Marketing misery

Addiction, the media tell us, is a Bad Thing. It causes suffering. And are we surprised when the media then proceed to offer us advice about how to alleviate that suffering? And are we all that surprised when the advice is highly questionable?

From a merchandising point of view, the best advice is what would normally be considered bad advice – that is, advice that doesn't work. That way the suckers – sufferers, I mean – having failed to solve their problems, keep coming back for more "help."

Obesity provides a classic example. The media are chock full of advertisements for high-fat food. If you are persuaded by those advertisements to try the food, you become fat, too. Once you're fat, you can then turn to other parts of the media which provide advice about how to lose weight. The chief characteristic of all the advice about how to lose weight is that it doesn't work. So you stay fat and keep scanning the paper and the television for any new advice about how to lose weight. The media win every which way from Christmas. And you stay fat.

Addiction is a fairly simple phenomenon to understand. Physical addiction consists of taking chemicals which make you feel good when you take them and bad when you stop taking them. The classic example is the heroin addict, whose withdrawal symptoms are so severe that they weigh very heavily in the decision about whether or not to take more heroin. Even your common garden-variety alcoholic experiences withdrawal, however, including a marked bodily craving for the addictive drug.

Over the last forty years some forms of compulsive behaviour which are not due to ingestion of chemicals have also been classified as so-called psychological addictions (since physical addictions affect behaviour they are also consequently psychological, but the public mind is stuck with a definition of psychology which hasn't been professionally appropriate since about 1920). Some examples are gambling addiction or sex addiction. The psychological addictions are indeed psychological, though – they are plain and simple habits due to plain and simple learning phenomena.

Let's consider gambling addiction. Anyone familiar with long-term gamblers knows that, regardless of their success or the responsibility of their betting habits, they all made many successful bets when they started out. When a pigeon in a Skinner box pecks a key (an undertaking remarkably similar to playing a slot machine), its initial pecks are usually frequently followed by presentation of food. It starts to peck more rapidly, and food can then be presented less frequently. You can eventually get a pigeon to work like mad for less food than it needs to survive. Similarly, a video lottery player can be trained to respond so frequently that he or she ends up on welfare.

An interesting aspect of supposed psychological addictions is that they are only considered addictions if they create personal problems. A gambler who makes money is simply a successful gambler, while a sex addict whose life is uncomplicated by his addiction is a rock musician.

Dealing with addictions should be straightforward. The addict to chemical substances can be dried out till the withdrawal symptoms are gone and then be provided with protections against resumption of the habit (Antabuse, for example, or behavioural analysis regimes). With psychological addictions you mainly need the behavioural analysis part – they're learning phenomena and can be dealt with as learning phenomena – and you can also do things like ban video lottery terminals, slot machines, and other forms of gambling whose resemblance to Skinner boxes is too close for comfort.

But these measures are not what you find promoted in the media. No, what television and the press tell you is either

• that addiction is a disease, or
  
• that you're an addict because you have an addictive personality.

The personality angle is pretty brazen. Supposedly all of us who quit smoking changed personalities. There is, anyway, little evidence that such a thing as personality exists, and more that it doesn't. I gave up drinking 26 years ago and to this day I still don't have a personality.

The conception of addiction as a disease implicitly denies the obvious facts of addiction. If physical addiction were simply a disease, surviving the throes of withdrawal should be sufficient to end the addiction. You don't find people who've had pneumonia rushing out to catch it again, but you find plenty of addicts who've been dried out and then put back on the street to fend for themselves heading straight for the nearest dealer. The so-called psychological addictions are particularly difficult to consider diseases. They have no physical symptoms apart from the occasional rush of adrenaline. If you "free" a psychological addict from those symptoms, he or she will just go back out and try to become a slave to them again.

The ideas of the addictive personality and of addiction as a disease have one big advantage, however – they can be used to make people feel inadequate, which makes them look for ways to become adequate, which means they have become a market you can sell to.


The most successful promoters of this angle these days are Oprah Winfrey and her close comrade in arms Dr. Phil McGraw (who promotes the disease angle). Oprah wants women to have high self-esteem, but much of her old show consistrd of showing women how inadequate they were – too fat, too messy, and on and on. She's got 'em whipsawed. She makes women feel so good about their prospects, but so lousy about the current state of their lives. You just have to buy her and Dr. Phil's guides to turning yourself into a worthwhile person.

