2025-06-21 – 2:55 PM

Today I had an epiphany realizing and reading the book “Less is More” by Jason Hickel, where he goes into critiques of how capitalism is an ideology that creates this “more and more” scale mentality.

The core of this ideology comes from a lot of the methods that advertisers use.

Being in the direct-response marketing industry for the past five years and studying human behavior psychology, I can tell you.. if we look at the copywriting handbooks from billion-dollar copywriters like Gary Halbert or Joseph Sugarman or Dan Kennedy, Evaldo Albuquerque, Kyle Milligan from Agora Financial, or Jon Benson.

These people have concentrated over 100 years of human behavioral psychology into language patterns make billions of dollars.

These companies and these people, and also as a result myself, have a very nuanced detailed understanding of how to get people to take action on things.

I was fascinated with the idea that if you just put the right words, in the right sequence, you can compel someone to spend $25,000 for private jet from a piece of paper.

That with simple text, written at a 3rd grade reading level, you can get someone to invest into $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 info products and services.

There’s literally sections in every single one of these copywriting teachers and mass advertisers books to use specific “us vs them” storytelling, which is a key rhetoric into fascist politics.

We advertisers specifically use the desires, the fears, the worries, to tell stories that get you to think a certain way about something.

I’m even doing it right now.

That’s what we advertisers are trained to do.

If we also look at the work of people like Ryan Holiday in his book “Trust Me I’m Lying”. How advertisers hijack the human mind and consciousness into creating correspondence or even thinkers like Noam Chomsky in manufacturing consent, or Edward Bernays..

I think the thing that a lot of people miss is that advertisers are one of the sources.

Marketers design & shape reality and the consciousness of civilizations.

We pitch and future-pace ideas of what reality could be like, and then we create the visual. While reality tends to follow suit.

And for better or for worse, for the health of humanity or the destruction of humanity, people believe it, perpetuate it, manifest it with our guidance.

Markets are at the forefront of civilizational design.

Back in 2019 when I first started waking up to the idea of myself being a marketer because I’ve been in entertainment, I’ve been a performer, been around human behavior psychology. I was also a photographer or videographer. I would make short films. I grew up in Las Vegas. I was a performer with the Jabbawockeez. I would do different creative gigs. I would do photography, odd creative jobs I’m very intimate with creative practice and telling stories and making people feel things.

During the coronavirus pandemic, that’s when I realized that I could utilize all these skills and build a marketing agency. I also thought it was interesting.

I remember hearing the quote, something like,

“If you control the media, then you can control the consciousness of a population.”

And that really stuck with me.

That’s what inspired my 20 year old self to learn marketing.

I thought: “I know that there are shady people in the world who utilize these skills to take advantage of others, and manipulate people against their own interests. What if I learned those skills for “good”, whatever my own definition of that is.”

Today, I’m 29.

I’m now seeing how that’s exactly what has happened, especially in the case of the Philippines with Maria Ressa’s work in How to stand Up to a Dictator and her journalism that got Duterte removed from office for his extrajudicial killings and the use of social media to spread misinformation.

And with how Sarah wynn Williams documents how she brought foreign policy to Facebook and witnessed how Facebook would partner with authoritarian governments and intentionally manipulate algorithms to get these authoritarian leaders into power for profit.

We also have people like Edward Bernays, the godfather of propaganda and public relations. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and used his uncle’s knowledge of human behavior to design a manufactured reality on the healthiness of smoking cigarettes.

We also have Chase Hughes, who is one of my mentors, who is a former CIA behavioral science expert that created the Human Behavioral Table of Elements, That’s used by the CIA and FBI for their intelligence investigations, dealing with negotiations with people like Al Qaeda and hostage situations.. Talking about how to manufacture and literally control and manipulate people with hypnosis.

Marketers are at the forefront of designing consciousness and shaping reality.

And with social media today, every single one of us is an unconscious marketer. If you have a phone, social media, and post, like comment something online, you are marketing ideas. And we’re all contributing to what the current state of the world is today. Either consciously or unconsciously.

Plato believed that political systems reflect the psychological character of their citizens, in his quote

“Man and city are alike” – Republic, 577d

And so what I want to propose is a new language of advertising that intentionally shapes consciousness in a harmonious and sacred way.

Not in the way that takes advantage of a person, but in a way that allows them to see the genuine value of a way of thinking. A way of being.

Beyond what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism.

Seth Godin said,

“Crafting a story that tricks people into making short-term decisions they regret in the long run is the worst kind of marketing sin.

In every single moment, every single one of us is an advertiser, every single one of us is an unconscious marketer, especially during this time of misinformation where everyone has the ability to put up their phone and share a piece of information and convince people to believe it or not.

So people need to be more conscious of how they market and “sell” their ideas. Their thoughts on politics. And current events. There’s a lot of gifts that I’ve learned from copywriting and being a marketer – one of the reasons why I think people resonate with me is because I know how to speak in a way that people listen and receive.

And I spent the past 5 years of my life studying, articulating, and refining that skill, in direct response. .

So I want to propose, again, a new language of advertising, a new language of marketing.

A new code of ethics, from a decolonial lens.

A post-capitalist lens

Rooted in a fundamental change in the values of the marketer. Built on the ideas of paulo friere, pedagogy oppressed.

That’s it.

What would a post-capitalist marketer look like?

Being that we are all unconscious marketers, perpetuating and creating the container of ideas that we all live in, collectively have created now a fascistic, authoritarian government in the United States.

We all play a part in spreading some kind of information.

If you’re on social media, if you’re commenting on things, if you’re posting something, if you’re sharing something, we’re all unconscious marketers.

So there needs to be a new code of ethics – the language that we use, a new reverence for the language that we use and how it shapes everyone’s consciousness.

A new language of advertising that also doesn’t perpetuate the consciousness of more more more scale scale scale. But this language of advertising has embedded ideologies and communicative frameworks with values that are harmonious with the environment and with each other as people.

This is a big task, and I don’t think this is going to have all the answers or anything, but I think it could begin the premise and the direction of new conversations around a new language, a new harmonious language, a new sacred language – a language of advertising that we can all start using more consciously.