WORLD
ENTERTAINMENT WARRIORS
"How To See
Through Advertising & Other Bright Ideas"
© 1990-2009
Antero Alli
Dr. Timothy Leary's "Eight-Circuit
Brain" theory suggests that intelligence may
be more than Intellectual Quotient (IQ) and plural
by definition, as in an interaction of intelligences,
or brains, begets more intelligence. In this model,
eight interactive functions of intelligence are
defined by Leary and, reframed by myself as: physical, emotional, intellectual,
social, somatic, psychic, mythic and quantum
intelligences.
This 8-Circuit Brain model suggests that within each center, or function of intelligence, there exists three phases necessary to that center's operation. These three phases mirror the trinary activity of the most basic unit of biological intelligence, the neuron, in its capacity to absorb, integrate and transmit information and/or energy (also a working defintion for intelligence). For example, physical intelligence is fulfilled to the degree one absorbs (receives), integrates (organizes), and transmits (expresses) physical experience. Apply this trinary function to each of the eight levels of intelligence and you'll get an idea of the extraordinary implications. The realization and increase of intelligence may be entirely up to HOW each central neural (not nervous) system processes its own experiences. To the extent experience is not absorbed, not integrated, not transmitted - in one's own way - is the measure of one's ignorance and idiocy in that center. You can be an intellectual genius and a social idiot. Are you intelligent ? No matter how smart you think you are:
Are
you intelligent enough to confess ignorance...
the specific area of your
particular idiocy ?
If so, what are you doing about it ?
There is a way
to apply the 8-Circuit Brain model, in particular
the first four centers, as a reference grid for
deciphering advertising strategies and eventually,
for seeing through advertising altogether. The first four
circuits -- physical, emotional,
intellectual, and social -- revolve around
four interrelated personal survival needs. To the
extent someone is not receiving, assimilating and
communicating human experience in any combination
of these four, is the extent survival anxiety persists
in that area of life experience. Nobody knows this
better than the media wizards (Art School Graduates)
working for corporate advertising executives who
play on the consumer's real and imagined deficiencies
to sell their products.
Successful advertising makes promises it vows to keep, or your money back. Most products are advertised and sold by a promise to meet very basic needs that the consumer could not dream of meeting on their own without the product advertised. The four basic needs I have seen consistently attached to advertising promises are: security, status, knowledge and sex. In other words, are you secure enough, important enough, smart enough or attractive enough without our product ? Advertisers don't think so.
INFORMATION WARS
Information wars are not fought over physical turf
but the internal landscapes of the psyche itself;
whosoever governs the metaphor, governs the mind.
Those who are not learning new ways to keep learning
and those who are not thinking for themselves are
becoming Info-War casualties without knowing it.
World Entertainment Wars exist at the level of mind.
Information warfare implements massive infiltrations
of gorgeous images and catchy buzzwords upstaging
personal and collective imaginations with externally
produced images and fantasies. War is hell. The
horror of the information wars begins when imaginations
are over-stimulated, numbed and replaced by corporate
designer replicas.
Imaginations corroded by TV Overdose, Video Game
Debauch, and Advertising Bulimia suffer the silent
agonies of a slow death. Do these words ring melodramatic
and paranoid ? Look again. The actual situations
they refer to are more dramatic and terrifying than
any ideas about them. To what extent have our minds
become oversaturated with slick simulations of realities
that we can no longer experience or create for ourselves?
This mental dilemma not only blurs the distinctions
between "reality" and "fantasy" but more critically, it diminishes our capacity
to care about whether or not our dreams and fantasies
are actually our own or the limbs of a larger body
of mass-produced dreams designed by (old soap opera
organ music, please): Corporate Imagination Killers!
Dampen a person's power for imaging their own lives
and futures and you wash away an internal psychic
environment that is house and home to a living soul.
Imagination loss precedes the death of soul.
THE
WAY OF HOW
Real intelligence thrives on process, not content.
