People have a natural discomfort when viewing the fun and fabulous lives promoted by social media influencers. Why? Viewers have the intuition that even where the presentation is not false, it is a very selective presentation. It is not authentic.
But what is? Civilization itself is a false reality. If reality is natural selection, then civilization is selective presentation.
Civilization is something other than what we can see and feel. It is an agreement among people about how to think and feel about what we can see. You can see the streets and buildings of your neighborhood, but how you go about them differs, depending on whether you think your city is run by warlords or elected officials. Your city, run by warlords, would not be the same civilization, and perhaps no civilization at all.
Civilization is built with the manipulation of social perception, and it is arguably nothing but that. The reason we pay taxes is not that everyone is audited each year; we have been convinced that taxes are essential to civilization. We queue at the supermarket, not because we will be punished for not queuing, not because we will get what we want sooner, but because we have been convinced that fairness and order are overarching principles.
How our minds have been manipulated by teachers, parents, film, television, and so on, determine how we behave. How we behave determines what kind of civilization we have. Civilization is a product of PR. It is not built any other way.
To refuse to participate in PR is to dump the responsibility of building civilization to others. When we are lucky, we may delegate this to the fun and fabulous, but increasingly, the slack has been picked up by religious extremists, nationalists, and racists. Civilization is built by people who are willing to do the PR; civilization has no mind of its own.
During the women’s suffrage movement of the 20th century, there was advertising for and against women’s right to vote. The modern perception of the anti-suffrage propaganda as preposterous is evidence of the victory of the suffrage movement. At the time, these posters were considered witty and to the point.
When public perception is manipulated by capitalism to increase consumption, that is a problem for the environment. The problem lies not in the practice of advertising, but in the lack of counter-advertising. This is arguably the business of activists.
It is the responsibility of people with a positive vision of the future to engage in PR.
