| A letter to Hugh Macleod |
[Nov. 25th, 2004|12:10 am] |
Hugh. One of the latest of your cartoons for business cards reads: 'At the center of every human soul is the intense longing to be closer to God. A brand that can empathise with that is powerful.'
I'm only going to talk about this once because it's sort of personal and I'm not a big personal-type blogger, but I feel justified here because your cartoon crosses the dangerous line between the business world and the spiritual one.
There are some things you shouldn't try to exploit!
I'm no Christian. In fact, whenever anyone mentions god I sort of recoil. Sure, I appreciate the basic idea - the do unto others, turn the other cheek stuff. But I don't go to church and I don't sing hymns and my Sundays are not spent reflecting on things theological. In fact, having suffered under an educational system that didn't recognise the difference between church and state where the teachers made us sing hymns each morning, I can say with complete certainty that I'm opposed to the concept of organised western religion for many different reasons. But I definitely sense an intense longing to be closer to something that I'll always be too far away from for my liking.
Here's the way I think it works, after thinking long and hard about it, and after drawing on on comments from some people who I love and respect, especially my sister-in-law, who wrote her thesis on something similar, I came to some fundamental personal conclusions:
1) The world doesn't exist.
We make it up as we go along. Reality is not a one-way deal. You build a reality for yourself through your experience of it. The way that you choose to experience things defines those things for you. A Buddhist monk's reality will be markedly different to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist's reality.There may be a hard, absolute reality underlying these things, but it's filtered through your belief system - the principles that you use to create a framework for living..
2) Reality isn't binary
Not only is reality not absolute, but it's not experienced in equal amounts by everyone either. I think there's a spectrum of experience. At one end of the spectrum are the passive. Those people who sit in front of the TV each day and let the world come to them. At the other end are the active. Those people who engage with the world head on, on their own terms. Why is reality at one end of the spectrum more 'real' than the other? Because if you try to experience the world on your own terms rather than meeting it head on, you get more control. If you remain passive and accept whatever you're shown, then you get spoonfed a pre-constructed reality that conforms to someone else's agenda. If you don't believe me, go back and look at the TV. Do you get the sense that there's an agenda or two there? OK, now turn off the TV. You've had enough TV for one day.
3) The tools to create a reality lie in metaphor.
How are these agendas constructed? They're constructed largely by branding, which is a form of metaphor in that it takes one thing (say, a description of a life said to be ideal) and substitutes it for another thing (your own life). This is why advertising works so well. Viewers look at their own lives, and see flaws in them, and are told that if only they buy a certain brand of jeans they'll be immediately fit and get lots of sex. Or if they buy a car of a certain type, their body will lose its bumps and warts, and their dress sense will improve. Everyone knows that this is bogus in principle, but in theory, it hits us at a subliminal level, which is why the people pushing these agendas keep doing it - you have to think your way out of it, and for many people, it's just too much hard work. It's why the term 'reality TV' is an oxymoron.
4) To experience the world in your own terms, create your own metaphors.
So, how do you become active and regain the control you need to build a world for yourself? Find your own metaphors. Break the tired system of dead metaphors that presents you with a reality that you think you want. How? Think of the world in terms of poetry. The next time you're walking, notice the air you're breathing, and the way the cold makes you sleepy as it blows against your face and makes your cheeks rosy and your nose red. The world is poetry. And there are different ways of consuming it. Make yours an act of creative consumption by creating the world as you go. And then the next time you switch on the TV, notice how dead it feels.
So, where does god come into this? Well, it doesn't, necessarily. Or perhaps it does, depending on who you are. For me, the term is irrelevant, it's just a question of semantics. When people talk about striving to get closer to god, I interpret that as striving to get closer to a reality that you create, by realising that the world is poetry, and writing it into being. No brand can empathise with that struggle, because it's a struggle that's inherently anti-brand. So Hugh, I love your other stuff. It's innovative, and always leaves me thinking. But back off, and leave my reality alone! :-)
If you're interested in this, check out the Centre of Everything shows on www.radioarthur.org. |
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