The Reality of Illusion in Contemporary American Society: An Essay on Flawed Economics

© 2005 by Eric S. Meyer. All Rights Reserved. 800-71USALL or usallsys@aol.com  Responsibility statement: Printing Paid for by USALL Systems company, towards a world with less poverty and more opportunity for the masses to pursue their dreams as the creative and emotional people they really are. PLEASE RESPOND TO THE AUTHOR, ERIC S. MEYER, IF YOU FEEL INCLINED TO DO SO!! YOUR RESPONSES ARE VERY HIGHLY ANTICIPATED AND WELCOMED BY ME.

Every day, we are subjected to thousands of commercial advertisement messages, which act to define who we are and what we value. We focus on what we think is relevant, to build conformity at the expense of creativity and intelligence. These messages are from, in order of descending rank, television and school, as the primary streams of flow.  By identifying these messages, we can label them false, “not like me” or “irrelevant.” To identify them, we must desire knowledge of self and care about what we value. To achieve this, we must actively seek information and analyze it and notice, and take responsibility for, what we decide is important and worthy of our time, money, and energy. As Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge” (a Stanford university website.)

Commercial messages try to sell services, products and resources, for the benefit of our economy, at the alleged benefit of the American People. The advertising industry is big business, bringing in billions of dollars every month within the United States alone.  Every time a product is bought, we are voting for its survival, and perhaps leading to its dominance over other products. Its sale generates tax dollars in most cases, and therefore becomes of interest to the government. According to Reading Culture, in an article on the media, stated that the average American sees about 3,600 ads every day.

We are what we know we think. When we watch television, we are flooding our mind with information, which is learned quite quickly. Consider Soap Operas: They are commonly used by immigrants to learn the English language, a language with many complexities and unusual rules, yet they tend to be quite successful and fast. 

We are what we don’t know we think. Imagine you had a way to influence what people think, but could achieve this without their consent or knowledge. Who would you be? Simple; you would be a “Creative Director/Vice President, with a U.S. salary of $40k to $400k” (www.princetonol.edu/groups/ad/jobs/adv.html )

A common fallacy in the U.S. is that the mind must be forced to learn. This is simply not true. “Learning happens all the time,” as Lewis J. Perelman pointed out in his book. The mind learns what it needs to, and when a need is created, it responds. The true key to success in school is knowing which facts to remember. Such facts may range from slightly useful to misleading.

There are several common stimuli for such “focused learning.” They include panic, fear and denial of needs. Sometimes, denial of wants and desires can be enough to motivate people to be focused and work on one project in sequence. The definition of “focus” is to “to bring into focus; to adjust the focus of (as the eye or a lens); to cause to be concentrated <focused their attention on the most urgent problems.>” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary on AOL.

Effective learning uses technologies like Autogenics, visualization, positive affirmations, association and subliminals. Forget going to class to know which 25 facts to memorize. Forget studying more than one hour per week for a 3 credit course. Instead, use a learning technology and learn 100, 200 or even 400 facts. Go to class to respectfully disagree with your instructor – but do so only when you can remember facts to reinforce your arguments!

As the Earth’s greatest fools, we try to compete with everything, including nature. We fight evolution using Biotechnology, where we modify living organisms to make entirely new ones, ones that may have required millions of years to mutate naturally. We fight each other, domestically via grades in school and competitive jobs and internationally via expensive tools that not only kill but pollute our environment for many generations in the future. We fight the environment, by polluting it until it is too toxic for our enemy to attempt to reclaim. It flows with the trend to suggest that we see everything as a fight, and as such, that we put our effort into being more efficient than others, regardless of the costs.

Work has consequences other than resulting in money for the participant. “There are also physical strains and benefits associated with work” (Slavin 175.) Every moment we work, we are contributing to our community and giving a segment of our life, as well as some risk of fatal injury. These risks are real, as are the emotional and physical costs associated with work.

Every moment that we live, we are emitting energy and influence on the entire Universe. We are not isolated, islands of characters. Instead, we are highly connected beings of highly complex order, where the choice of just one person can empower or devastate millions. Adolf Hitler had a vision, which was communicated, and thus resulted in the loss of about 7 million lives. Gandhi had a vision, and improved millions of lives. But that is not the end of it. The actions of these two men will be with us forever; literally for all of time.  Every moment someone writes about them, reads about them, or even thinks about them, the history yet to the written is modified and altered. 

Every one of us has great power in emitting influence. We don’t need to be famous to influence the Universe and, therefore, implicitly, all human civilizations from this moment until infinity. Because we don’t know the outcome over every action or thought we commit to, we therefore have limited ability to predict the future. When we can predict the future very well, we have difficulty manipulating the future.

When we focus our efforts, we are manipulating the future. To the disappointment of many, the future can be predicted accurately sometimes, but also inaccurately others times. By manipulating it, we are fighting nature. Here, the idea of prayer is noteworthy: “Leave things to God to work out and you will be much happier.”

The above quote about God is very true. It is a fact. Whether or not you believe in god, whether or not I believe in God, whether or not God prays to some god or has a favorite television show is totally irrelevant. The point is that manipulating anything involves the connection of intent with action.  Intent that is based on rejection of the natural systems that govern all things will cause its user serious harm. Action that is based on false ideas and motivations will lead to serious harm.

Serious harm means the needs, wants and desires are not being met, and may even be obstructed in some way or to some extent. Therefore, by focusing on one task at a time, we are doing serious harm to ourselves. We need to have interesting, meaningful work to be happy; happiness is not a need, but a result!

