On Commercials and Capitalism

Paul has up an interesting Neil Postman excerpt. In part (yes, I'm excerpting from an excerpt), it reads:

...the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism ... was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, then surely rationality was the driver....

But television commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: to be rationally considered, any claim - commercial or otherwise - must be made in language. More precisely, it must take the form of a proposition, for that is the universe of discourse from which such words as "true" and "false" come. If the universe of discourse is discarded, then the application of empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the other instruments of reason are impotent.

... it was not until the 1950s that the television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete as the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them....

Even when commercials do use words, the gap between rationality and advertising is wide. Maybe you've seen the one that is driving me nuts (it's continually inflicted on me at the gym, which has banks of televisions above the exercise machines). It's for chocolate, and it croons, nonsensically,"Celebrate your right to indulge."