{"id":299,"date":"2010-03-19T21:18:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T21:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/roddreher\/2010\/03\/truth-and-advertising.html"},"modified":"2010-03-19T21:18:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T21:18:16","slug":"truth-and-advertising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/roddreher\/2010\/03\/truth-and-advertising.html","title":{"rendered":"Truth and advertising"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If we don’t believe that truth exists, and is knowable to us, then it’s nothing but advertising.” <\/strong>— Phillip Blond, at Georgetown this afternoon.<\/em>
\nDavid Rieff:<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is the management guru Tom Peters writing <\/a>in Fast Company in early 2009: “Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me Inc.” Of course, what he writes makes no sense. Individuals cannot be brands. It’s not even an oxymoron, like the marketing term, “mass customization,” it’s a category mistake pure and simple, and the political implications (not to mention the ideological agenda, whether conscious, or, far more probably, unconscious) of it are of real consequence. To be human is, very precisely, not to be a corporation. To write as if it were, to “shape” language in this way, as Orwell put it, has tremendous consequences. Language matters, and the dominant language of our time is Peters’, not Orwell’s. We are paying dearly for that. We will pay more dearly still.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If we don’t believe that truth exists, and is knowable to us, then it’s nothing but advertising.” — Phillip Blond, at Georgetown this afternoon. David Rieff: Here is the management guru Tom Peters writing in Fast Company in early 2009: “Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. 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