There was a time when the difference between marketing and propaganda was a bright line. Marketing, in the old days, had some responsibility to tell the truth. At the very least, ads could not be blatantly false. Propaganda, on the other hand, was a construction of lies designed to appeal to our baser instincts and to what we already believed. From a biological perspective, it triggered the dopamine receptors that provide us with immediate and short-term pleasure.
Nowadays, the line between news, marketing and propaganda has become blurred.
Politics, social media and most of our modern technologies are designed by corporate America to provide us with immediate gratification. To trigger our dopamine receptors. The problem is that the long-term effect makes us unhappy and depressed.
At least that is what Dr. Robert Lustig, who is one of the world’s experts on endocrinology, addiction, happiness and depression, claims. Lustig is also a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where he specializes in neuroendocrinology, and the author of The Hacking of the American Mind. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcasts, he talks to Jeff Schechtman about what is essentially the biology of the Trump era.
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Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Telelobotomy (MattysFlicks / Flickr – CC BY 2.0).
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