel, 'Watching Little Sister':

Information and advertising:

Before the 20th century, there wasn’t much advertising of any great significance. During that time period it became either its greatest tool or its greatest scam or sham, depending on how one sees commercial products and services. Advertisers perform a kind of service, of temporary duration and restricted value, which can’t be resold, rather than make a solid product of potential use. Advertising serves the seller, far more than it serves the buyer.
Legend tells of an early use of advertising: a prostitute of ancient Greece, named Taïs, perhaps working docks, used tacks inserted under her sandals to spell out, lengthwise, “Follow me, discreetly” (ΑΚΟΛΟΥΘΕΙ AKOLOUTHEI) - in order to leave an enticing message. Hidden amidst palm trees, a transaction might commence. Modern advertising, it can be said, has followed in her footprints.
For centuries, advertising consisted mostly of hardly manipulative notices. Manufacture was controlled by guilds, with village economies managed by barter, and little excess or competition. People made do, and to encourage them to want more was counterproductive. Folk took what they could and were glad of it, especially in terms of non-local goods. Most production and consumption was local, and sustenance, not indulgence, oriented.
But when the 19th century CE “Industrial Revolution” brought mass-production, things changed. People began to discover needs they’d never had before, and some realized that telling others of these new “needs” could be a lucrative enough occupation to allow those engaged well in it to afford the unnecessary luxuries becoming more available. Soon the amenities of service were no longer just for rulers.
There’s one kind of “service” some instances of which can be resold: amusement. Propaganda had begun early on; plays and circuses disseminated it. Material printed to amuse eventually carried advertising meant to titillate, and even provoke, and a chain developed, with diverting notices for diversions that propagandized. How good it was to have bread and circuses! Having them made those with them the best! Made them better people than those who didn’t have circuses, or bread, and didn’t even know enough to WANT to go to circuses…
In the 1830s proudly lowbrow “penny papers” began competing with conservative 6¢ ones read mostly by businessmen. Cleverly perpetrating amusing hoaxes (one involved descriptions of myriad varieties of life on the moon), they became popular enough for the staid established papers to anxiously imitate, and thus become no better than their low-brow competition. Penny-paper sensationalism worked well; along with P.T. Barnum and his circuses (with a “mermaid” on display and signs proclaiming, “This way to the egress”), they helped convince the public that the dangerous and deceitful, but booming, new urban world was at least exciting, and often entertaining. Penny-papers put the 6¢ ones out of business, and nurtured advertising’s questionable involvement with truth. A sense that it’s forgivable to be misleading, as long as you’re entertaining, gained credibility – for some formats.
In the 1870s, the New York Times had ads for “magnetic ointment”, “magnetic anti-bilious pills”, “old eyes made new without spectacles”, “comfort for the ruptured” and “confidential information for the married.” Promotional pamphlets, banners and posters for various kinds of “snake oil” could often be found around the US, but subtleties in manipulative technique had barely begun to develop.
As slick presentation techniques replaced mere notices, more and more information began to slide into propaganda; advertising agents, who began as middlemen between marketers and media, mostly just buying space, found need to offer more and more functions, and increased benefits to their employers, to earn their commissions. In one early success in sloganeering, in 1898 Albert Lasker (1880-1952) sold a hearing-aid manufacturer the slogan, “You hear! When you use Wilson’s Common Sense Ear Drums.” The hearing-aid company soon increased its ad budget from $10,000 a year to $180,000, and tripled the commission paid. “My idea of this business,” Lasker said, “was to render service and make money.”
It didn’t take long for advertisers to start capitalizing on anxieties: “When you use you are exempt from the dangers that men often encounter who allow their faces to come in contact with the brush, soap and barber shop accessories used on other people.” Lifebuoy soap ran a radio commercial with a foghorn booming, “B.O.” then the slogan, “Your best friend won’t tell you.” Soon, deodorants, antiperspirants, after-shaves and colognes had proliferated… Fear, much as in politics, worked well. Quite well. Thus, Madison Avenue got its start by recognizing how well aromatic paranoia could pay, and frightening the public into fear of being olfactorily “offensive” - and bullied into considerable outlay for lotions, sprays and potions which claim to mask natural odors (admittedly sometimes odious; regular use of soap and water had recently become the cultural standard, though…).
