There Is No Truth In Advertising

In this time of political rhetoric, let us pause for a moment to consider that most abused form of advertising: The Campaign Ad.

It shouldn't have to be said that they are ALL dishonest. They are all likely true (well, recent polls indicate that not only do people expect Democrat ads to be less than the truth, but they expect Republican ads to lie more.), but none of them are honest.

What's the difference?

The best way of describing it is a complete lack of integrity on the part of the candidates. As one person with whom I was talking said, a person with integrity is always honest, but a person who only tells the "truth" can be a liar.

The simple fact is that truth is relative. Having no absolute "truths" in the world, it's easy to say things that aren't true, and believe it. When it comes to political ideology, this is especially plain to see. No one's "truth" aligns with the "truth" another person sees (unless they happen to agree on all particulars). The sad fact is that the "truth" isn't fact. It's a collection of perceptions all colored by an individual's beliefs. And because individuals all vary, so do the truths in which they believe.

In short, there is no truth. Especially in advertising.

But there CAN be something which relies on the individual just as much as their perception that can better relate their belief in what's "truth" than speaking the "truth" as they know it: Integrity.

Integrity means "wholeness", and when speaking the "truth", it means the WHOLE truth and not just a little part of it. Integrity leads to honesty. Honesty is giving someone the relevant facts (as to who decides what's relevant, that's up to the individual). When in doubt, relay all the KNOWN facts.

But it's more than just fact-giving. It's keeping up on the facts. After all, facts change. Yes, yes they do. Facts are things that people know to be "true". We're not born with the knowledge of ALL THINGS, so we discover as we go. Being human, we can get things wrong - very often a lot of the time. Given that half of all humans are below average, it's likely that we get things wrong more often than we get them right.

So "facts" can change, otherwise the earth would be flat, the sun, stars and moon would revolve around the earth and everyone would be dying of infections because no one would think that a common, lowly mold could do anything about it.

As to the difference between a truth teller and a liar, there are none. Especially in terms of politicians. After all, they often DO tell the truth. But the truth they tell is only PART of the truth. The truth isn't the whole truth. It lacks wholeness, therefore lacks integrity. This is why a truth-teller is usually quite dishonest.

There are reasons they don't tell the whole truth or relate all of the relevant facts. It's always deliberate in this lack of information, by the way. Politicians don't get elected by being blunt and honest with people, after all. Honest requires them to disclose too much.

Take fossil fuel subsidies, for example. The politicians would have you believe it's to offset the high costs of finding new reserves or upgrading old equipment and saves jobs.

Let's examine these truths:

Finding new reserves is indeed expensive.

If equipment isn't replaced, jobs will likely be lost when it breaks down.

Both of these are quite true. But this isn't all there is to the story of why the fossil fuel industry gets billions of dollars in government subsidies.

The truth is that finding new reserves is part of the standard profit/losses in the industry. The costs of looking are a hell of a lot less than the costs of acquiring - which are not part of the looking costs. In short, it's a normal business expense and they have a 35% success rate on average. That is to say, of three test wells drilled, one will produce a financially viable return. "Financially viable" means profitable, which means it will pay for the costs of the other two dry wells, plus the cost of the acquisition of the oil, plus more which goes to profit.

The truth here is that this reason means the oil companies are being paid profits on top of their profits.

As for "saving jobs" rationale about equipment expenses, again, replacing or upgrading old equipment can be expensive, but it, too, is part of the normal operating costs of doing business. It was mentioned before that drilling on a financially viable well means they're making a profit. Profits mean they've already paid for the upgrades and replacements WITHOUT the subsidies.

As for the saving jobs part, the fact is OLD equipment generates jobs more than new equipment does. It requires more maintenance, more people to take care of it or even run it. Replacing it means fewer people are needed to run it or take care of it. That means fewer jobs. So while upgrading and replacing old equipment does save some of the jobs that would be lost if that equipment couldn't be repaired or replaced, it doesn't save the same number as before.

Care to check the figures? Between 2003 and 2010, the oil industry (globally) made $1.7 trillion dollars in profit. ($900 billion of it was from the top five oil companies alone). During the same time, the government handed them $500 billion dollars in subsidies. That means the oil companies made $1.2 trillion dollars in profits WITHOUT THE SUBSIDIES. (Note: "Subsidies" include tax breaks and allowances that would have otherwise been taken from them. Therefore, the above numbers for the amount they would have made without the subsidies are correct, but could be misleading if someone thinks that it was all money GIVEN to the oil companies. The amount of tax dollars given to them was much smaller - approximately $75-$100 billion dollars. But they could have been taxed $400-$425 billion dollars on the $1.7 trillion dollars they made.)

So what truth is there when the two parts of it - both true - mislead people into thinking the oil industry needed ANY subsidies at all? The bottom line is that even without the subsidies, they were making a profit and regardless of the numbers involved (to which there is always dispute), the profitability of the oil companies is without question. They made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits at the least. The need for subsidies is absolutely a question because those subsidies didn't come close to what the oil companies made in profits. But they don't tell you this part.

An HONEST politician would have pointed out these little truths above, but they don't. Why not? Because there's one more truth that's part of the whole they fail to mention: They get money from the oil companies to stay in power and do their bidding.

Harsh? Perhaps.

But let's examine the assertion.

