You may have heard of Scott Bakker but probably not. He has written a series of fantasy novels. I rather dislike them and do not recommend. As such, this post will nonchalantly spoil major plot points when it furthers understanding of the text.
The central conceit of the first series is a man who has been trained, and whose ancestors have been bred for many generations, to develop a “self-moving” will that can make decisions without being influenced by external considerations. That’s a little abstract but we can illustrate the concept with an example. Suppose you’ve a free afternoon and must decide what to do. If you’re hungry, you’ll be more inclined to eat than you would if you were full. Your physical condition would influence your will. In Bakker’s books, the central character has been fashioned so as not to be affected by such outside influences. Even when he feels the physical sensation of hunger, the feeling does not compel him.
The hyper-rational character is not new to literature. However, Bakker’s character has a comprehensive understanding of human emotion and is thus able to manipulate other men with ease. Cast adrift from his hermit sect of rationalist ascetics, he blunders into a crusade and soon worms his way into complete control of a fanatical host numbering in the tens of thousands.
But is this even possible? Are men, in fact, conditioned by their environment to such a degree? Are we all indeed NPCs? In an interview, Bakker argues his point with an appeal to advertising:
So in a formal sense, portraying Kellhus's superhuman intelligence was relatively easy. I would start with straight dialogue for Kellhus's scenes, which I would then go over again and again, each time giving Kellhus more in the way of insights and observations. It was the substance of these insights and observations that proved exceedingly difficult to write. But here again, I had the luxury of time: I would work and rework them until I eventually came up with something 'Kellhus worthy.' I took a shotgun approach.
But there were other challenges as well. Surprising ones.
Most people don't know that the average per second cost of a primetime commercial is greater than the per second cost of a major summer blockbuster. In fact, you could argue that commercials are the most premeditated form of communication in history. Now this is pretty scary when you realize they're primarily designed to condition viewers, rather than rationally convince them. Most commercials are intent on branding, on connecting a product or corporation to a certain set of positive associations. The point isn't to provide the details you need to make a informed decision between competing products -- this is the amateur model of advertising that started disappearing after World War II -- the point, rather, is to literally train you, to transform your automatic response when you next encounter their products. (I irritate my wife to no end by adding 'honest taglines' to pretty much every other commercial we see. With the Olympics on CBC, for instance, my favourite has been, "Another American corporation, pretending to root for the Canadian team.")
Advertisers use these tactics because they work so damn well. It just so happens that conditioning us with associations is a much more reliable sales generating mechanism than engaging us rationally. And yet ask anyone if they're regularly manipulated by commercials and the answer will be an emphatic no. 'I make up my own mind, dammit!'
On a personal level, I clearly remember various products from twenty years ago when I still watched television but I did not then and do not now feel any desire to consume said products. There was an ad campaign for Old Spice deodorant, depicting a male user of said product getting straight-up attacked by various sexually desperate females and there was a Captain Crunch cereal advertisement based on the pun of loving the cereal enough to marry it. That I still remember testifies to the lasting power of these commercials but the fact that I’ve never bought the products renders that a moot point.
Corporations believe in advertising but they delude themselves. Commercials can make someone aware of a product that he then desires or they can make a fellow favor one brand of a product over another but they do not fundamentally condition our desires. How many sports-hating nerds have watched the superbowl because they saw a series of commercials? “Dawg! I didn’t care nothing ‘bout that on repetition #9 but repetition #10 moved me.” How often have you seen a park bench or a bus plastered with the message “You just proved advertising works”? Compare that to how often you’ve bought an add on a park bench.
Steve Sailer weighs in:
I worked in marketing research for eighteen years in the late 20th century and helped write a couple of white papers on whether our internal data showed that paying for more television commercials would sell more supermarket products.
The firm I worked at had constructed the finest test-marketing laboratory in history.
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A BehaviorCheck test market was run in one or more of the eight small cities where our firm had bought newfangled laser checkout scanners for all eight to twelve supermarkets in town. In return, the grocers had their checkers scan the barcode ID cards of a couple thousand families we had recruited to share with us scanner records of all items they purchased. We then manipulated which commercials they saw on cable television.
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But in the second half of the 1980s, clients started to complain that very few of our tests showed that increasing TV advertising by 50 or 100 percent would move the needle on sales at all.
In response, we did a couple of meta-studies summarizing hundreds of test markets we’d run.
Occasionally, we found, higher advertising did pay off, especially if you had news to share, such as that your chemists had actually invented a better ingredient.
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On the other hand, if you didn’t have any news to tell consumers, we didn’t find much evidence that you could cajole them into buying more just through the awesomeness of your advertising.
This is not to say that good advertising couldn’t help a new brand, but there tended to be diminishing returns once an identity was established.
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This logic seemed unassailable to me. But my contacts at G&Z explained that no brand manager had ever gotten promoted by cutting his ad budget. G&Z believed in advertising. To consider reducing commercials was heresy.
In short, Americans like to advertise.
Our assumption that somebody must have proved that advertising works is reassuring even if nobody can remember the exact details.
I don’t believe Bakker’s central character is possible in the way he describes, which undermines the entire plot. Not much of an irony enthusiast but one has to appreciate how Bakker can say that religion grows out of ignorance because it doesn’t yield results and subsequently argue that advertising must work or no one would use it.
Surely NPCs are more susceptible?
Think about how many are drawn into supporting The Current Thing.