Amerika

Sometimes when passing by the meaningless oversaturated images and entertainment noises of a typically unattended television, I’ll retain a snapshot of the information conveyed to intended viewers. Most recently, I was reluctantly treated to some fruit juice commercial.

The artificially jubilant pitchwoman asked the faceless intended audiences how wonderful it is for nature to grow tasty sensations that just happen to be fit for our bodies.

I was struck by this inverted reasoning. Our bodies evolved to take advantage of approximate proportions of nutrients stored in plants and animals that happened to exist in sufficient abundance. Our olfactory senses evolved to inform our brains to go for this and to shun that.

Yet, according to our prevailing pop culture and advertisement cultural mythos, it is the other way around. Humans happened into existence for no apparent reason. There, they encountered nature which by happy chance provided us products with which to please ourselves. It was made for us. We must be special.

Likely, this is a carefully tailored appeal to our centuries of Abrahamic religious dualism where, according to the creation narrative, from out of a flawless parallel universe was spawned the universe we inhabit and all of its contents. Hey, everything fits together pretty well, so the perfect parallel reality outside of our own must have had intentful purpose in mind.

By matchmaking humans with nature’s raw materials in the form of our processed commercial products, we’re therefore aligned with God’s intent. Commerce is our daily ritual, sales and marketing activity our sacrifice, and profit our object of reverence.

Tags: consumerism, control, media, realism