Was replying to some comments on bestoftheblogs, and this popped out of my fingers. Thought some here might be amused. ***************** Not force, seduction, leading to addiction Sandy, commenting on Mikey's remark, challenges the description of what the modern corporate economy does as "forcing consumers to fund their purchases with a massive increase in debt acquisition." Allow me to wax a trifle academic here and ride one of my hobbyhorses. In my view, "force" and "power" are terms now so cliched that they obscure rather enlighten political discussion. They belong, as many commentators have noted, to a world conceived in terms of mechanical systems, where the application of force with sufficient power automatically produces a certain result. The result of that is the kind of thinking that suggested to Robert McNamara and his whiz kids that a properly calibrated application of force (measured in tonnage of bombs) would bring the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to their knees, or more recently that, since the US has the most powerful military in the world, everyone else will automatically bend to our will. We now live (we always did) in a world of soft as well as hard power, where soft power is what we used to call influence, the influence we had when people accepted what we said because they had good reasons to believe that we were, if not on the side of the angels, at least being reasonable in the offers and demands we made. Now the relevant metaphors are cybernetic--not mechanical--systems. Influence works like a virus or worm or the DNA in our cells, transmitting messages that may or may not fit the receptors at which they're directed. Marketing has gone the same way. There are so many goods and so much information pouring through the marketplace that the idea that anyone could be forced to choose has become ridiculous. Now, for example, someone in search of a car doesn't face the stark choice that Henry Ford offered, a model T so long as it's black. Toyota gives you so many choices when you buy an entry level Corolla that a single brand is, in effect, 30,000 different models. Thus it is that sociologists have been talking for years about societies in which the primary source of power is no longer force but seduction. The marketer/politicians' wet dream isn't people who have to be coerced to buy the product and do what they are told. It is, instead, people so seduced by the messages they offer that they are, in effect, addicted—they themselves feel that they can't live without it. Sure, people addicted to consumerism still like to talk about being forced to have the next new thing. But by using the language of force they not only shift responsibility elsewhere (the old blame game), they make it impossible to develop a critical awareness of how seduction works and their own roles in the system. They never learn the systemic thinking that would help them avoid the traps observed by management consultants like Peter Senghe: reacting to events, blaming the other, not noticing what's happening until a problem becomes overwhelming. Sure they feel trapped. But seeing the trap as a force instead of a puzzle. That's what has us screwed. -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd. 55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html