By the mid-1920s, aggressive advertisers weren’t interested in meeting needs, but in creating them. Claims presented were, often demonstrably, and blatantly, even, false. But in response to this kind of stimulation, consumer spending – and debt – rose dramatically. By the middle of the 1900s, propaganda and sensationalism had become acknowledged hallmarks of mass culture, with clear evidence of manipulation of the public by mass-media’s tendency to undermine progressive values. In magazines and newspapers, over the radio and then TV, a verbal barrage had been set in motion, hosting new fears about health, bowels, teeth, looks, eating and drinking, while promoting goods to postpone the onset of disease, of social ostracism, or of business failure – and also to aid in recovery from ailments, physical or social, already contracted. People were clearly diverted by the process of getting hoodwinked, and to some extent even taking pleasure in it; there was insufficient outrage to curb advertisers’ antics.
The growing advertising industry soon developed opinion and market research. James Thompson entered the advertising field in 1868, at age 20, working as a bookkeeper; he became a solicitor of advertising, purchased the company from his employer in 1878 then incorporated it as J. Walter Thompson Co. in 1896. In 1921, as head of an agency long one of the largest in the world, he hired Harvard psychologist John Watson, widely considered the father of behavioral research, to help his agency plumb consumers’ minds. Watson developed behaviorism into the dominant branch of psychology in the USA in the 20s and 30s; a primary, integral behavioral concept is that learning is best accomplished by small, incremental steps, with immediate reinforcement, or reward, for the learner. This concept was applied to advertising by using sex-interest and status-seeking as titillating reinforcers (reinforcement: the use of stimuli, including praise, nutrition, opportunity to explore, money, sexual provocation, electric shock or direct brain stimulation, to facilitate learning). Watson became vice president of the Thompson advertising agency, promoting the idea that advertisers must tell consumers “something that will tie him up with fear, something that will stir up a mild rage, that will call out an affectionate or love response, or strike at a deep psychological or habit need.” He held that campaigns should “dispense with rational copy almost entirely” as reason was “useless” compared to the pull of emotions. Status anxiety soon proved as good as other forms of fear, successfully stoked both by Cadillac advertisements mentioning “the Penalty of Leadership” and by Woodbury Facial Soap ads claiming to produce “The skin you love to touch.” The method worked very well within the emerging culture of celebrity infatuation. In line with the belief that people preferred news, education and entertainment presented by strong, eminent, and popular personalities, American Tobacco hired naval heroes and famous actresses to plug Lucky Strike cigarettes - a product that was to “emancipate” women while enslaving them to the physical ideal of slimness. Hearing-aid slogan writer Albert Lasker, worked on these ideas, and became considered the founder of modern advertising because of his successful insistence that advertising copy actively sell rather than simply inform; he also helped develop our dangerous cult of celebrity.
In 1904 Lasker met John E. Kennedy, a Canadian mounted policeman, who told him advertising wasn’t news: “news is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words, it is ‘salesmanship in print.’” When Lasker had started in advertising, agencies just took copy prepared by their clients, and placed it in various publications. Lasker seized on an idea that advertising shouldn’t seek to passively inform about a product, but instead should actively promote it, and turned into enduring household names Kotex (in 1921) and Kleenex (in 1924). He changed people’s attitudes through new sales-promotion techniques using images, slogans and, especially, endorsements, and is duly credited with being responsible for radio (and then television after it) becoming advertising-driven. Radio broadcasting, at first, was just an instrument useful for selling radio sets; but with “salesmanship in broadcasting” came enduring influence, real money, and power. Lasker is also credited with inventing the soap opera.
Listerine, first made in the 1800s as a surgical antiseptic, then distilled to be sold as a floor cleaner and gonorrhea cure, became a runaway success in the 1920s, when pitched as solution to “Chronic halitosis”. Advertising scholar James B. Twitchell put it this way: “Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.” But in just seven years, revenues rose from $115,000 to over $8 million.
Advertising before the advent of TV, of course, was as nothing compared to after – and with color its power increased even more. The TV images so much more readily offered an ideal to compare oneself against; not only did expectations rapidly change, but body shapes, even, and, it really isn’t too much to say, all interaction between mind and body, self and world, among those influenced by media (meaning, practically everybody).
