Brought to You by Our Corporate Sponsors
Just kidding. Right and Freedom doesn’t have corporate sponsors. You know who does have corporate sponsors? Your politicians — most of them anyway. And they’re trying to buy and sell your information, your life, and your opinion.
Fun fact: advertising can actually make you like a purchase more. I have an MBA — I know this. There have been several studies. If someone tells you how much fun you have doing something, you’ll have more fun doing it than if you were only inspired by your own devices. Buy a car? You’ll enjoy it more if it’s been sold to you. Sounds asinine, right?
It’s not.
It’s a quirk of personality, and it’s not the only one. Another you might have heard of is “the Big Lie”. That one, it’s where you say the same thing over and over with a big microphone (i.e. social media) until it becomes understood as a fundamental truth. It doesn’t actually have to be true to be seen as true. You may be aware of Habermas and the Theory of Communicative Action? Yes, this is Chuck writing this — so I’m going to get geeky for a minute.
The theory of Communicative Action indicates that social groups in isolation come up with their own set of maxims, or underlying truths, (recall not actually truths). Once in place, dislodging such truths becomes nearly impossible, because it would be analogous to telling someone who has seen blue skies forever that the sky is really fuschia. Worse, in that the conflict with a true believer is likely to turn violent before you ever convince anyone of anything.
What does this have to do with our corporate overlords? Simple. How many unions have formed of Amazon employees? One. Does Amazon simply treat their people better than other organizations? No. They’re among the worse. Empirically. Not going to litigate that. The point here is that corporations have agendas. And corporate owners have agendas. It’s not as simple as someone wants to make a lot of money (sometimes it is). Like Elon Musk buying twitter — there’s often more than one upside. For a global communication platform — what better way to spread information. Advertise and pitch any Big Lie he wants (and if you don’t think Elon Musk lies, you haven’t been paying attention).
In this episode, Don and Christina talk about corporate influence in politics. You know how we do it though, by now. There’s a lot more in this podcast episode than simply that.