And if those don't work (and if you've consulted our articles about Dr. Phil, you know why they're not likely to), you turn to another guru. There is a peculiar communism among the purveyors of self-help advice. Each turns consumers into psychologically needy sponges, and when they're done with them they let other practitioners in the field have a squeeze. Once you've learned that you're inadequate, you're going to find a lot of people ready to keep you feeling that way, for a price.

The only problem is that addicts who follow the media's advice rather than undertaking courses of treatment which have been shown to work will continue to be addicts, and we know that the toll of addiction on society is enormous. On the other hand, the purveyors of non-help to addicts tend to get enormously wealthy from it (Oprah now has a larger gross domestic product than Luxembourg), so I suppose it all evens out in the end. They profit and we, non-addicts and addicts alike, suffer. Which is fair, because we're the inadequate ones.

Marketing Misery © 2005, John FitzGerald

Hot, Cool, and Hitchens

This piece was written back in 1999. It's being reproduced here not to speak ill of the dead (something its subject, quite rightly, had no qualms about doing if the ill was bad enough), but to demur from its subject's recent elevation to sainthood. On the whole he made a positive contribution to the degenerate public discourse of our day by actually reasoning about important issues. But, as he argued himself, not even Mother Teresa is a saint.

When he appears on television Christopher Hitchens is supremely out of place. He is what McLuhan would call a hot figure. He exudes information. His hair is usually tousled, his clothes are often askew, and he has an opinion about everything. In other words, he ain't your common everyday well-groomed, grinning, platitudinous television "personality." Worst of all he is linear. When he opens his mouth what comes out is not a sound bite but an argument.

Television isn't good at communicating large amounts of information in linear fashion. Books are, though, and so we here in the literary department expected a better performance from Mr. Hitchens in his most recent book, No One Left to Lie To (Verso, 1999, 113 pp.).

Although his book is an attack on President Clinton we were not interested in it for partisan reasons. For one thing, we're not Americans, and since we cannot vote in American elections our opinions of American political leaders aren't even important to us. And as you will see, we found that we were neutral on the issues Mr. Hitchens raises. Anyway, what we were interested in was some effective communication, and what this review will discuss is Hitchens' success in communicating in a manner appropriate to his medium.

Mr. Hitchens can present linear analysis effectively in writing. We've read articles where he's done just that. Unfortunately, No One Left to Lie To is not an effective linear presentation.

Linear arguments are evaluated at each of their steps. Mr. Hitchens starts missing steps early on. First, he makes unsubstantiated accusations. Please note that we are not complaining about the specific accusations or arguing that Mr. Hitchens is necessarily mistaken. We are pointing out only that he doesn't justify his accusations. For example, Mr. Hitchens accuses Mr. Clinton of rape, without offering any reason to believe the accusation. He accuses Mr. Clinton of intimidating Kathleen Willey, but the only "evidence" he offers is an unsupported allegation which the reader has no way of verifying. These allegations are padded out with some implications of guilt by association.

Then the errors of fact start. The most serious involve matters of fact which Mr. Hitchens should know but gets wrong. Mr. Hitchens is a journalist. If he isn't an expert in the history of racial integration in the United States then he knows where to find out about it. Nevertheless, he dismisses Mr. Clinton's recollections of debating racial segregation as a young person by implying that racial integration was an accomplished and accepted fact in the United States by 1955! You do not need to be a historian to know, though, that segregation in public places was abolished only by the Civil Rights Act of  1964, the year in which Mr. Clinton turned 18, or that discrimination in housing was abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the year in which Mr. Clinton turned 22, and that if Mr. Clinton was not debating integration in those years, he was probably the only young person in America who wasn't.