Great Expectations indeed: we all became little kings and queens, able to command “Off with his head!” merely by changing channels. The world in the screen before us was merely to please. And so, as utilitarian Ford ‘Model T’ cars, priced under $300, had become replaced by status symbols costing ten times as much, conspicuous consumption became an indicator of success. The proportion of the economy devoted to advertising soared, and savings and self-sufficiency dwindled.
Planned, programmed, built-in or ‘Dynamic’ Obsolescence comes directly from annual car-model changes introduced by Harley Earl, ‘father’ of the Corvette, from General Motor’s Chevrolet division. Earl called it “design obsolescence” and in 1956 explained that styling is “where noticeable change must come annually,” that this “amounts to dynamic obsolescence – the creation of a desire on the part of millions of car buyers each year to trade in last year’s car on a new one.”
“Since the design of the automobile is the first thing the buyer sees, the stylist is more continuously involved in the annual change. The importance of engineering changes, however, cannot be over-estimated, but by their very nature they cannot be changed annually as much as can the appearance of the car,” Earl asserted. From the late 1920s, he encouraged industry-wide recognition that appearance and function shared parallel importance. He’s credited with developing turn-signal lights, hidden spare-tires, pillar-less top, heated seats, tinted and electric windows, power-operated convertible roofs and telescopic radio antennas. He introduced the two-tone paint job, quadruple headlights, aluminum wheel hubs, on-board car computers, key-less entry and the crash-test dummy.
General Motors’ president and chairman for over a quarter century, Alfred Sloan Jr., presided over GM becoming the largest business corporation in the world; for years GM made more than half of all American auto sales. Sloan saw that the automobile industry depended on changing consumers’ attitudes, and became a primary force behind changing what was at first a low-cost form of transportation (Ford’s Model T) into a symbol of attainment – something that consumers would want to upgrade, almost continually. Sloan promoted planned obsolescence through cosmetic changes, providing “a car for every purse and purpose” while encouraging “conspicuous consumption.”
Ideas that “advertising is fundamentally persuasion,” and persuasion is an “art,” and other ideas about “total-marketing communications,” and “integrated marketing,” gained great favor after WWII; more and more often their adherents incorporated theories derived from contemporary psychology. A theory of “empathy” suggested it was “brand personality” and not differences between products that decided customers. Companies staked claims: Volvo promoted its automobiles as the “safest,” while the Mercedes-Benz is claimed to be the best “engineered.” Products began to have life cycles, (‘product-cycles’) and often soon disappear; brands, though, properly managed, can well out-last individual consumers. To gain brand loyalty, one of the advertising industry’s dominant desires became not to offend; ‘humorous’ racial-stereotyping ads had to disappear. Johnson & Johnson’s produced heartwarming evocations of mother love; the National Urban League warned that the U.S. had better “give a damn” about its Black underclass, and by the 1960s, communication technology was homogenizing markets everywhere. Global corporations were selling the same things in the same way all over the world – to absolutely anybody with cash or credit.
By the late ‘80s though, new technologies were rendering communication and promotional devices less effective. The few firms that could afford the cost of major advertising campaigns gained dominance in the market, while a glut of products taxed the limits of imagination; network TV, the advertising agencies’ most profitable venue, lost substantial prime-time audience to other media, as audiences explored new offerings. Catalogs returned to vogue, and also direct marketing; finally e-commerce completely changed the nature of the game.
When, not even half-a-century, not even a modern working life-time, after TV, interactivity really hit (well beyond ham radio and pin-ball machines), allowing complete irresponsibility through anonymity, and one could try to fully re-invent oneself, and so much more fully indulge as to not even feel subject to promotional manipulation (although that remains, quite naturally, still there), communalism disappeared like endangered species and rain forest – the last voluntarily-shared group ‘activities’ became but ‘networking’ over restaurant meals and (of, once again, course) getting intoxicated.
