WTF.

Yesterday, I sent H, my account director and recently-licensed psychotherapist (one word) an article I thought would infuriate her from "The Economist."

Much of what I see in our troubled world is because of our societal descent into childish moral absolutism. Millennia ago, we might have called it Manichaeism, the Third Century AD religion embracing a cosmic dualism that saw the world as a constant battle between light and goodness and darkness and evil.

Certainly certainty is to blame here. And amerika's current political discord is evidence of our miasma. Our collective societal intelligence is devoid of nuance and over-flowing with judgment. Any transgression, whenever it took place, whatever the circumstances, and the result is banishment--cancelling.

I've seen buckets-full of this in advertising. Puffed-out pontificators saying "blank is dead," or that advertising's role is to clean the oceans of plastics when advertising as an industry no longer even pays 85-percent of its practitioners a living wage. Worse are those who absolutely believe that some binary gizmo can reach people through math or data science or surveillance, when the only thing that's ever reached people is a well-crafted (that doesn't mean honest) message repeated often.

Just now, I read another article from The Economist. This one on moral ambiguity. A much richer topic than absolutism.

The article grabbed my attention in part because of the photo above. I spent two starlit nights in Verona, Italy's 1st
-century AD Colosseum while at the Verona Opera Festival with my wife. We saw Puccini's "Turandot," and Verdi's "Aida." I've lived about 25,000 nights in my long life. Those two nights were among the best I ever had.

But onto horror, my metier. The Economist article begins this way:

Ouch. 

Today you get workmen's comp from a paper cut. 

But the point of the Economist article is in the Wally Benjamin quotation below. (I was the only one ever permitted to call Walter Wally.)

"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." And the point is this: 

With the escapism and gelato, you get a lesson in the moral complexity of the past.

Graham Greene, Carol Reed, and Orson Welles said it best, as you'd expect, in this scene from "The Third Man." The best lines come at the end. So it's worth hanging in there for the requisite three minutes.

I realize a post on absolutism versus moral complexity is a little deep-dish for a blog on advertising.

I'm funny that way.

So I'll leave you with this, from Czeslaw Miłosz, a Polish poet, writer, diplomat and Nobel Prize winner.  Supposedly Milosz heard it from an ancient Galician Jew. 

Personally, if I worked again for any agency or holding company, I'd have it painted on the walls and I'd make human resources people memorize it.  They'd probably fire me for that.