How to save the world? Part 1 of ?

Check this. Before I left the states, I had an idea. I have lots of ideas. I only worry about the ones that stick with me for a bit. This one stuck.

I was driving in SLC, UT. I hate driving in this city for a lot of reasons. That day I was getting onto I80 from 1300E. They're revamping the interchange and its a complete mess. Traffic was bad, it was hot, and I was in a hurry. I should have more patience, I guess, but sometimes I don't have time to have more patience :-) So I thought: They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build bigger freeways to funnel more people around the city. Why not spend a fraction of that money in an advertising campaign to: 1) convince people to have fewer babies; 2) make mass transportation more attractive, and; 3) shame people for driving so damn much (like me!). Wouldn't that be a more efficacious use of limited public funding? The answer, I've come to believe, is yes. But no one is going to like it.

This traffic-reduction advertising blitz sat on the back burner for a while. I had a few conversations with people about it. My dad and I got into a pretty heated discussion about its applicability towards (and my cynicism about) growth in the Eugene, OR area. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it here in Nepal. I also at this time read a book about the diamond business and how outrageously successful they were in creating a demand for a product with no particular use, where no demand previously existed. How did they do this? Advertising and marketing, pure and simple. All you need to do is create what they call a 'cultural imperative' for your product, service, idea, and it will eventually sell. Think about it. Do we really need diamonds, Coke, Pepsi, Gatorade, big cars, fancy televisions, etc? Of course the answer is no, but there are a lot of people who have a huge financial stake in making you think the answer is yes, YES, YESSS!

So I got really pessimistic about things. How can we possibly change the collective trajectory of our culture? No one who thinks about it really denies that we are on a crash course with reality in the near future. Somehow we need to convince 7 billion+ people that the way things have been for the last 10k years isnt actually working, and we need to change. Its a huge job with so many pitfalls.

But there is a way. Let's have a thought experiment. What if you could magically capture every advertising agency and marketing firm in the world and have them do whatever you said. And then what if you told them to be really really sneaky (the way they know how to be) and to create a new cultural imperative. You want them to do this slowly enough that no one in their TV-induced mental fog would recognize it, and you want them to do it very very well. Within say, a generation, you would have them phase out all current advertising and replace it with a new series of ideas and products. Instead of promoting a consumer culture, make people want a sustainable culture.

I know, its trickery. It's 'sleeping with the enemy'. It's the cheap way out. Instead of having a society of free-thinking people who all spontaneously decide that the world would be a better place if we just stopped using all that dang petroleum, we instead have a society of people who have actually been shamed and advertised out of using all that dang petroleum. Different method, but same result. Right now there is only one way to simultaneously influence the mind and wallet of every person in the world-and that way is advertising.

At least, that's what I've been thinking about here in Nepal. I hope that I'm not the only one who thinks that this might work.