Only a generation or so into its existence, modern advertising had begun to focus on signals of desirability – on signals our ancestors were attuned to for both reproductive ability and manipulative success (satisfaction attainment potential). These signals were worked on, manipulated by cosmetics, clothing and eventually surgery – until much of our lives became dominated by giant industries devoted to false advertising, with the selling empty promises the core of the game. Expensive packaging became a substantial part of the economic outlay of all modern people, who pay for annoying promotions, as well. The successful dissemination of pretense had become a viable substitute for successful attainment of satisfaction - as it was regarded as such, and so false became, somewhat, real. Success is not what is promoted as desirable, but rather what is found desirable to the successful, with form (cuteness) high over function (which the truly successful are no longer much concerned with, except in terms of symbol – due to having plenty of backup and usually too much age to depend on innate characteristics to help maintain place in the pecking order). Marketing agents and advertisers accept that packaging and product image are more important than the actual product… as Leo Tolstoy put it, “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” The trick became to manipulate concepts of beauty, and thus desirability.
For a few, co-oping and bulk purchasing without packaging replaced the general stores of the 19th century, saving money, resources and self-esteem, but for most, the interest, all too often, is primarily in attraction, more than in utility. This cannot have been as much the case when survival was more at stake. Now, though, it is but self image which is at stake. The individual showing the truest pride, vanity and affectation is the one most often catered to, and acknowledged as deserving. As people began to catch onto these things, product marketers abandoned media advertising in favor of “below-the-line” approaches, even returning to direct marketing. With internet, hand-phones, satellites and overnight delivery, marketers used wickedly challenging slogans to alter readers’ preconceptions about familiar icons – redefining the subliminal. The internet placed renewed emphasis on the importance of brand symbols and name recognition, the only things retaining power enough to compel attention. Consultants probed the virtues of humor, likeability, and refreshing entertainment, while arguing that in an age of interactivity and choice, advertising must act more like movies, TV, and even conversation. As the planet began to show unmistakable signs of stress, strain and depletion, systematic attempts to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, and permanently discontented not only continue, but gain further in strength and power.
Potentially valuable new products like global positioning systems (GPS) and wireless Internet might improve traffic management and congestion control by generating more precise accident reports and helping users call for help and locate alternate routes, but they have attained visibility mostly as status symbols. New possibilities for enabling instantaneous crime reporting, for troubleshooting, polling and weather advising have opened, but the main thing has remained the generation of profits, way over meaningful improvement to quality of life. People have become like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, who wasn’t much bothered by his 40 cars having but 300 miles of paved road to drive on.

As marketing research attained increasing significance through the 20th century, large corporations - particularly mass consumer manufacturers - began to recognize the importance of product design, effective distribution, and sustained communication with consumers regarding the success of their brands. Marketing concepts and techniques moved into the industrial-goods sector, then later into the services sector, and it became apparent that successful marketing not only of goods and services but also ideas (social marketing), places (location marketing), personalities (celebrity marketing), events (event marketing), and even the organizations themselves (public relations) required a scientific approach.
Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995), the original doctor of spin and one of the 20th century’s most influential people, pioneered many of the publicity industry’s techniques for achieving, and maintaining, not only invisibility but unaccountability. His mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister, and Freud’s reputation as the “father of psychoanalysis” owes much to the work through which Bernays made himself important: publicity (marketing and public relations). Bernays saw himself as a kind of psychoanalyst to troubled corporations. Feeling strongly that a dangerous abundance of irrational animosity is overly likely in any society, and especially in democratic ones, Bernays considered the public’s judgment “not to be relied upon” and far too potentially treacherous. He wrote that the public “could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so they had to be guided from above” and that if “we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least to a certain point and within certain limits.” He argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy, and that deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the public unconscious of forces working to mold their minds was necessary for stability, indeed, essential: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this mostly unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” For him, to draws on social sciences in order to motivate and shape the response of a general or particular audience was merely being responsible (the duty and obligation of noblesse oblige).
One of Bernays’ favorite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of “third party authorities” (for instance, physicians) to plead his clients’ causes. He used psychoanalytic ideas, and the stimulus and response ideas of Pavlov, to promote commodities as diverse as cigarettes, soap and books. His corporate clients included Proctor & Gamble, American Tobacco Company, CBS, United Fruit, GE, Dodge Motors, Cartier; and even Calvin Coolidge, for whom he set up a “pancake breakfast” with vaudevillians, in perhaps the first overt media acts for a president. In a Dixie Cup campaign, he helped convince consumers that only disposable cups are sanitary; in another campaign he helped convince the public that beer is the “beverage of moderation.” He also helped initiate water fluoridation, working with the Public Health Service and American Dental Association to aid the Aluminum Company of American (Alcoa) get rid of some of its industrial waste, by putting it into drinking water. He paid a group of young models, supposedly Women’s rights marchers, to light Lucky Strike cigarettes while in a New York City parade - as “Torches of Freedom”. The New York Times reported on it this way: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’”!
