THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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When you tell a lie big enough… 

When you tell a lie big enough… 

Who says we are defined by  where we live or what we drive? The advertisers, of course. Believe them at your peril, because the truth is we can be content with what we are, no matter where we live or what car we drive.

Or, it seems, what makeup we wear.
South Korean women are sending a message to cosmetics companies, and giving the whole world good reason to think twice before spending its money. The women are smashing their beauty products to pieces, complaining commercials misled them into thinking they were “essential”.
People criticise advertising all the time, but to understand the Korean women’s actions you need to see the wider context. South Korea is a highly patriarchal country with a very influential beauty industry. The backlash against cosmetics takes inspiration from the #MeToo movement in the US, yet American women are not up against  a business-driven cult of beauty on the same scale.
But cultures differ from place to place, and we can be judgmental if we assume we know what should be changed in South Korea and what should not. The women, though, have also attacked something universal – advertisers’ deep-rooted habit of exaggerating the importance of their products.
There are rules against adverts that overstate the quality of products, but the lines are blurred and regulators never consider the frequency or the manner in which a product is advertised.
An advertiser’s job, meanwhile, is to make us feel that we have to have “that car”. See the ad once and we are interested. See it twice and we start to want it. See it multiple times and we think we need it. The trick is achieved by presenting people like us using the car.  
On the one hand, this is textbook business practice, in which case nothing is ostensibly wrong with it. On the other hand, the line between selling and telling blatant lies is getting thinner and thinner. Manufacturers don’t only compete to make better goods anymore; they are also in a race to tell better stories, which more often than not make them liars.
The storytelling competition is unhealthy. Price tags are often breathtaking not because of the product’s qualities, but because of the cost involved in telling a “better story”, on the biggest stage, as often as possible. Good products with small advertising budgets lose out to inferior ones whose commercials bombard us. Manufacturers go further by bribing reviewers with freebies so that product flaws are “overlooked”. 
Which brings us to the real topic at hand. Politics is largely about advertisement, too. Politicians romanticise their own actions while advertising those of their opponents as “propaganda”. 
Politicians will tell us what is important and what is not, but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing as “Do we really need that car?”
The difference, though, is that the slippery slope is even more treacherous in politics. The competition to tell better stories can become a race to tell better lies in no time at all.
This does not necessarily mean citizens – whether in a democracy or dictatorship –  are gullible. It simply means that the powers-that-be or politicians vying for power have contempt for the people they seek to control or win over. It is the nature of politics, no matter what system we are talking about.
Under dictatorship, we may find it hard to resist the lies. The good news is that those lies come from one source. Democracy allows us to resist lies, but the bad news is that those lies come from left, right and centre. Dictatorship does not have to compete with anyone, so its lies can be crude or thinly veiled. Democracy, on the other hand, can create unhealthy competition if we don’t watch out, meaning the liars can become more and more creative.
If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it, goes the old saying. This suggests that it’s easy to fool anyone, no matter what system they live under. But we have to read between the lines. Liars find it difficult to tell big lies and keep repeating them unless they have effective “advertising” mechanisms in place. In other words, if the liars are powerful enough to repeat their stories, unchallenged, over and over, there is little that people at the receiving end can do.
In the end, nothing somebody says will define you, can actually define you. Think hard before spending money on an apartment or on cosmetics. When it comes to politicians, think harder. 

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