(From Beverly Hills Stories)
- If you are not interested in punishing, only in protecting yourself from future recurrence of the same type of behavior, then the important thing is not what they did, but the question, is there anything we know about them which would tell us they wouldn't do what we suspect?
- So it doesn't matter if the CIA remote flew the airliners into the World Trade Center and set off previously prepared explosives in the building when the planes hit, it only matters if we know anything about the CIA that leads us to believe they wouldn't do it if they thought of it?
- Right.
- I was watching a video about food additives, and I checked the ingredients in yogurt. The non-digestable artificial sweetener Aspertame was in even the non-diet variety, along with sugar. The conspiracy theory video would have us believe the giant food corporations are deliberating re-configuring our bodies. Aspertame increases appetite, and is being added to make us want to eat more of the product adulterated with it, literally used to addict us to it.
- Is there any reason to believe the giant food corporations wouldn't deliberately try to addict us to their products?
- None.
- A trainer of the sales staff at a Rodeo Dr. store selling designer bags told me his job was to teach the staff to teach the customers brand loyalty. I asked him:
- Why should anyone be loyal to a brand?- Brand loyalty is like Aspertame, an addictive, artificial additive to the actual product. What brand did he represent?
- In the modern world people feel good with products that are associated with ideas they can identify with.
- What ideas?
- Luxury. Workmanship.
- Shouldn't people feel good about their relations with each other and not their relation to things? Love and care about each other?
- That's not my business. My business is letting people know about our products and the happiness being associated with them can bring.
- How are you different from a drug dealer?
- I don't break the law.
- You sell people a destructive form of happiness.
- You have your view, I have mine.
- I didn't ask. I think it is an interesting question, use of conspiracy as thought experiment rather than possible history, to ask if these brands and companies are reconfiguring products as person substitutes. We can't be loyal to people who we know will stab us in the back for a dollar, but the products truly are loyal to us, they want us never to leave them, they want to be everywhere we go, inside us being ingested and hanging on outside us.
