2016 and the principle of disgust

It’s a new year and time for resolutions. One resolution I have had for a while, and will continue to have in 2016, is when I see a commercial that I feel degrades my intellectual decency, I will not buy it — even if I happen to like the product.

The point of a commercial is to sell a product. Marketing might be necessary in order to let people know it’s there and the basics of what the it does. In short, a commercial is supposed to inform you what separates this product from the many others that originate from the same need. This is the idea behind marketing and it makes sense. Off course, we all know that this is not how things are and to think it will ever be, is as naive as it comes.

Instead — marketing reaches a reverse effect where the level of stupidity and banality is so high that it makes one not want to buy the product, ever, due to an inner principle of disgust.

I’m not romanticizing the past because I’m not even sure if this ever was the basic rules of marketing. If it was, it seems like we left this idea so long ago that we cant even remember what those where like. Given there are no rules for what is okay to push trough your senses, how has marketing eventually turned out?

In my opinion, it has turned into an ever more horrible battlefield that knows neither dignity nor shame. This is the basics of capitalism, a system inconsistent with either, I am aware, but what I find most disrupting is how they actually view our ability to tell reason and sense from plain nonsense and banality.

I think we are at the point were marketing is so overwhelming that is seems easier to accept this being its true nature rather than objecting.

It’s not the attempt to create false demands to sell you some garbage you dont need that is most provoking, rather it is the undermining of our intellectual decency. Any company that directs itself towards you in this way sees you as the most primitive of all beings. For 2016, I’ll object by going with the principle of disgust. It might not be much and it certainly won’t make a difference, but it’s the only thing left to do.