Mr. Hitchens is probably not being disingenuous here. Publishing things he and everyone else know to be wrong is not in his interest. He just doesn't know what he's talking about, and he should. Mr. Hitchens can't even do simple arithmetic, or at least he can't be bothered to check his own arithmetic. On page 33 he describes Mr. Clinton taking a phone call that lasted from 12:42 pm to 1:04 pm. On the next page Mr. Hitchens says that Mr. Clinton talked on the phone during that call for at least half an hour. On page 36, he quotes a 1997 speech by President Clinton at a celebration of the anniversary of Jackie Robinson's entry into major league baseball. He notes that Mr. Robinson retired in 1956, when Mr. Clinton was nine (he turned ten in August, 1956). Mr. Hitchens then makes the astonishing claim that Mr. Robinson entered the major leagues when Mr. Clinton was six! Mr. Clinton was of course less than a year old at the time, as Mr. Hitchens' own exposition of the facts makes clear (unless, of course, he thought they were celebrating the forty-third anniversary of the integration of baseball in 1997).

By the time he is a third of the way through his slim volume, Mr. Hitchens seemed to have made his credibility disappear as quickly as Doug Henning used to get rid of that elephant. If the guy can't even subtract 1946 from 1947 and get the right answer, he's scarcely going to impress you with his analytical ability, right? If he's unaware of important events in recent history, he's scarcely going to impress you with either his mastery of his discipline or his concern for accuracy, right?

Well, wrong. The literary department had a look at some other reviews and found that they praised Hitchens if the reviewer didn't like President Clinton and attacked Hitchens (one even talks about a supposed drinking problem) if the reviewer liked President Clinton. The veracity of Hitchens' accusations and analyses was of little if any importance.

The simple explanation would be that these other reviewers didn't care about the facts, and that's likely. Disregard for the facts is a popular habit these days. To many people hatred of or admiration for President Clinton seem to offer psychological benefits, and they're not going to let the facts get in the way of those benefits. The literary department's concern for linearity and fact persuaded us that we must be neutral, and that Mr. Hitchens' book would be unpersuasive to anyone who does not already agree with him when they open it for the first time.

Even the best argued parts of the remainder of the book (and there are some, notably the section on welfare reform which appeared recently in the National Post) are rendered unpersuasive by his earlier demonstration of his disregard for accuracy. We found ourselves, while reading Mr. Hitchens' section about Lani Guinier, saying to myself "That's an interesting fact – well, if it's a fact."

In McLuhan's terms, Mr. Hitchens succeeds in converting a hot document into a cool one. The linearity of his argument is destroyed by his errors and vagueness, and instead of analyzing his argument logically his reader starts to try, as one does with cool media, to interpret Mr. Hitchens. If you like his opinions, you decide he's the greatest figure to grace the world of letters since Johnson. If you don't like him, you mention, as one review did, that he doesn't conceal his chest hair well enough to satisfy the reviewer.

As for us neutrals, we asked ourselves why Hitchens wrote the book. The most likely explanation seemed to be that he was simply trying to justify himself in his falling-out with Sidney Blumenthal. The most reasonable and linear conclusion, though, is that we just don't know why he wrote it. However, because Mr. Hitchens has produced a cool document rather than a hot one we keep on trying to figure out why he wrote it. Hey – maybe he's a narcissist! Maybe he owes someone a favour! Maybe he's as intellectually sloppy as he is sartorially sloppy! Maybe....

Because Hitchens ended up with a cool presentation, all the reviews (including this one) focus on him to an unusual degree, a phenomenon which follows from the analysis presented here. Mr. Hitchens' book is as much about him as it is about President Clinton. All Mr. Hitchens communicates, despite the parts of the book in which he actually argues effectively, is that he doesn't like President Clinton. He pleases those who don't like President Clinton, displeases those who do, and fails to convert anyone to his way of thinking. He might as well just have aimed at his foot.

Hot, Cool, and Hitchens © John FitzGerald, 1999

The passion for passion

We are the most passionate generation ever. People are constantly declaring their passions for pretty well everything under the sun. The first five pages of a Google search for the phrase "is my passion" found the following listed as passions:

• collecting
  
• football
  
• architecture
  
• photography
  
• quilting
  
• running
  
• hockey
  
• wireless technology, and...
  
• taxidermy!

Come to think of it I might not mind joining that quilting group. Sorry. If you're going to take these statements seriously, you really have to have no sense of humour. Like the fellow who describes himself as a "passionate internet guru". Never go alone to consultations with him, eh?

When I think of passion, I think of an intense desire. Someone with an intense desire for wireless tachnology is just sick. You may object, of course, that passion can be used to mean enthusiasm. But why not describe it as enthusiasm, then? That's the more accurate word.

