The perspective I subscribe to is that access and abundance has outpaced the average persons ability to choose. By which I mean, their talent at choosing. An overall inability to make quality decisions. I would say the issue really grew some teeth in maybe the 50’s and has been accelerating more or less exponentially. The art of exploiting this inability to choose first starts getting real traction in the evolution advertising. Getting people to buy cans of beans and cigarettes was the larval form of a much more sinister science of mass manipulation. The internet definitely threw gasoline on the fire. And now no one knows what is quality, or true, or nutritious, or sustainable, or important. The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a short term solution. People need to start learning at a very young age explicitly how to not be a mark. Which is antithetical to the wealthy and politically connected people whose bread and butter is hoards of unscrupulous consumers of products and rhetoric.
The perspective I subscribe to is that access and abundance has outpaced the average persons ability to choose. By which I mean, their talent at choosing. An overall inability to make quality decisions. I would say the issue really grew some teeth in maybe the 50’s and has been accelerating more or less exponentially. The art of exploiting this inability to choose first starts getting real traction in the evolution advertising. Getting people to buy cans of beans and cigarettes was the larval form of a much more sinister science of mass manipulation. The internet definitely threw gasoline on the fire. And now no one knows what is quality, or true, or nutritious, or sustainable, or important. The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a short term solution. People need to start learning at a very young age explicitly how to not be a mark. Which is antithetical to the wealthy and politically connected people whose bread and butter is hoards of unscrupulous consumers of products and rhetoric.