Back to the Future with Laverne and Shirley: The Trivialisation of the GMO Debate
July 6, 2016
Back to the Future with Laverne and Shirley: The Trivialisation of the GMO Debate
by Colin Todhunter
When people don’t possess sufficient expertise on matters, they require simplicity. They desire easily manageable packages of knowledge, and these packages become taken for granted stocks of ‘common sense’ that enable them to cope with or to understand the world around them, no matter how faulty or misrepresented that ‘knowledge’ may be.
Powerful corporations and the media recognise people’s need for simplicity. And here lies the problem. To rally the masses around certain ideas and to make things ‘simple’ for them, corporations have taken their cue from Edward Bernays, the modern father of advertising, propaganda and public relations. Bernays knew how to manipulate groups of people and get the masses to acquiesce and hooked on the products and messages of capitalism. We are now all subjected to this type of manipulation each and every day by the incessant bombardment of commercials and official pronouncements.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has reported that young people see 3,000 advertisements a day and are exposed to 40,000 different ones per year. It was not without good reason that the late academic Rick Roderick said that modern society would fall apart if it not were based on people’s addictions, whether in the form of pharmaceutical drugs or consumer products.
At the same time, Roderick noted the trend towards banality, simplification and trivialisation in society – the type which corporations and their public relations arms excel in. He referred to a rampant phenomenon of important issues and problems being reduced to a fad of some kind through continuous repetition. The same few points become thrown around so often that they constitute sound-bite sloganeering.
Anyone who has followed the debate about GM food will be aware of such corporate-inspired banality:
1) Golden rice will save millions of lives
2) Greenpeace should be hauled into court for committing crimes against humanity
3) Critics of GM are stealing food from the bellies of the poor
4) Critics are liable for killing ‘billions’ – and they are also anti-science, Luddites, ideologues, elitists and so on.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/06/back-to-the-future-with-laverne-and-shirley-the-trivialisation-of-the-gmo-debate/
