“What is intelligence?” We have sometimes pondered that question here, but it begs a question: “what is stupidity?” One possible answer is to be so confident of the assumptions of your own group that you discount those of others altogether. Effectively saying they have no worth. It can happen in all classes and at all educational levels. There’s no fool like an over-educated one, in our experience. But our examples today are chosen from a different field.
Nothing reveals the deep inner psychological fixations, obsessions and and assumptions of a society as well as advertising does. Especially those of the power groups to whom they’re selling. The excellent site we bring you day, called Canvas Art Rocks [1] have put together a collection of poster/press ads that are so very crass, offensive and in some cases potentially dangerous that is a tribute to the way their researchers held their noses. However-these ads are not really that old, and we are certain that senior readers will have seen something like them in the colour magazines of the nineteen seventies.
So, hold on to your seat and prepare your sick bag to enter a world of folksy old doctors selling tobacco. Of women depicted as stupid and inferior , so that they can be turned into sex objects. Of cheerful racism. And scariest of all to us, the gleeful promotion of firearms. It’s easy to laugh now. But remember-many of your fellow citizens had their minds formed in the era of these ads, and the culture they floated upon. And what unconscious assumptions do YOU make, gentle reader, as you smile indulgently at the follies of the past? The biggest fool of all is the one who knows, and knows best.
#advert #mores #racism #sexism #tobacco #collective unconscious
Learning, Science and Society 