The Last Bastion of Philosophy

On the Use and Abuse of Marketing and Mass Media

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Come be “part of something bigger” than yourself the Starbucks corporation beckons in their marketing to prospective employees. Get involved with the “Subie” community and “make the world a better place” the Subaru car manufacturer’s website proclaims. Social media companies promise to “Connect the World” and to be a place to make “Real Friends.” Nowadays, the idea that a deeply felt need for something like community has become a pervasive one in the marketing industry, and brands that do it well are constantly studied and emulated.

Since ancient times, it has been a common opinion that philosophy is either useless or vicious¹—that it either makes you an outcast living with your head in the clouds, or it makes you lawless through the questioning of your community’s shared morals. There has also been the common opinion (this one held by philosophers themselves) that there is a difference between types of human beings, the “few” and the “many”: the minority capable of cultivating the patience and attention philosophy requires and everyone else. This was held to be the ultimate “sorting mechanism,” if you will, between the herd that blindly accepts public opinion and those capable of thinking for themselves. 

In the modern world, this all still largely holds true. Tell someone that you are majoring in philosophy and the most likely response will be, “What’re you gonna do with that?” Yet, there is one field today where philosophy is considered extremely useful. Like the philosophers of old, those who work in marketing and public relations believe ideas matter; or as Nietzsche more immodestly proposed: “The world revolves around the inventors of new values—it revolves silently.”² The ability to understand the world, make judgments, and then disseminate the resulting values to “everyone else,” marketers hold as both the master science and the master art—the true distinction between the Few and the Many. Most so-called “philosophers,” on the other hand, see their craft as nothing more than an occupation, a career like any other. PR, it would seem, is the last bastion of real philosophy today.

The field of public relations was the creation of Dr. Edward Bernays—a man who held no doctoral degrees, but did happen to be the nephew of Dr. Sigmund Freud. Bernays realized that if he called himself “doctor” people would automatically take him more seriously, especially when armed with his uncle’s insights into the unconscious. Whereas the Many consider the study of philosophy at best amusing, Bernays understood that with the right knowledge one can devise techniques to manufacture desires and opinions in others. As he observes in his 1928 field guide Propaganda:

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.³

While philosophy is no doubt still used to deconstruct shared morals and opinions, it is now predominantly used to shape them.

IN MY EYES, such a use certainly confirms philosophy’s potential viciousness; it in some ways even exonerates the Athenian jury for their execution of Socrates. Yet, it would also seem to exonerate philosophy from that other charge usually made against it—that of uselessness. Far from being useless, our entire system is grounded in the efficacy of philosophy: its power to drive market growth and create consensus through, what Bernays called, “the engineering of consent.” Philosophy’s potency, though, ultimately derives from its ability to understand what is. While marketers’ power to manipulate us is great, it is also limited by the material at hand: human nature. What are we to think, then, about the fact that marketers have identified a need for belonging as one of the most effective PR techniques available to them today? 

The free market system is premised upon the idea that all citizens have the right to identify unmet needs in the market and to devise any way they see fit to fill that hole. Those who most efficiently and effectively do this, it is thought, ought to naturally rise to the top in the competition of said market niche. But how is a brand to differentiate itself in a world where everything is “pretty good”? I would argue that nowadays everyone in the middle class and above (and with the addition of cheaply made Chinese products over the last few decades, even many in the lower classes) are inundated by “pretty good” products: ones that reasonably match or exceed expectations. In consequence, what a brand must now sell is not just a product, but an idea, a feeling, a value—something that fulfills more than material need; something that possesses (and confers upon its user) an identity.

The elect Few who “pull the wires that control the public mind” seem to have recognized that there is a giant hole in the soul of the modern Many that longs for real connection—not just a network, but a community; not just partners, but friends and lovers. But marketers do not care about the real needs of the Many; they just want the herd to be branded with their particular symbol. The only value this symbol actually holds, though, is the value the consumer can be persuaded to pay for it. Behind the symbol is an abyss into which anything can be stuffed that the marketer thinks useful to move us to action.

THROUGHOUT MANY of Plato’s works (most notably the Phaedrus and Gorgias), he attempts to distinguish between two different types of knowers: philosophers and sophists—between lovers of wisdom and the “wise.” The sophists were itinerant teachers who traveled from city to city teaching for a fee ambitious young men the art of debate and oratory. The philosophers are best represented by Socrates, the hero of the dialogues who lived in poverty in Athens his entire life examining the veracity of his fellow citizens’ opinions. After eventually exposing one to many empty opinions, Socrates was put to death by the city. The charges made against him were “corrupting the youth” by not worshiping the gods of the city, and for teaching how to “make the weaker argument seem the stronger.”⁴ These would be quite the feats of a practice that is useless! We would seem to be compelled, then, as we were in the case of the marketers, to conclude that philosophy is indeed vicious. It is precisely this conclusion that Plato employed his vast rhetorical art in refuting. 

Like our PR practitioners today, sophists tended to be less interested in what result their techniques were used to achieve than with simply getting results. The “wisdom” they taught to their eager pupils was how to use knowledge of human nature to achieve this. All rhetoric to them was “empty rhetoric”—a means to an end: power. Plato sought to show that true philosophy (the kind practiced by Socrates) had a different end—self-knowledge in pursuit of the good life. And in fact, its usefulness actually lay in its uselessness. 

It is okay to have one’s head in the clouds, if your feet remain on the ground. Transcending the mundane world, striking out beyond the strictures of your particular society, meditating on the nature of being—these are all transformative and empowering practices, if you remain rooted in nature, in your community, in history and becoming. Divorced from this “if,” however, one becomes the useless citizen of caricature, or worse, a vicious itinerant who sells their knowledge and skills to the highest bidder. 

So I ask again, what are we to make of the fact that our modern day sophists have identified lack of community and belonging as one of our most urgent needs? And more importantly, what are we to do to counteract the empty answers they offer us as means of fulfilling this need? As Plato clearly saw, rhetoric itself is not the problem—his use of imagery, poetry, drama, and pathos ought to dispel any notion that philosophy is the mere application of syllogism and logic. But by abandoning the practice of philosophy to the manufacturers of public opinion alone, we have robbed ourselves of the ability to counteract the power of empty rhetoric on our souls. 

It is estimated that nearly $20 billion was spent globally on public relations services last year—which means $20 billion was invested to sell you fake solutions to real problems. As modern philosophy has revealed, we seem to have an insuperable need to be “part of something bigger” than ourselves. But as Plato sought to convince us through his beautifully philosophic rhetoric, the good life only comes to those willing to cultivate self-knowledge, who can delineate their own priorities and devise their own solutions. How are we to reconcile these two opposing propositions: the need for something to submit to and the divine command to “know thyself”? As with all of life’s most pressing questions, there is no easy answer to this dilemma—which makes the revivification of genuine philosophic thinking all the more needful.

While it is undoubtedly true that there have been no more than a handful of true philosophers throughout all of history, philosophy as a way of life has never been the preserve of an elite. It is open to anyone willing to cultivate the necessary attention and patience required to attempt to see the world as it is. The choice is open to everyone: will you remain part of the branded herd, or shall you commit yourself to seeking the truth; shall you remain part of the Many or become part of the Few? But perhaps an even greater question lies beyond this—what sort of knower do you desire to become: a philosopher who seeks to be part of something bigger than themselves, or a sophist who wishes to control it?

1. The Republic, 487a, Plato

2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I.12 “On the Flies of the Marketplace,” Frederich Nietzsche

3. Propaganda, Ch.1, Edward Bernays

4. Apology, 18a - 20c Plato