The answer is that when you describe something as a passion you make it sound much more important than a mere enthusiasm, even if an enthusiasm is all it is. And these days enthusiasm is pretty well all it ever is. The days of intense feeling are over. People with real passions – your more ardent Muslims, say – scare the living daylights out of us.

Wentworth Sutton pointed out in an article at our old site that this generation has had to adapt to a life of excruciating boredom:

Why are we so keen on being bored? For the obvious reason that life has become so boring that we have to work on our ability to tolerate it. The conservative values of security and husbanding one's wealth which have been so skilfully promoted over the last twenty years or so discourage people from doing anything interesting. Go on a trip? No, better to put the money into a retirement account. Better to put it into a rental property. Better to put it into mutual funds (oh, sorry – that advice is under review).

Declaring your enthusiasm for quilting to be a passion makes it seem as if you're leading an exciting and rewarding life, rather than haunting craft shops a little more frequently than is good for you.

If you're a stockbroker who devotes every spare moment you can get — once you've fulfilled your duties to family, friends, and employer — to painting, then you have a hobby. If you're a stockbroker who loves painting so much that you abandon your wife and children and eventually move to Tahiti because you think you can develop a more authentic style of painting there, then you have a passion. People will still remember your name over a century after you die, too.

On passion © 2008, John FitzGerald

New breakthrough in TV programming!

Television is now obsolete technology, and its audience continues to shrink. At the same time, though, the number of broadcast and cable channels is increasing faster than the number of television shows produced, so there is more competition for the programs which are being produced. Television executives started looking for programs that were cheap to produce in an attempt to keep prices down.

At first the cheapest programs TV could find were so-called reality shows. These had the advantage that you didn’t have to pay the contestants. However, soon TV producers stumbled on a type of show where the performers paid to take part – the poker show. The prize money on these shows came from the entrance fees, and the participants paid their own travel and hotel bills. NBC has even been able to coax big-name poker players to cough up $20,000 apiece to play on Poker after Dark.

And – the shows were popular! Internet poker is wildly popular, and people who play internet poker like to watch shows that might help them play better.

But television was becoming one-dimensional. Before the 2011-12 season the executives of all major television operations sat down and decided what to do to help restore a wider range of programming for fall of 2011. After careful consideration they decided to – show more poker! Here are the exciting new shows you will be following eagerly this fall:

• CBC Poker Night: The CBC celebrates the diversity of poker throughout Canada by running a copy of a foreign poker show.
  
• CTV Poker Night: CTV celebrates the entrepreneurial flair of Canadian poker players by running a copy of a foreign poker show.
  
• Antiques Pokershow (Newsworld) : “In perfect condition your hand would take the entire pot, but with it in this condition I’d fold immediately.”
  
• Intelligently Designed Poker (Crossroads TV): This show demonstrates that poker must be the product of superhuman design, since the individual hands occur so infrequently in nature that they never could have combined by any natural process to form a new species of game.
  
• Gangsta Hold ‘Em (MTV): At press time the future of this show depended on whether the participants would make bail for the unfortunate incident during the first taping.
  
• Poker is America (PBS): Ken Burns’ latest documentary shows how poker was formed by America and America was formed by poker. Fifty-two cards of different colours and motifs overcome their differences to work together to create effective game-winning hands, and the big money goes to the guys who own the tables.
  
• NDP Poker Night (CPAC): The New Democratic Party introduces a new form of hold ‘em in which most of the pot goes to the winner and the remainder to the remaining players in proportion to the amounts of money they put in the pot. The NDP still loses.
  
• Hold ‘Em Québécois (TVA): Bets may be made in either French or English, but the English bets must be smaller than the French ones.
  
• Ontario Hold ‘Em (TVO): Players get extra chips for replacing cards in their hands with energy-efficient light bulbs. Steve Paikin hosts.
  
• Alberta Hold ‘Em (pay channel) : Whatever the players do, their stacks just keep getting bigger.
  
• People’s Republic of North Korea Resolute Anti-Imperialist Hold ‘Em (Omni): Players compete for the right to support the will of the people of the People’s Republic of North Korea by donating the grand prize (an egg) to the state and resolutely pledging to redouble their commitment to the thought of Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il.
  