Bernays had no problem with policies based on deception, as he considered that dangerous libidinal energies lurking just below the surface of every individual could be harnessed and channeled by the corporate elite, for economic and social benefit – the elite being the chosen, somehow without those “libidinal” challenges, and able to lead all to utopia. Mass production by big business, he was sure, could fulfill the inherently irrational cravings of the masses, simultaneously making the economy more secure and sating dangerous urges which otherwise threaten to tear society apart. He worked to develop the marketing strategy of the “tie-in”: linking a variety of promotional venues for reinforcement of the message (often combining radio and newspaper ads, “news”, exhibitions and even holidays, for instance, “Thrift Week”).
His tour de force was a propaganda campaign for United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International, now United Brands), which directly led to the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala under Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1954). By painting the mildly reformist Guzman as a “friend of communists”, Bernays helped reinvigorate the a corrupt multinational corporation’s domination of a food-producing nation beset with brutality, slave labor and even starvation, and bring into popular parlance the term “banana republic”. Bernays whipped up media and political sentiment: articles in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader, and other publications discussed the growing influence of Guatemala's Communists. Bernays was a key source of information for the press, even, and perhaps especially, the liberal press, right through the takeover. As the US invasion commenced on June 18, Bernays was giving what he called the ‘first news anyone received on the situation’ to the Associate Press, United Press, the International News Service, and the New York Times. The tragic result of his manipulations was decades of tyranny under a government which condemned hundreds of thousands of people (mostly from the country's impoverished Maya Indian majority) to dislocation, torture and death. But Bernays relished, and apparently never regretted, his work for United Fruit, for which he was paid $100,000 a year (a huge amount at the time). Bernays and those for whom he worked viewed Latin America as ripe for economic exploitation and political manipulation, and that particular propaganda war set precedents, and patterns, for future US-led campaigns in Cuba, Vietnam and a host of other countries. Summing up his attitude, he wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
And since, “spin” has exceeded even the doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, the incessant propaganda of Huxley’s Brave New World, and the misinformation presented by despots Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong Il. And the glory of it all is: the repressed don’t even realize they are so.
Expertise gained through manipulative techniques developed for advertising soon helped with deception plots against WWII’s Axis powers, the antics of the secret services, and eventually, the machinations of the US Right Wing. As information technology grew, and disinformation, distortions, misdirection, bait-and-switch swindles and outright lies became the norm, neo-cons became able to seriously believe liberals and progressives to be fascists, while supporting fascism themselves – in the name of “freedom”. Equally important, boredom, once been no threat at all to self-esteem, had recently become a severe humiliation. This wasn’t a twist on the Faust tale, just an updating: we’ve become enslaved through what we thought was liberating us.
Advertisers adept at co-opting critiques of both their methods and of consumerism have even built themselves up by mocking advertising; in an amazing “Catch-22”, the industry doesn’t even need to co-opt its critics - efforts to expose advertiser manipulation often benefit the ad industry! People now gladly pay extra to wear promotional logos…

If television advertisers don’t like what’s in a program, they pull sponsorship worth millions of dollars. For years, a large corporation’s policy included: “There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivations… Members of the armed forces must not be cast as villains. If there is any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same show.” Many preferences simply can’t be expressed, or shown, in mainstream media, constructing a kind of context displaying the socially acceptable – in society as media and its backers choose to define it.
We’re herded into receiving as an acceptable norm what’s placed before us, not giving it another thought, merely following agendas set by those wanting to use herd instincts to imprison us. We’re conditioned to accept degraded values. Reality-perception manipulation through media disinformation campaigns discredits or promotes various agendas; exploitation of the masses by those with power remains a defining characteristic of both our modern technology and age. Few ever believe they’ve been brainwashed, but it’s accepted that media attention contrary to official policy can result in careers summarily ending. As advertising went from presentation to manipulation, through use of subtle insinuations, especially in terms of group acceptance or ostracism, subtle threats, often presented with a beaming smile, have achieved remarkable persuasion, too often all but unrecognized.