Climber99,
I have an idea why I’ve chosen the first couple of pages of Vance Packards book as a copy and paste, leaving a link below to the complete pdf book sourced safely from Archive.org.
We are indeed governed by an algorythm echo chamber. The Hidden Persuaders - Vance Packard 1957 Chapter One - The Depth Approach
This book is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic new area of American life. It is about the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, "hidden." The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives.
Some of the manipulating being attempted is simply amusing. Some of it is disquieting, particularly when viewed as a portent of what may be ahead on a more intensive and effective scale for us all. Co-operative scientists have come along providentially to furnish some awesome tools.
The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry. Professional persuaders have seized upon it in their groping for more effective ways to sell us their wares -- whether products, ideas, attitudes, candidates, goals, or states of mind.
This depth approach to influencing our behavior is being used in many fields and is employing a variety of ingenious techniques. It is being used most extensively to affect our daily acts of consumption. The sale to us of billions of dollars' worth of United States products is being significantly affected, if not revolutionized, by this approach, which is still only barely out of its infancy. Two thirds of America's hundred largest advertisers have geared campaigns to this depth approach by using strategies inspired by what marketers call "motivation analysis."
Meanwhile, many of the nation's leading public-relations experts have been indoctrinating themselves in the lore of psychiatry and the social sciences in order to increase their skill at "engineering" our consent to their propositions. Fund raisers are turning to the depth approach to wring more money from us. A considerable and growing number of our industrial concerns (including some of the largest) are seeking to sift and mold the behavior of their personnel -- particularly their own executives -- by using psychiatric and psychological techniques. Finally, this depth approach is showing up nationally in the professional politicians' intensive use of symbol manipulation and reiteration on the voter, who more and more is treated like Pavlov's conditioned dog.
The efforts of the persuaders to probe our everyday habits for hidden meanings are often interesting purely for the flashes of revelation they offer us of ourselves. We are frequently revealed, in their findings, as comical actors in a genial if twitchy Thurberian world. The findings of the depth probers provide startling explanations for many of our daily habits and perversities. It seems that our subconscious can be pretty wild and unruly.
What the probers are looking for, of course, are the whys of our behavior, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favor. This has led them to probe why we are afraid of banks; why we love those big fat cars; why we really buy homes; why men smoke cigars; why the kind of car we draw reveals the brand of gasoline we will buy; why housewives typically fall into a hypnoidal trance when they get into a supermarket; why men are drawn into auto showrooms by convertibles but end up buying sedans; why junior loves cereal that pops, snaps, and crackles.
We move from the genial world of James Thurber into the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother, however, as we explore some of the extreme attempts at probing and manipulating now going on.
Certain of the probers, for example, are systematically feeling out our hidden weaknesses and frailties in the hope that they can more efficiently influence our behavior. At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on. A Chicago advertising agency has been studying the housewife's menstrual cycle and its psychological concomitants in order to find the appeals that will be more effective in selling her certain food products.
Seemingly, in the probing and manipulating nothing is immune or sacred. The same Chicago ad agency has used psychiatric probing techniques on little girls. Public-relations experts are advising churchmen how they can become more effective manipulators of their congregations. In some cases these persuaders even choose our friends for us, as at a large "community of tomorrow" in Florida. Friends are furnished along with the linen by the management in offering the homes for sale. Everything comes in one big, glossy package. Somber examples of the new persuaders in action are appearing not only in merchandising but in politics and industrial relations. The national chairman of a political party indicated his merchandising approach to the election of 1956 by talking of his candidates as products to sell. In many industrial concerns now the administrative personnel are psycho-tested, and their futures all charted, by trained outside experts. And then there is the trade school in California that boasts to employers that it socially engineers its graduates so that they are, to use the phrase of an admiring trade journal, "custom-built men" guaranteed to have the right attitudes from the employer's standpoint.
Where would we be without fossil fuels and credit? Our use of both is completely unsustainable, and we do a poor job of accounting for the consequences and total costs (especially non-monetary costs related to fossil fuel use). We can do that for a while and appear to be far wealthier than we really are, but it can’t go on indefinitely.
I for one, welcome mk1 comments. Having someone challenge ones belief systems is good for you. It helps you to refine your own arguments. The main thing is to remain civil at all times and for it not to become personal. I would also recommend peakresilience regulars to visit other sites that promote other world views and make challenging comments on them. I worry that society is becoming too fragmented in which people just live inside their own echo chamber in cyberspace.
While I agree with you in principle, it's too broad of a statement you've made for me to agree entirely.
