If you are selling [escape], you would work to increase demand on your product.
Making life as miserable as possible for everyone just increases demand for your product, increasing profit, increasing power.
Why would you ever publish something positive again, once you figure that out?
Apply same business strategy to drug cartels, alcohol cartels, human trafficking cartels, social media cartels.
Logically, they make natural partners to media with respect to selling misery, selling escape at the same time.
The biggest threat to their profitability is hope, love, joy, faith, and always will be.
I can fight that.
With a smille on my face and faith in my heart.
Literally.
Gotta keep people running on that hedonic treadmill, otherwise the whole system falls apart. Happiness wants nothing, but misery and fear will buy anything you sell in hopes of a cure.
Wonderful post. We’ve been conditioned to be in a state of endless craving. There’s a great, old song that speaks to this. Satisfied Mind.
Remember Lot's Wife: Diabolical Narcissism, the Overarching Global Pathology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4dtcwv5dPM
I love personal epiphanies. Thank you for sharing yours.
Happy people don't make good socialists. They don't make good revolutionaries.
Also, there's a name to the concept you brought up. Think it is Snake Oil. Merchants used to sell it, to poison the customer, then, sell them the cure. The most potent of these are those that get you addicted or hooked in some manner. James Lindsay talks about this concept in relation to wokeness.