The Benevolence of Advertising

[After a delay this month dueling with a medical monster (whom I believe I have defeated), I decided to dig into my archives for the current post. It is the final chapter of my 1994 book In Defense of Advertising. The chapter’s title is similar to one used by George Reisman in some of his writing. I highly recommend not just Dr. Reisman’s magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (esp. pp. 471-73), but also his Kindle monograph The Benevolent Nature of Capitalism and Other Essays. As Professor Reisman eloquently points out, benevolence and capitalism go together. Here is chapter 8 of In Defense of Advertising.]
 
 
Advertising is just salesmanship.
 
It is not a drooling ogre, waiting to feed on the helpless consumer. Nor is it a vaudevillian’s hook that has the power to yank consumers out of their socks (and wallets) to force-feed them unwanted products. Nor is it a vaudeville show, as many people, including some advertisers, seem to want it to be.
 
Advertising is just salesmanship, the product and expression of laissez-faire capitalism. Unfortunately, this is precisely why the critics hate advertising; namely, that it is the means by which millions of self-interested individuals become aware of the self-interested, productive achievements of millions of other individuals. Advertising is the means by which millions of people learn how to enhance their tastes and increase their standard of living above the ordinary, humdrum existence of their forebears. It is the means by which the masses—including the “proletariat,” the “bourgeoisie,” and the “intelligentsia”—are given the opportunity to live far beyond the wildest fantasies of the rich nobility of earlier years. Advertising, indeed, is the intellectual conduit by which everyone can seek the good life.
 
Daniel Boorstin calls advertising the symbol of American “voluntariness.” “It is an educational device to provide opportunities for freedom of choice.” In societies in which there is no such opportunity, states Boorstin, there also is no need to advertise. Advertising’s presence, he says, is a “clue to the increasing opportunities for choice.”*  These opportunities, which originate as political and economic freedom from government-initiated coercion, manifest themselves to consumers as the many new products the entrepreneurs offer for sale.
 
It was through newspaper advertisements in 1652 that English consumers were first introduced to coffee. In 1657 they were similarly introduced to chocolate and in 1658 to tea. Indeed, advertising, as Boorstin points out, played a critical role in the founding and settling of the United States:

Advertising, of course, has been part of the mainstream of American civilization, although you might not know it if you read the most respectable history books on the subject. It has been one of the enticements to the settlement of this new world; it has been a producer of the peopling of the United States; and in its modern form, in its worldwide reach, it has been one of our most characteristic products.**

Boorstin sees advertising “perhaps even as a prototype of American epistemology . . . a touchstone of the sociology of knowledge, of the ways in which Americans have learned about all sorts of things.”***
 
If advertising is as valuable as Boorstin maintains, and as I have argued throughout this book, then when will it begin to gain the respect it deserves? Not, I am afraid, until egoism and capitalism are no longer defiled as unquestioned evils, and thus are allowed to gain the respect that they deserve. Not until intellectuals of all types acknowledge that man, as an integrated being of mind and body, possesses not only the capacity to reason, but also a consciousness that is volitional. Not until an objective theory of concepts—the foundation of objectivity and scientific induction—becomes internalized on a wide scale. And not until the objectivity of values and the existence of rational options become accepted and understood.
 
To borrow a phrase from Ayn Rand, I ask you to “check your premises”—to introspect and examine the ideas on which your value appraisal of advertising rests. If you do this conscientiously, I think you will find that your negative evaluations stem from the anti-reason, anti-man, anti-life, authoritarian world view that permeates our culture. It is this world view that paints such a satanic, malevolent picture of advertising. It is this world view that also paints such a satanic, malevolent picture of capitalism.
 
If, on the other hand, you examine these ideas in light of Ayn Rand’s pro-reason, pro-man, pro-this-earth philosophy of Objectivism, and in light of the pro-individualist laissez-faire economics of Ludwig von Mises—that is, in light of a truly liberal world view—I think you will begin to look at advertising differently and begin to react to it differently. You will begin to see that advertising and capitalism both are life-giving and benevolent institutions. You will begin to see that capitalism is the social system that provides man with continuous economic progress. And you will begin to see that advertising is the beacon that guides man to the fruits of this progress.
 
Nothing, as far as I am concerned, could be more benevolent than advertising, beacon of the free society.
 
NOTES

* Daniel J. Boorstin, “The Good News of Advertising,” Advertising Age, November 13, 1980, 20. The recent lifting of the American Bar Association’s ban on advertising by attorneys has brought “opportunities for choice” in legal aid to many more people, especially the middle classes. Prior to this change in attitude toward advertising, legal help was available primarily to the wealthy, who could afford the monopoly prices lawyers were (and still are) able to charge because of their government-granted privileges, and to the poor, who received legal aid from lawyers who were paid for their time under other government-granted privileges. The middle classes simply went without legal services.
 
Studies of attitudes toward advertising by professionals provide revealing insight into the motivation of some of these professionals. One study of dentists showed that the majority of older, established dentists opposed advertising, while the majority of younger, unestablished dentists—the ones who most needed some means of finding new customers—not surprisingly favored advertising. So much for principled thought among licensed professionals—not that they are more pragmatic than any other segment of our society.
 
** Daniel J. Boorstin, “Advertising and American Civilization,” in Yale Brozen, ed., Advertising and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1974), 11.
 
*** Ibid., 13.

Postscript

Professor Boorstin, whom I cite extensively throughout this book, was trained in law, but was attracted to history, especially “for the achievements of the ‘amateur’ in history,” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. That made him a match to my understanding of advertising as a knowledge tool of everyday buyers and sellers, including the benevolence of America and its sense of life. Which is not to say Boorstin did not have a brief foray into the U.S. Communist Party during the 1930s and does have some negative comments to make about advertising—the usual ones: advertising corrupts American culture, which are part of the litany I discuss throughout the book. Professor Boorstin ended his career as the prestigious Librarian of Congress from 1975–1987.