Rêvons d'un monde meilleur...
* So far we have looked at what advertising is, why it exists, the forms it takes - from paper to screen - where it is practised (principally , capitalist economies, i.e. most) and when it began (3000 B.C.)
* What interests us most however (I am employing, by affinity, the Victorian form "we", you will have noticed), is the conundrum involving Man's need to communicate versus the capitalist tendency - via the advertising industry - to forsake ethical principles for financial gain
* To better follow our logic, let us consider some simple, explicit conclusions which require writing down. We are assuming of course, that as a species, Man does have the right to exist and to survive, a point that the Deep Ecology movement (see later) might contest. These are :
- Conclusion 1 : primitive, gregarious Man needed to communicate with other members of his species. He tended to congregate in groups for protection, procreation, exchange...
- Conclusion 2 : Man is constantly creative. With his intelligence and ideas, he will attempt to survive, whatever the political regime, whatever the meteorological or economic climate
- Conclusion 3: Man as a species is also, as you may have noticed, chronically destructive. Destructive of himself, of others, and, more to the point today, of his environment
- Conclusion 4 : after a long historical process, most of the planet in 2009 lives in a market economy, under what Karl Marx denounced as capitalism. Capitalism places profit, not Man, at the centre of the the universe
- Conclusion 5 : modern capitalism, like a coin, has a creative side and a destructive side, corresponding to Man's nature
- Conclusion 6 : we live (until further notice), in a world of finite natural resources
- Conclusion 7 : global capitalism, in its scope and appetite, is objectively destructive of these finite natural resources (forests, oil, coal...), dependent as it is on growth to fuel what has become the 'consumer society' (1920s-?), soon to engulf India and China
- Conclusion 8 : the engine of growth in 'developed' consumer societies is the advertising/public relations industry, disseminated via a wide variety of media, events and spin-offs
- Conclusion 9 : like the financial industry, if left unfettered in its operations (CL, Enron, Lehmann, Madoff ...), the advertising industry requires strict regulation to prevent exploitation of the humble, the weak and the ingenuous Sciences-Po student...
- Conclusion 10 : the law of the jungle will not reign.
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