• People’s Republic of China Hold ‘Em (Bloomberg): This series has been cancelled following the recall of the decks of cards because of lead contamination.

New Breakthrough in TV programming © John FitzGerald, 2007, 2011

Sex lives of the great philosophers

That Karl Popper – oh, he was a lively one, he was! "Whoops! – that was an unintended consequence," he'd say, and oh, how we'd laugh!

I said to that Gilbert Ryle once, I did, "There's no doubt about what's on your mind, is there, dear?" and he got the funniest look on his face, he did. He always paid me extra after that, too.

That Bertrand Russell, he'd had most of the women in Cambridge and Oxford. Well, you know that, you've read his autobiography, haven't you? And probably more than once. Still, "Mavis," he'd say to me, he would, he'd say "Mavis, it wouldn't be St. Swithin's Day without I give you a right doing over." Which he did. Do me over, I mean, every St. Swithin's Day.

And don't believe everything you read about that John Stuart Mill. Qualitative happiness, my eye. All he wanted was quantity, dearie, if you get my drift. Me and the other girls, we used to have to work shifts to keep him happy, we did.

Now that Artie Schopenhauer, once he had the idea he had the will, you can believe me. He brought that Hegel along once but I wouldn't want to tell you some of the things he wanted to do, no I wouldn't.

That Kierkegaard was a rum one. He never really did anything. He'd just sit and talk to me in Danish. He said it was English, but it sounded like Danish to me. His little joke, I reckon. As I say, he was a rum one, he was.

Oh, but that René Descartes! He had them French ways about him. He was ever so suave and debonair. Cogito ergo sum, he'd say and I'd say Futuo ergo pecuniam habeo. Oh, how we'd laugh!

That William of Occam was a handful, I can tell you. He was what you call a submissive. I'd flog him and flog him until finally he'd gasp and say "I have avoided multiplying entities," and then he'd leave as quiet and polite as you please.

My friend Gladys didn't want me to have anything to do with that Averroes but "Glad," I said to her, I said "Glad, I don't care where he's from or if he's an Arab or an Hottentot or whatever it is that he is, as long as he pays me in good English money that's all I ask." I used to get a groat in those days, dear. As it turned out my agent had misunderstood his English and he was looking for a tour guide! Oh, how we laughed about that! So as not to disappoint I got Mr. Bloggs to show him and his wife around Cambridge; it was a lot smaller then – stands to reason, doesn't it? after all – so it didn't take long, but they paid him a groat and a half! They sent Mr. Bloggs a postcard, too, from Bognor, they did.

Well, dear, I'll have to tell you about the Greek gentlemen next week. This nice Lacanian gentleman is coming over and I have to put the plastic slipcovers on all the furniture, so I'll do that while you're having the nice bath that Auntie's going to draw for you. Oh – ta ever so much!

Sex Lives of the Great Philosophers © 2000, John FitzGerald

The natural superiority of Christianity

Guest post by televangelist John Hazee

There are none so blind as those who will not see. And friends, today there is a plague of blindness on this land. A plague, moreover, which afflicts Christians, and keeps them from the service they owe to Jesus!

Yes, friends, many of our professed brothers and sisters in Christ have been struck blind by demonic power! How else can you explain their failure to deal efficiently and effectively with the anti-Christian forces which are gathering around us and threatening to put the Christian light back under a bushel!

One of the leading demonic forces is an evolutionary biologist, whose evil book The God Delusion sat atop the bestseller lists for weeks like the devil surveying his mighty works in Hell. And what have Christians decided to do when confronted with arguments that evolutionary biology disproves the truths of the Bible? Why, their response boils down to “Does not!”

Oh, yes, they came up with Intelligent Design. Proponents of Intelligent Design argue that since certain features of living organisms are supposedly too complex for us to understand, they must have been produced by an intelligent creator. Friends, I don’t understand what Paris Hilton does with her life, but that doesn’t imply that her life is the product of intelligence.

What is the correct way to respond to evolutionary biology? Friends, the answer is simple. When David went to fight Goliath, did he think “What I’ll do, see, is persuade him that he’s got the wrong ideas about us”? No, he didn’t. He thought “I’m going to beat this giant on his own terms,” and that’s what he did.