Any mind can fill itself with dead data and remain
fundamentally ignorant; too many still do. The processes
producing whatever contents fill a mind actually
govern and regulate that content. WHAT something
is, identifies it; HOW something happens, shows
us its essence. Did you ever notice how the
way someone says something can mean more than the
actual words themselves? The way of how. The way of how is utilized to great effect by the
Corporate Advertising Imagination Killers to change
the contents of the consumer mind without asking
their permission. Imagination lobotomy. Shame. Shame. Shame.
Corporate advertising promotional tactics act on
the low-esteem of the naive consumer whose minds
have not begun thinking for themselves and governing
their own lives. The most sophisticated frontline
advertising strategies trick the consumer into believing
their lives are incomplete and deficient without
the promoted product; only through purchasing the
commodity will the consumer's life be "whole"
or "better" again. The successful advertiser
exposes a need and then, makes a promise to meet
it for the price of whatever is selling. And maybe
more.
By superimposing the grid of the first four circuits
over this general "deficiency" principle,
very specific information jumps out at us. Each
level of survival, from physical through social,
is genetically motivated by specific rewards assuring
satisfaction of specific needs: 1) SECURITY 2) STATUS
3) KNOWLEDGE and 4) SEX.
Everybody
defines and meets their needs for security, status,
knowledge, and sex in different ways. The content
of these needs is universal; the
way of how they're met is personal. When
needs aren't met, we are frustrated. This basic
knowledge also forms the backbone of a successful
advertising ploy: promise them anything but sell
the product. By associating any product with the
promise of more security or more status or more
knowledge or more sex, the consumer's own unmet
needs are touched and hooked.
IMAGINATION BOOT
CAMP
There
is no truth in advertising. Advertising is a business
of promises, fantasies, and dreams: truth doesn't
sell products, images do. The 8-circuit grid is
a good starting point for seeing through these images.
A good offense is the best defense. Corporate advertising
will promise to deliver you whatever you're not
giving yourself. Imagination Boot Camp demands that
we learn to identify and expose our own needs and
then, find our most honest ways of meeting them.
The public education systems are, in part, to blame
for this epidemic of self-denial. Remember grade
school. Young impressionable minds are taught to
value knowns over unknowns, content over process,
as a measure of not only intelligence but self-worth.
Remember receiving your first "F" on your
report card? The highest grades and the greatest
approval goes to those minds willing and able to
retain the densest volume of known facts. The imagination
becomes ill when the mind stops relating with unknowns.
When a mind is taught to avoid facing the abyss
beyond its own machinations, it tends to fill that
void with an endless stream of facts and trivial
pursuits. The mind closes and is put out to pasture
as a dead data depository.
By redefining "security" and "status"
and "intelligence" and "sexuality"
according to one's true feelings, responses and
needs, something extraordinary occurs: an identity
is born. Not a"self-image" (too often
confused for identity) but an honest expression
of your innate being. By defining one's terms, one
stands a better chance of living by those terms
and cultivating the ground of being essential for
living a real life.
World Entertainment Warriors know it is too late
to avoid self-definition; "define
yourself or be defined." World Entertainment Warriors fight on the
frontlines under camouflage of ineffable poetry,
trance-inducing music and pirate cinema; they evoke
where their opponents explain and then, get away
with murderous humor. World Entertainment Warriors
hit the roads, rearranging highway billboard images
to expose dangerous truths while circulating posters
of political candidates referenced by "Dial-A-Prayer" phone numbers. Most of all, World Entertainment
Warriors use their wildest imaginations as combat
weapons, as power tools and as mojo healing totems
for inspiring people to death. If religion is the
opiate of the masses then, the death of religion
is the rebirth of poetry.
The phrase "world entertainment warriors" was inspired by my friend Rob Brezsny's band
WORLD ENTERTAINMENT WARS and our ongoing rapport with these themes and issues.
Other Writings by Antero Alli
NEURO-PHARMACY
OF THE 8-CIRCUIT BRAIN
Published by Talking Raven Quarterly (1991-95)
OCCULTURE
"The Secret Marriage of Art and Magick"
BOOKS
IN PRINT
"Angel Tech", "The Vertical
Oracle", "Astrologik" and other titles
SELECTED
ESSAYS
A variety of astrologikal & non-astrologikal
articles