Organic Frog

I heard this conversation when I was in Paris last weekend and I found it quite representative of the way the French are dealing with communication and more specifically with advertising.

This is it in context: I was in a Virgin Megastor buying a couple of French books when I overheard a conversation between a man and his girlfriend where having about a CD.

Man: ‘This CD is great, I’ve seen the ad on TV’

Woman: ‘Come on it should be crap if you’ve seen it on TV’

Man: ‘If the CD is advertised on TV it doesn’t necessarily make it crap!’

I find this quite representative of the love / hate relationship the French have with brands and advertising.
The pragmatic assumption that someone can have when seeing a piece of communication is that the ad is embellishing reality? (Which is fair enough). Here the assumption is that advertising is evil by essence.

I think that the root of this behaviour goes beyond just branding and advertising and can be found with the relationship people have with capitalism.
An interesting way of looking at Capitalism can be found in André Comte-Sponville’s book: Le capitalisme est-il moral? (Is Capitalism moral? His book is deconstructing Capitalism’s cliché.

What the philosopher is demonstrating in his book is that capitalism is neither moral nor immoral but amoral. Indeed as an economic system Capitalism is outside of any moral concerns.
To demonstrate this point he has developed four universal orders which are made up of the following:

• The technical, economical and scientific order
• The political and juridical order
• The moral order
• And the ethical order
• (A fifth order is possible if people are religious)

This distinction is very interesting because it allows you to bear in mind that capitalism isn’t bad by essence.