And we can beat the evolutionists on their own terms, using their own evolutionary principles! Evolutionary biology holds that species evolve by natural selection of organisms with superior characteristics which make them more likely than other members of their species or of other species to survive. Well, if we look at religions from an evolutionary perspective, what do we find?

First, we find that Christianity has evolved considerably over the two thousand years of its existence. At first a humble doctrine of obedience and love preached by impoverished members of the peasantry, it is now a collection of giant corporate enterprises whose leaders command the attention of the great and powerful and who live in affluence to rival that of the rich and powerful!

Furthermore, as a result of evolving to this highly selected condition, Christianity has become the dominant religion on the planet! Hallelujah!

After spending a thousand years evolving as it repelled repeated attacks from Asian pagans and middle eastern Muslims, Christianity was finally able to burst forth from Europe, conquer its traditional enemies, and then spread round the world as it made and conquered new enemies! Hallelujah!

Vastly outnumbered by Hindus, Christians conquered Hindustan and ruled it for hundreds of years! Hallelujah!

Christians were out numbered in Africa, but they conquered African Muslims and the adherents of all the other religions found there and ruled that vast continent for nearly a century! Hallelujah!

When adherents of Shinto tried to enslave the millions of the far east, Christians dropped atomic bombs on them! Hallelujah!

When adherents of Islam destroyed the World Trade Center, our Christian leaders destroyed Iraq! Hallelujah!

Christianity is the superior product of millennia of evolution which have made it the dominant spiritual and ethical force in the world. Richard Dawkins and others like him are mere evolutionary curiosities – random mutations whose function is to amuse us for a short while with their curious features before they are condemned to the evolutionary dead end of extinction.

How far do you think Richard Dawkins would get if he invaded Iraq?

The natural superiority of Christianity © 2007, John FitzGerald

The TRUTH about Queen Victoria!!

It's Victoria Day weekend, and I am proud to be able to help renew public knowledge of the great woman this holiday commemorates by providing the following list of little known facts about her.

1. If the Prince Regent hadn't detested Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent, she would have ruled under a different name. The Prince Regent livened up her christening by refusing to allow her to receive any of the traditional names of the British royal family. So her intended name of Victoire (sic) Georgina Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta became Alexandrina Victoria.
2. She had an older half-brother and half-sister, Prince Charles and Princess Feodora of Leiningen. Feodora and Victoria were each other's closest friends throughout their lives, as a result of the curious circumstances of their childhood.
3. These curious circumstances were called the Kensington System by their instigator, Capt. John Conroy. He had been the Duke of Kent's equerry, and after the Duke's death the Duchess fell under his influence. He wanted Victoria to be dependent on her mother so that when Victoria acceded to the throne he could control her through her mother. To make Victoria dependent, Conroy kept her and Feodora isolated from any outside influence. After Feodora was married off at the earliest opportunity, Victoria was on her own.
4. Victoria nevertheless refused to fall under Conroy's influence. Before acceding to the throne she refused his request that she make him her personal secretary, on the day of her accession she ignored him and her mother, and after her accession she refused to receive him at court.
   
5. She loved beer.
6. Contrary to popular belief, Victoria's first language was English, not German.
7. When she became queen one of the first things she did was pay
   her father's considerable debts.
8. Like the rest of the royal family she was a staunch Whig. In 1839 she precipitated a political crisis which resulted in the Whigs preventing the Tories from taking over the government. The idea that the Crown should be above politics was introduced later by Prince Albert.
9. Because she outranked Prince Albert, she proposed to him.
10. In 1840 one Edward Oxford tried to shoot Victoria from close range while she was going to her mother's house in her carriage. She proceeded to her mother's house, then shortly after went out for another drive to assure the public that she had not beenhurt. The public was much impressed.
11. In 1858 she wrote to her pregnant daughter: "What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our very nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic."
12. Victoria's noble wish to promote the cause of civilization by demolishing the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, was thwarted by Brighton Town Council, which purchased and refurnished the building. The monstrosity survives to this day.

Happy Victoria Day.

(This article was cribbed from Cecil Woodham-Smith's
Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times, 1819-1861.)

The Truth about Queen Victoria © John FitzGerald, 2001