The oil companies give money to candidates to get elected. The candidates with the most money usually get elected. Once in office they initiate, or continue, subsidies to the oil companies that are utterly unnecessary.

Tell me the difference between doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or doing it as a straight out quid-pro-quo. I fail to see any. Because with soaring deficits, I don't see that they're doing it to help the country. Taxes only happen on profits. You can't tax a company if it's not making a profit, after all, and you can’t take all of their profits in taxes. So the only reason to give them subsidies when they're already making far more in profits, that I can see, is to pay them back for helping get the candidate elected in the first place.

Back to truth in advertising...

The lack of integrity in advertising - not telling the whole truth - is endemic in the world. Everyone has a spin that makes their product or service seem much better than "the competition". Most of the time, there's no discernable difference. In some cases, there are distinct, occasionally glaring, differences which makes mosts rational people ask, "How the HELL could they say that???"

It's called deliberate misperception. Take Apple, for example. They don't sell hardware. They market an "experience" which they claim is clearly superior to anyone else's. They then control that experience in such a way that no one inside of their "walled garden" has a CHANCE to encounter another kind of experience. They're told that the Apple experience is better, but they have no way to find out for themselves without using a non-Apple product.

(Disclaimer: I an am unabashed Apple basher because of the deliberate misperceptions that Apple perpetuates upon its victims (among other reasons). For the sake of "honesty" and disclosing the whole truth, I thought you should know.)

This fallacy about a better "experience" came to the fore recently with the distribution of iOS 6, which removed Google Maps entirely and put in Apple Maps. The reasons for this are fodder for someone else's blog, but the bottom line is that people complained. Loudly. Often. In every place. On every continent except one, and Google Maps isn't available there mostly because there are no roads.

The "experience" was not living up to its billing. Apple's Maps application (I HATE the lazy-ass word "app") was clearly NOT better than Google Maps. Not only not better, but potentially deadly. But here's my prediction for what will happen. Apple expects its followers (like a cult, and the right-wing, Apple has followers, not customers or supporters) to be soothed by their reassurances that the Apple Maps program will get better and become better than Google's Map program. After all, it's Apple and the Apple "experience" is clearly better than anyone else's, right?

And people will believe it.

Another thing Apple did - and still encourages the belief in - is the notion that Apple computers are somehow magically immune to malware, viruses and other security threats. They had the Apple Guy (a pretentious, pissant slacker I really hated) and the PC Guy (A bumbling nerd) arguing about the PC's need for security software and how Apple computer users don't need to worry about it.

That little fantasy has been repeatedly shot down over the years, most recently by the Flashback virus and others. The fact is NO operating system is virus-proof. But Apple still insinuates that their products are safer despite the relative ease in which they can be hacked.

Apple is not honest. It lacks integrity.

Now, not everyone is privy to ALL of the facts. People make mistakes (Even me, though it's because I thought I was wrong once, but it turned out I wasn't). I'm not talking about dishonesty through ignorance that is curable. I'm talking about willful ignorance - the refusal to entertain the notion that you MIGHT be wrong. The refusal to check the KNOWN facts to make sure you're right. The refusal to look beyond your own biases and only see what you already believe are facts.

For example, I hate tablets. I see tablets as wasteful toys intended for the drooling masses to sit and consume without actually producing. They have niche market uses, but for computer productivity, they're pathetically devoid of utility when compared to laptops, desktops and even netbooks. So I concluded that they would be a fad and people would abandon them in droves once the "new tablet smell" wears off because I believed that people would prefer to be productive instead of drooling consumers.

I still believe all of this to a large degree, but am beginning to wonder about the fad part. People are still buying them to the point that major manufacturers are moving toward tablets and away from traditional laptops and desktops. The variety and selection in the latter two are way down compared to even a year ago, and pricing on them has increased a lot. A variety of market conditions would account for that (especially if they're trying to put their recoures into tablets instead of the others), but it may be that tablets aren't a fad after all. It may be that all most people want to do is sit and look and drool and not be productive.

Stranger things have been known to happen.

That means tablets will NOT be a fad. I've accepted that as a possibility. And given the fact that a tablet is basically disposable (you can't really fix them without the resources of the company that made them to begin with), the worst thing it's going to do is make my job of fixing computers harder to get by on with fewer computers to fix out there and, of course, cost the end-user a hell of a lot more money than a standard computer over its lifetime because it's much more profitable to make tablets than laptops (part of the market reasons they make, and promote, them).

The point, though, is that the facts have changed my reality rather than my insistence in maintaining my reality coloring the facts. I am not willfully ignorant. I accept the facts, even if I don't like them or what they may portend for my livelihood.

Integrity means wholeness. A person with integrity is an honest person. A person with integrity must be honest with themselves first before they can be honest with anyone else. In the end, candidates who are not honest with others aren't even honest with themselves. And if you can't be honest with yourself, a person of integrity, a whole person, then what HONEST claim can you make in support of your qualifications to be the leader of others?

In the end, all we ever elect are a hell of a lot of dishonest people. So it makes me wonder how any sane, rational, intelligent person can possibly believe what a politician tells them, let alone believe in that politician in the first place.

It goes back to the old adage about how you can tell when a politician is lying: Their lips are moving.

The paradox is that we NEED honest politicians but no one honest ever runs for office.