Where does one even begin with a critique of this commercial?
—The Hollywood, stylized/hip, quick-cut interview technique; the overly Self-conscious utilization of Marketing Buzz-words; the seemingly un-Self-conscious exploitation of high philosophic concepts; or perhaps just the all around insulting, simple-mindedness to its approach to marketing its product.
Most of these are pretty much self-explanatory (and I have already covered them before: Quick-cuts, Buzz-words, Simple-mindedness) and I think I will just limit myself to exploring the existential fire this company is playing with in its pseudo-philosophic—and, not to mention, highly Ego-flattering—lexicon for this Marketing Campaign.
Let’ start with the first—and also the most egregious—instance in this commercial: “We’re not just machines that pump stuff out.” Of course our notion of the so-called “Dignity of Man” automatically makes us think of this as a no brainer—and also our commonsense, subjective experience of everyday life—but, in reality (in the work of our most highly educated Physicists and Biologists), this still remains a highly contentious scientific and philosophic conundrum. (Great article about it here) Our human bodies are made of the same substance as every other “body” in the natural world, and so much of their function is on an unconscious level that it is quite problematic to so boldly assert that “we’re not just machines.”
After Newton’s new brand of Science and Physics asserted that the world was just one big deterministic machine, all of philosophy had to follow suit. Our bodies became just another “body in motion” that wished to preserve that motion, i.e. Self-Preservation—the foundation of Modern Political Philosophy. This made the possibility of true “Freedom” quite problematic, despite Philosophy at the same time also declaring that we are all “Free and Equal.”
This lead Rousseau to assert that our Freedom can only be based on a defiance of our Nature, or a perfection of cultivated Virtue through Art and Education (or to be creative; to make something out of nothing; to be The Creator). Only when we rebel against our Animal/Deterministic Nature—Self-Interest, Self-Preservation—do we truly commit a “Free” action, which, for him, has its highest expression in a life-long, freely committed Marriage. Although Nature directs Man to Woman in the act of procreation and perpetuation of the species, there is—again, for him—no natural basis for this “Relationship.” But this initial act of Freedom sets the stage for the possibility of true Moral Choice and Human Dignity because it is an action in defiance of the Deterministic World-Machine.
These ideas were then taken up by Immanuel Kant, in his body of works known as the Three Critiques. In them, he tried to set limits to the possibility of Reason to fully penetrate the Human Condition, and created a new realm higher than Science that could account for Man’s Freedom, or Autonomy—his capacity for Free, Moral Choice, and its accompanying Dignity. But this did not truly solve the problem, as much as just place it on the shelf—it simply assumed it exists and then moved on to easier solvable dilemmas.
There is a lot more to this history that followed Kant’s “solution”—involving the Unconscious, and all kinds of other highly problematic elements—but I will just leave it there for now and move on to the next set of thorny philosophic ideas alluded to in this commercial.
At the end, the gentleman says, “It’s about a sense of community. It’s about a sense of being part of something greater than one-Self”—which is perhaps the issue for Modern Man.
If we are all Individuals, whose main motivating factors are Self-Interest and Self-Preservation, how do you make us truly care for an-Other? Now that all the old bonds—Country, Religion and Family—had been shown to be only false convention and myth by the Enlightenment, how do we now create any sort of binding, non-conditional relationship between any two separate, “free” Individuals? How can there be a Common Good if everyone is, first and fore-most, concerned with their own Private Good?
Pretty much ever since this idea was postulated, there has been a backlash against it. Our Founding Fathers weren’t nearly as doctrinaire as the European Enlightenment, and did not work nearly as hard at dispelling the “prejudices” (opinions) of the People, and left much of the old social apparatus in tact—which is what the “Real Americans” still believe in. But, for all us Fake Americans, this social network has been on a steady decline for at least the last 50 years or so and has been documented by Political Scientists like Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Yet, we still yearn for some sort of connection—for a “Human Network” and “the power of collaboration.”
And Marketers are well aware of that. The idea that shared Consumer Tastes can be equated with “Community” is a highly pervasive one in the industry and Brands that successfully pull this off are constantly used as Case Studies to be emulated. But there is a big difference between Communities that connect us and bind us to a larger vision of society and our role as citizens in it, and ones based on the exploitation of desire in order to maximize profit.
Capitalizing on this superficial, mutual fandom may be an extremely useful technique to sell products, but there is a very deep reason that these techniques are so successful: it helps to fill a hole in our soul that has been created by a false vision of Man by Modern Philosophy. The Commercial Persuasion Industry plays a very big role in the Material success and comfort that we are able to enjoy, but, if this is to be our only metric for quality of life in America, then all we are ever going to have here is the “Pursuit of Happiness,” and never its attainment.
For more on the exploitation by Marketers of the “Tension of Modernity”—the need to feel like an Individual, but also to be part of something greater than one-Self—check out the very excellent book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker.