It is therefore clear that focus is not worthless, but harmful. Focus denies the innate human requirement to be doing motivating, exciting, pleasant work. But it should be noted that by focusing on tasks that are irrelevant to a goal is actually another form of focus, not an absence of it. In other words, for maximum learning and accomplishment, it is necessary to allow the mind to be unfocused, by allowing it to entertain a limited number of disconnected ideas and thoughts, but by being sure to know your goals, their rank in importance, their time-line, who can help share in their fruition and realization, and their relationship to all knowledge within your mind.

I am not saying working on one project in sequence is harmful if that is what feels comfortable and productive; but if you actively suppress your “unrelated” thoughts you will create stress. That stress will build up and lead to heath problems and diseases, like ulcers and chest infections.

Working on one project at a time reduces creativity and decreases risk. By focusing, we are actively “tuning out” other information which may appear irrelevant, but may actually be an occasional brilliant idea or theory that could advance humanity significantly. The post it note, invented by 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacture) was an “accident” of an unfocused idea. What happened was that a chemist was attempting to formulate a super glue, but it failed, and someone wrote on the small rectangular paper with the glue and stuck it to the wall. They were not focused and took the risk of appearing foolish for posting a paper with glue onto a wall.

Creativity and risk taking advances the public good for humanity. “Nevertheless, few innovations have come about without the willingness to chance losing fortune, reputation, or self-esteem” (Dacey and Lennon 235). By being focused, we tend to have lower productivity due to lowered intrinsic motivation. 

Morale is a result of creativity that boosts profits for all sectors. “Lower wages might impair worker morale and work effort, thereby reducing labor productivity (output per worker)” (McConnell and Brue 217.) When workers are paid more, logic follows that they will be more creative, while being less inspired to blind their mind’s eye from the so-called “unfocused” content.

Cognitive control, or focus, helps determine how much effort is necessary to achieve a certain task. “The automatic component of cognitive control has a crucial role in determining task difficulty, even when the required levels of control and analyzed knowledge are not altered” (Forrest-Pressley 215). Repetition, not narrow use of concentration, are of key importance here, because forced rejection of ideas is less efficient.  “High levels of automaticity permit the learner to display more skilled performance, even with no apparent increase in knowledge” (Forest-Pressley 215) shows that freedom to practice and explore creatively without rigid limits on “cognitive control” or “focus” can improve productivity.

Television is our main source of false information.

We are taught to value property over self. “The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically ‘grade everything’ and television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale” (Gatto 31-32.) What good is all the property in the world if it has no real meaning, other than that it makes you feel good to have “more” than someone else?

What is the true purpose of anything? To accumulate property or to gain from meaningful relationships?  Which is more important: To have lots of belongings to retreat from community with or to be an integrated part of community to which there is far less despair to retreat from?

• “We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones average, nor national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods, and the death of Lake Superior” (Slavin 177.) Quoting Robert Kennedy.
• Our nation has stopped formal training in logic, which may be at the demand of U.S. companies. “At one time, logic was considered one of the ‘seven liberal arts’ along with grammar, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astrometry” (Bennett 21.) A handle on logic could prove disastrous to the U.S. economy, because people would be buying things useful, instead of buying due to ideas that are not really their own.

By valuing the act of questioning of what makes us who we are, we are practicing introspection. Introspection is about looking inward at our perceptions and observations. “We can discover the nature of mind by a process internal mental events or contents and then by engaging directly or indirectly in some process of inner perception or inner observation” (Lyons 2.)

Self-actualization is a powerful means to help combat the destructive power of commercial adverting messages. “[autogenics] is one way you can move toward what Abraham Maslow, the father of Humanistic Psychology, called self-actualization, or what some call wholeness, what business psychologist Marsha Sinetar calls a ‘21st century mind’” (Ostrander 15.)

The postulate that creativity and focus are opposites is supported by the fact that creativity is essential the allowing of a free flow of thoughts without much analysis, while focus is selecting, by means of rejecting, all but one set of thoughts. Consider “I am talented, intelligent and creative” (Gawain 83,) suggesting Gawain values intelligence and creativity nearly equally in a short positive affirmation statement in her book.

Our culture is said to need materialistic, unthinking people to buy up all the worthless products that is stolen from future generations. As China Achebe said on page 143 of Things Fall Apart, of the white men, “They were mostly the kind of people that were called Efulefu, worthless, empty men. The imagery of an Efulefu in the language was a man who sold his machete and wore the sheath to battle” (Achebe 143.) “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats 1921) shows exactly that advertising fallacies can lead men and women to do harm without any real reason, other than that they were “told to kill” and “programmed to hate” by the efficient adverting and corporate authorities and investors in and of our uncaring, irresponsible economy.

Works Cited:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

• Bennett, Deborah J. Logic Made Easy: How to Know When Language Deceives You. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004.  
• Dacey, John S. and Kathleen H. Lennon. Understanding Creativity: Interplay of Biological, Psychological, and Social Factors. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Forest-Pressely, D. L., G. E. MacKinnon, and T. Gary Waller. Metacognition, Cognition, and Human Performance.  San Diego: Academic Press, Inc., 1985.

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gaboriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1992.  

Gawain, Shakti. Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What you Want in Your Life. San Rafael: New World Library, 1995.

Lyons, William. The Disappearance of Introspection. Boston: The Massachusetts Institute for Technology, 1986.  

McConnell, Campbell R. and Stanley L. Brue. Macroeconomics: Principles, Problems and Policies. Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2005. 15th Edition.

Ostrander, Sheila, Lynn Schroder and Nancy Ostrander. Superlearning 2000. New York: Bantam Doubleday books, 1994.

Perelman, Lewis J. Schools’ Out: Hyper-Learning, the New Technology, and the End of Education.

Slavin, Stephen L. Macroeconomics, 5th edition. Irwin McGraw Hill: Boston, 1999.

Stanford University, a web site. Www.rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” 1921.