I am the worst liar in the world. 1) My memory is too terrible to keep the facts of the story straight. 2) My acting skills are too weak to fake enthusiasm or sincerity. 3) Lies offend me, especially if I’m the one telling them.
So, I rely on reality to compensate for these deficiencies: To compensate for my memory I use reality as a cheat sheet to remind me of the truth. To compensate for my lack of acting talent, I draw my inspiration from reality as I experience it, and allow the reality of my inspiration to carry my credibility. And I buttress my self-respect by always staying faithful to reality as I see it, and I try to get others to do the same in order to cultivate mutual respect.
Notice — I haven’t even touched on any of the advantages of scientific soundness, which are also very important. But those are well-recognized.
The importance of subjective and social truth is under-recognized, and we’re suffering for it.
We’re forced to pretend in stuff we just don’t believe. We suffer the effects of having to tell little moral and aesthetic lies, just to get along with the people around us. We suffer from the strain of having to act all the time. Free, spontaneous action might carry us away and cause us to reveal what we really think and feel about things. Or we try to squint and blur what we see, or re-engineer our attitudes to make them line up better to what’s expected, and consequently we lose contact with our own immediate sense of reality become self-alienated. And worse of all, we become cynical as we lose our capacity for respect. There’s this belief that nothing is true or real or felt. We don’t even expect things to be as people say — much less for any of it to line up with what we value.
The reason I care about brand is this: People are noticing that companies that learn to shake cynicism are more charismatic to customers, and the shaking of cynicism takes the form of great brands. Through the discourse of brand the business world is rediscovering the objective truth: Subjective truth is not a mere nicety, it is a competitive necessity.
Simple but such a true idea for brands and people – “people are noticing that companies that learn to shake cynicism are more charismatic to customers, and the shaking of cynicism takes the form of great brands.” Nice write up.
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