Magic.

I'm reading a terrifying book right now by a reporter called Elle Reeve. It's called "Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics."

You can buy it here. And read the review from The New York Times here.

The subhead of the Times' review hints at why I find the book so frightening. It reminds me of the reportage I've read from post-WWI Germany, during the cacophony and hardship leading up to the ascent of hitlerism and nazism. "In 'Black Pill,' the journalist Elle Reeve finds that the once-fringe alt-right is dead— because now it’s mainstream."

But, Ad Aged being a blog on advertising, of course, there's an advertising point in bringing up 'Black Pill.'

If you look at the political era we're living in especially under the malign spell of trumpism, I believe--broadly--that it can be characterized by the inability to distinguish make-believe from reality.

We heard this some years ago from a trump acolyte, kellyanne conway, when she forwarded the perverted notion of alternate facts. Alternate facts are the hallmark of the maga movement. 

From small to large, we are being sold an alternate reality. One that doesn't exist. 

How bad things are under the current administration. How good they were during the trump years. How golden and great america was when you could hang black people with impunity, when women were subservient and the nation was largely white. How one-million didn't die of Covid. How invasions of sovereign nations are good as is police violence. How the democrats eat babies and can legally kill four-months old.

The list is endless.

And advertising is just as bad.

In our commercials, our press releases, our self-promotions, we've conveniently ignored reality. We've made getting a new phone, or the last nacho chip the apotheosis of living. Every car commercial is filmed on a traffic-less road. Every phone-rep is pretty and happy and helpful and unencumbered by an ineffective bot or a four-hour hold-time.

Advertising, like politics, no longer reflects the world people actually struggle to live and make their way in. The spate of pharmaceutical commercials makes matters worse. All you have to do is take a pill, then gallop off to spin in a field or push your grand-children on a swing set propitiously placed on an empty beach with no micro-plastics in sight.

As an industry, we have retreated from a reality-based world, preferring causality, certainty and magical thinking. We lie about the people we hire, the people we depict and the very saliency of our work. We lie about its effectiveness and its creativity. We pretend things ran when they didn't. Then we buy ourselves plasticine trophies and tell the world about the things we "won."

As we trade in un-reality, reality is pushed to the margins. It's largely gone in so many realms.

Of course, the worst reality, in politics and our profession is the one we don't even realize.

We've come to believe magical thinking. 

And of all the lies we tell, we don't realize that most prominent are the ones we're telling to ourselves.

No lie.