I'm reading Seth Godin's Permission Marketing and he brings up the difference between Interruption Marketing and Permission Marketing. Interruption Marketing is when you interrupt people from what they are doing in order to ask them to pay attention to something else. Permission Marketing is when you build your product around a consumer base that is expressing a need that you design your product to fulfill. If you've read The Tipping Point then you already know that as soon as Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen get ahold of a good message, it can spark a social epidemic and change everything. Paul Johnson, in A History of the American People, refers to the three times it has happened in American history as The Great Awakenings. Great Awakenings are periods of great social upheaval that are surpassed by spiritual awakening. These are points of significant sociological choice--even the smallest actions can have the greatest efffect. But Great Awakenings are not always good things because by this definition, a Great Awakening took place in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s; we know how this one ended. If the right individuals are making the right choices at the right places in time during these critical periods of social evolution, humanity soars. But even if the right individuals are making the wrong choices at the right places in time it is essentially the same as if the wrong choices had been made all the time anyway--because the stakes are so high and the smallest actions carry the greatest repercussions. But none of this stuff is new. These things have been said time and time before by many great religious leaders--but their approach has changed over time as well. It's like that haunting opening line in Pink Floyd's opus The Final Cut: Tell me true, tell me why was Jesus crucified. Was it for this that Daddy died? Was Jesus practicing interruption marketing at the wrong time in history? It was pretty dangerous for someone to upset a powerful political institution at a time of near revolt, especially when all you had to offer was the secret to spiritual and emotional freedom beyond the laws of man. The economics and politics of man were and still are the primary focus of society and the spiritual and emotional needs of individuals are just now becoming to be realized as having enormous impact on the standard of living for the entire human species. Politics is beginning to yield and so is economics as the emotional and spiritual needs of the individual are helping to bring balance to the politics and economics that are still threatening to throw our entire species into a serious downhill evolutionary drop--possibly into the abyss. It is the responsibility of the Strong-Willed Individual in this world to step up and do the right things at the right places in time. The reward for this is that the Strong-Willed Individual usually gets to live cushier existences with more ameneties. In my mind this is rightly so because they are Atlas holding the world in place instead of shrugging it off by making the wrong choices at the wrong or right places in time. What I'm basically saying here is: Conservatives are people motivated primarily by economics and politics. Conservatives should be running the government and must be able to balance individual emotional and spiritual concerns with the political and economic large scale repercussions of the Universal Sociological Maxim that seemingly small individual actions towards other individuals can render enormous social impact for the good or the bad. (e.g. The American Revolution vs. The Nazi twelve-year rule). Liberals are people motivated primarily by emotion and spiritual concerns and who, realizing that economics and politics are destroying the world, are lashing out against the conservatives who are barely holding things in place. Liberals should be concentrating their efforts in the fields of education and art. Liberals must NOT view education nor art through limited political and economic lenses. The idea here is that those with only limited access to our world's valuable resources become inspired by liberal education and art so that the talented among them have the knowledge, experience and skill sets to be able to make the right choices at the right places in time and thereby raise the value of themselves, their friends and family, their country and all of humanity in the world's economic and political eyes. If Jesus would have practiced Permission Marketing rather than Interruption Marketing, he probably wouldn't have gotten himself murdered by religious politicians just fighting to hold things together--some things haven't changed in two thousand years. |