For example, there are people who comprise the 'flat earth society' and they invest considerable effort in attempting to convince others of their belief that the earth is actually flat, not spherical.
I think there is indeed some benefit to wrestling with their arguments if only to hone your own. But after you've done that once, perhaps in the 5th grade, there's nothing to be gained intellectually from the debate, except to learn better techniques for managing one's urge to roll eyes and to learn how to remain pleasant no matter what.
That is, not all arguments are worth our efforts. Some have already been so thoroughly dispensed that there's too little to gain from using one's immensely valuable time revisiting.
Further, even if someone has an interesting counter-argument that might open my mind, if that person is utterly inflexible in their views -that is their mind is closed - then I also have to decide if that one-way street is worth my time. It might be if the counter argument really opens up my thinking.
But if someone is offering only opinions, no data, and is unwilling to be receptive, or to address the points raised, then usually I find it's not worth anybody's time.
So I don't generally spend any time going to other sites and leaving comments because, generally speaking, the quality of the engagement is too low for me to justify it.
On the other side, I will say that when I heard Jonah Goldberg of the National Review speak (right after me a the New Orleans Investment Conference) I came away with two distinct thoughts; (1) I did not agree with many of his positions (2) I admired him enormously.
He was open, armed with facts, and strung his thoughts together in a very powerful and thoughtful way. And he did sway my opinion in several areas, and if he and I were to sit down and really have at go at it, I bet he would expand my thinking and opinions even more.
If someone has taken the time to assemble their thoughts, test them out, and refine them, then I'm in!
But if someone is mainly lazy in their approaches, hasn't done the research, and is more or less just winging it from a base of a few sloppy personal observations then it's just not worth my time.
Make sense?
I’ve personally known about peak oil since around 2002. I remember being slightly worried about it then. My worries about the economy started to strengthen in 2005, but it took until August 2007 until I sold all my assets (stocks etc.) due to fears of an impending collapse. That was a pretty good bet. I remember being very concerned around 2008-2010 of a further dip down, but was again pretty fully invested during those years. Then in 2013 I thought “this is it”, and have done nothing but accumulated cash since then. What has astonished me over the years is that I’ve looked at this for 15 years now (well, at least 12 years) and something truly cataclysmic hasn’t occurred. Yes, we had a bad recession in 2008, but that never felt like the event I was expecting.
I’ve since run - and I continue to run - a lot of scenarios in my head and on paper and the best case I can come up with is a liquid fuel crisis “any day now” that is going to shrink the global economy by a minimum of 20%. This crisis will for certain be accompanied by reduction in travel and cut down the actual value of entitlements (pensions, social security etc.) by at least 50%. In this “best case scenario” we would eventually carry through initially with the help of less wasted electricity and in the longer run through the use of thorium reactors etc., but it would be a very painful adjustment process that would definitely take decades; in other words similar to the US great depression, except worse.
My worst case scenario is not really worth discussing, since even the though of it truly depresses me and it makes me feel clinically insane - similar to someone who’s met one of the Great Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft’s novels. But the basics of it would be that the economy would disintegrate into hunter-gatherer levels in an uncertain/lengthy timeframe due to lack of energy and environmental decay through species loss/climate change that would make farming too unpredictable of an undertaking. Herding animals might still work under this scenario.
What I think will actually happen is a return to a society ca. late-1800s/early-1900s, but with more scientific knowledge and less practical understanding. For example, we would know germ theory and the importance of sanitation, we would also be well-aware of how genetics work and hence breading desired characteristics etc. would be a bit easier. Unfortunately most things we understand we could no-longer do due to the lack of energy.
Regardless of what unfolds the most obvious thing to me is that it’ll all start - or be closely connected to - the liquid fuel crisis. On some level, in my case, this 15 year (or so) wait is almost like waiting being hit in the stomach with a baseball bat: it’s a very, very bad - possibly fatal - experience, but you just want it over with so you can, hopefully, carry on with your life. Peakprosperity.com is by far the only site I read, and most other places I visit are full of techno optimism, where the balanced views are at best of the John Mauldin/Doug Casey style with the author in question seeing problems on the near horizon, but believes that humanity will ultimately overcome, conquer the galaxy and boldly go where… you know the deal. One thing I can admit, even if I hate to, is that thus far I’ve (and dare I say, “we”) have been horribly, horribly, wrong. Nothing really bad has thus far happened. In my case the wait has actually been so long now that I’ve started to doubt my analytical abilities, my education (formal and informal), intelligence, and even personal sanity. The only thing I’m still hanging on is that all this economic stimuli has only brought demand forward, meaning that all the spending (read: mostly malinvestments) we’re doing now is money spent we simply can’t spend in the 2020s or even 2030s because we’ve squandered the available energy and natural resources by electing to build strip malls that nobody visits and highrises nobody lives in rather than build a railway and canal infrastructure that could somewhat mitigate the coming liquid fuel crisis. Hence the baseball bat in the abdomen has transformed into a morningstar in the abdomen: a metallic spiky club that I can guarantee is a lot more painful and a lot more fatal than what we could have gotten away with if we’ve chosen the original baseball bat 15 years ago.
