4. Nike, L'Oreal and Me

Modern advertising is saturated with humanistic sloganeering. And what do I mean by that? Like Nike, “Just do it.” What does that mean, “Just do it”? It implies there is some conscience you have, some self–restraint, an internal process you go through before you decide to do something. They are saying, “Don’t listen to it, don’t think about it, just do it!” Why?

I have a series of ads that answer this question. So, Nike makes that proposal, who gives the answer? L’Oreal, “Because I am worth it.” Why should I just do it? Because I am worth it, that is why. But of all the ads I ever saw, the most blatant, naked assertion of humanistic sloganeering was from a company whose slogan was “Total indulgence. Zero guilt.” It was about Weight Watchers. It doesn’t matter what it was about, but they had the audacity to make that their slogan “Total indulgence. Zero guilt.” No conscience, just indulge without conscience.

Who does things without conscience? Generally they are called animals. The animals, they are not crying when they are eating the babies of others, they are not stopping to think, “Oh, these babies are so cute, why should we do this?” Never. There was a YouTube video recently, where they say, “After this lioness killed a deer, and then it took the calf”, and all the people went, “Oh, look! She is taking the little deer calf back to her place”, and someone else pointed out, “Yes, and after playing with it for a while, as cats do, she will eat it. They will kill it and offer it to her children.”

So, a lack of conscience; of considering why we do things; self–restraint; what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called in his famous “World Split Apart” address, “What is needed is serene voluntary self–restraint.” Serene voluntary self–restraint. That is interesting. You could say that is the definition of tapasyā. As Śrīla Prabhupād used to say and has in his Bhāgavatam purport, “What is tapasyā? Voluntarily inconveniencing oneself for the sake of spiritual realisation.” You will be inconvenienced by living in this world. We will have to suffer by living in this world, it is inevitable, it is unavoidable, but a spiritually progressive person will voluntarily inconvenience themselves, will voluntarily undergo certain types of “suffering” for the sake of spiritual advancement.