> Why doesn’t he ask his girlfriend what a thermodynamicist is? (She should know: That’s what her dad does.)
My dad worked a lot of different jobs at the same company before he retired a few years ago. I know at some point one of his jobs had "logistics" in the title. I only ever had a vague notion of what his job entailed. Unless the job title is obvious, like "plumber", I wouldn't expect this woman to know what the hell her dad does.
Advertisers have tried to manipulate our social fears and anxieties since Edward Bernays invented it a century ago, to get more women to smoke cigarettes for Lucky Strike. Along the lines of 'you'll wonder where the yellow went...' or 'the heartbreak of psioriasis' ... The old SOB lived to be 103 years old.
It's sort of the opposite of 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.'
Sure, but I think the bigger point is that, if you've got a really great and really useful product, why would you need to convince people to use it by highlighting barely realistic use cases and exploiting their fears and anxieties?
This theory about Edward Bernays and the lucky strike being some PR mastermind striked me as bullshit and still strikes me as bullshit. People have convinced themselves of how this one guy is behind it all because it’s an easy answer - that’s the bigger con.
This happens a lot in historiography. Easy tales become handles for epochs and then denounced as contrived, then revived. Reminds me of the xkcd about levels of rebuttal.
The guy indeed was behind the "Torches of Freedom" campaign. And was indeed an influential person. Would it have happened without him? Most likely. But he did do the things. Is History driven by personalities? By structures? Big debate there. Nonetheless, Bernays' story is not bunk.
