Fear and the Art of Buying

Everything is Free
When I worked in advertising about five lifetimes and thousands of dollars ago, when I worked in advertising for a short while, long enough to realize it was greedy lying, as opposed to writing fiction, which is graceful lying that flirts with notions of “truth,” when I worked in advertising, I learned that fear sells. Fear sells cigarettes (we buy because we want to think we are in control of our own deaths, our own fears…and eventually because we are addicted), it sells homes, it sells, clothes, soda pop, lamps, shoes, sofas, cameras, magazines, newspapers, books. If you make people feel fear (preferably without them knowing it) you can make them do anything–even give up their hard earned cash for what they don’t need.

We are the greatest consumers ever to infest the surface of this planet, and we are, more and more, a culture of fear.

The seat of fear in our brains is the amygdala, the center of emotion, which is why we sometimes say we smell fear, because the sense of smell, unlike other senses, bypasses all our gray layers and goes directly to the color-saturated amygdala. We rarely say we smell happiness. Or joy. But we smell fear. It’s an evolutionary defense developed long ago: if we could smell danger we could act even before it was in sight.

And now. We smell fear and it tells us to buy. Fear that we’re inadequate, or outdated, or irrelevant, or too fat, or too skinny, or too rich (how about a security system that police everywhere tell you does not work, but even so) or too poor, or too human.

Artists are too human. In this age of manufactured need and fear, art has been rendered a luxury. Writing that is art has been rendered superfluous, a luxury, yeah.

A friend of mine told me she was speaking to a marketer in NYC the other day. The marketer said, “Well, a book is just an info-product.”

My friend said fuck you and walked out of the meeting.

I lied about that last part. My friend did not say fuck you and walk out. That was me, fantasizing. That was me, wishing I’d been there to say fuck you, to say that books are not info-products. Books that are art don’t sell fear; they sell humanity. They are not products at all. They are years of hope and sweat and passion and loss and love and celebration and toil and play and insight and loss (yes, twice loss appears). Literature and art are inquiries into the nature of the human heart, and so they are the first to be cut in school programs, the last thing parents want their sons or daughters to develop a deep interest in. (“What about law, or engineering? you’re such a smart child.”)

If I had children, I would want my child’s school schedule to look like this: First period: Biology; Second Period: Sociology; Third Period: Math; Fourth period: Physics; Fifth and Sixth period: the study of the human heart in all its manifestations, because without that how can anything else possibly matter?

Someone hit the big time, and figured it out: that we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.

But what makes a society tick without art as its metronome? The slow tick of a dying heart, the inaudible tick of a bomb, the inevitable rhythm of whatever breathes beneath the surface, the skin of the earth seething with consumption and destruction.