The waiting is the hardest part, at least until the next phase of this story manifests in earnest (and I think it is manifesting, almost unperceptively, at the edges). When that happens, we may look back and wish we were still waiting.
Enjoy the bounty while you have it, and set aside as much as possible for the future we know must come. Your mental facilities and intellect haven’t failed you. You just underestimated how long the game could be drawn out, which many of us also have done. But the math is the math. As Daniel Quinn might quip, “the civilizational contraption we have built appears to be flying just fine right up to the point where it meets the ground at -9.81 m/s^2 * time.” It doesn’t matter how hard we pedal, and boy are the central banks pedaling (or should I say peddling?) fast!
I don’t believe in the coming crash because Chris or Adam told me so, nor because anyone else on this site told me so for that matter. I believe it is coming because I took the data and assertions made here, verified them with my own research (spent a good year trying to punch holes in the Crash Course), thought things through with my own mind, and concluded the data supported the conclusion that the system will fail, and relatively soon. In 20 or so years, the world will look very different indeed. I don’t doubt that because it isn’t a “belief system,” but because the data shows it must be true. Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, and the data shows we are hitting walls right now.
We’ve only come this far in technological development because we were lucky once.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis the common humanity and wisdom of Kennedy and Kruscheuve saved us from incineration. We may not be lucky again. Call it wealth, awareness, or humanity.
And the UFOs may not be even bothered to disarm our nuclear weapons. We’re slow learners of things that matter most!
I read the original post and since then have taken a closer look. Netflix is one humdinger. Even their owners say the P/E ratio is high and their banking on that to cover their recent bond sales. Only trouble is, how much of a panic does it take for their stock price to crumble to next to nothing leaving bond holders exposed.
There is something I read concerning the Fed. The Fed intends to get out of the MBS business beginning this year. At present they account for about 30%+ of the purchases. FannieMae complained about not having enough money back in December. They had to go ‘begging’ as it was said for a few billion.
Where will the buyers come from to make up for the Fed being out of the game? Interest rates are currently too low to attract the necessary level of investment unless of course something happens. That something might be two fold.
One, interest rates will be increased which is no surprise except it won’t be as much as we think. Second, the stock market will get some air let out of it. It won’t be a full on ten thousand point overnight bubble burst. It will be calculated and gradual to facilitate the movement of investors from stocks to bonds.
Bonds are more important in the grand scheme of things. Stocks are generally speculative post IPO. They usually produce no actual benefit to the company unless it’s to support borrowing as was the case with Netflix. Bonds on the other hand do more. They’re actual loans. In this case the Fed purchases are to support home buyers which is more important to them than stock speculators.
The interest rates can’t be increased too much because that will make the FED’s current assets less valuable plus cause problems in the secondary bond market. It also makes government borrowing more difficult. For those reasons the primary motivator will be risk aversion from stocks that push the investor to bonds. The Fed gets out of the bond market replaced by slightly beaten up stock traders. It won’t be super dramatic and will appear almost natural. Point is, the days of a stock market bubble are almost over.
Having just finished " The Devil’s Chessboard " I’d like to say it’s essential and hair - raising reading about how TPTB ( CIA ) operated as background to Kennedy’s assassination and how the deep state still operates. Compelling. Once you get over the slow start.
Snydeman wrote ‘The waiting is the hardest part, at least until the next phase of this story manifests in earnest (and I think it ismanifesting, almost unperceptively, at the edges). When that happens, we may look back and wish we were still waiting.’
I agree this is tremendously frustrating. Part of my preparation strategy is to purchase online items I see future value in. If you watch the auctions and don’t get caught up in having to win there are lots of real bargains out there. Think good quality and low tech
Some of the things I’ve bought include-
garden tools and hand tools
a grain grinding mill
a corn sheller
several scythes
manual juicers
mountain bike and trailor
a solar cooker
lots of preserving / canning jars ( new lids bought separately)
storage shelves
air tight plastic buckets and containers…