We're Being Hounded not by Ads but by Signals

     At a recent OLLI class, we took up the effects of marketing research upon our decision-making.  Marketing as a scientific study is an offshoot of psychology, and as such is just as devoted to Jeremy Bentham's pleasure principle, a fundamental proposition in psychology, that mankind searches the pleasurable and avoids the painful.
     As applied to our buying habits, we want items that give us pleasure, i.e., stimulate in our brains feelings of pleasure. We buy the shirt whose color patterns we take delight in.  But the same line of reasoning applies to the tenets and beliefs we hold.  Thus, a listener calls in to a radio personality whose views make him popular over the airwaves in order to agree with him!  Together, they are sharing a pleasurable moment because they hold to something, some belief, they both cherish  for whatever reason. It is important to stress that the reason that the psychologist may attribute to the moment of pleasure shared by host and listener will differ markedly from that the participants will proffer.  That is because the psychologist qua scientist provides a psychological reason while those involved offer an experiential, reasoning account.
     The point being that the scientific explanation for the sharing is not that the experiencers would give.  What makes Snowden so important is that he offers an explanation for supposed underhanded snooping by such agencies as the NSA, which those who may be victimized have no knowledge of.  It's closer to psychological explanation of human action and belief but far removed from "his reasons" offered by espousers of the belief.
      Bentham's acknowledged aim in urging psychological research is to provide mankind a wealth of pleasurable experiences during his lifetime.  Ultimately, he will enjoy being alive to its greatest extent.  But then that raises the question whether mankind would also experience great joy at some time in the ending of his own life, as did those who drank the Kool-Aid as their final act.