5. Advertising | Humanistic Slogans

What is real and what is not real about all these things and self-expression? Even in a secular sense artists, writers, musicians, different types of artists, they talk about finding their own voice under the layers and layers of cliché, of clichéd artistic expression. They talk about “trying to find your own voice”. Even they know, they have written books “The Anatomy of Influence”, how you are under the influence of those, who thought and expressed ideas before you. So they are talking about how to find your “true” artistic voice, you know, your self-expression. 

So even they recognise that; they know, for the most part, what people express is just their regurgitating what they have heard from others. As Guru Mahārāj once said, what he liked about Saraswati Ṭhākur, one of the things he liked about him, he was not vomiting what he heard from others. So, for the most part, people are just vomiting what they have heard. And where do they hear it? 

A famous playwright, Arthur Miller, when playwrights were important people—it was around the 1940s, 50s,when Americans and Europeans, particularly, looked to playwrights as the interpreters of life, what’s important, and such things as that, and they would think that they present in their plays the big questions, the things we should understand about life and existence and how to proceed, so really they occupied the position of, like, the kavi, the poet in the Sanskrit sense, the interpreters of reality. 

But this man, he wrote his famous play, “Death of a Salesman”, and they keep running it, but they interviewed him a few years back because now this art form is virtually vanished. So they are thinking he is arguably one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, and, “What do you have to say, sir, about it all?” And he said, quite simply and frankly, he said, “Today most people get their concepts about reality or life, or existence from advertising.” He said, “That is where they get their ideas.” 

So we see, people see ads, and what are the ads? Basically, they are humanistic sloganeering. Levi’s “Go forth!”, “You are you!”, “Go forth!” … Humanistic poetry. Nike’s “Just do it!”, L’Oreal’s “I am worth it!” It is all humanism; they are humanistic slogans that basically have pushed the notion, the concept, the idea of God out of the picture and put man as the centre and measure of all things.

As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, “Man, with all of his innumerable defects, he will be the measure of the value of all things.” That is humanism in a nutshell. He calls it “the disastrous deviation of the Enlightenment”, of Enlightenment thinkers. So that is the irony, that this sort of dense darkness is being called Enlightenment: “There is no God. There is no need for God. You are God.”