Heineken's "World Apart" and Corporate Sociopathy
 

Watching the recent Heineken ad I was instantly reminded of the moment when Donald Trump told Caitlyn Jenner she could use any bathroom she liked at Trump Tower. Then I realized it was nowhere near that dignified. The ad is apparently working quite spectacularly. It's a successful ad, in that it made more people feel positively toward the Heineken brand without undermining the company's bottom line. That is its job. To artistically convey a message. Much like propaganda. When propaganda truly has warmed your heart, you know you've been had.

If you think I'm cynical, consider how cynical this ad is.

What actual substantive discussion did we even see the climate change guys engage in? Do you think this is an accident?

How plausible is it that the cause of the sudden(ly visible) political polarization in the present moment honestly can be explained by reference to questions of gender, gender identity and opinions on climate change? How plausible is it that the good people of Heineken or Publicis London think that?

Heineken claimed in a tweet that these are not actors, and that what we see is not staged. Despite the fact that people do seem to have been rather selectively "cast" for their roles in this experiment, it hasn't been staged or scripted. It's simply been directed and edited.

Toby Dye, who directed the commercial for Publicis London, also directed a vile commercial for Persil, a laundry detergent, in which he told prison inmates that they spent more time outside than the average child and filmed their reactions, and then featured a prison guard telling the audience that if kids aren't filthy with dirt and in need of a bath, they haven't played outside hard enough. The man's editing and direction were able to make it look like incarcerated prisoners thought that kids growing up at home had it better than they did behind bars.

Consider moreover some of the things these people you see in the ad probably already agreed on, but which Heineken would never dare allow to be aired in a commercial. For example, a majority of Britons believe that big business and wealthy donors have too much influence on government and politics. I dare any beer company to show beer drinkers of different walks of life agreeing — as in reality they often do — on that point.

What else might these people actually have in common? For one, they were all part of a social experiment whose purpose they did not understand. Presumably they were paid to participate. In other words, if anything actually binds these people together is that they have to work for a living, and really could use the money.

Finally: just how many pairs of people do you suppose Toby Dye actually had to film before he got a handful that could serve as beer ad posterchildren in ways that played to all the right demographics' sensibilities without actually saying anything dangerously substantive?

Publicis London's slogan of “You have to lead the change, if you don’t want to be led by change” sounds rather unintentionally sinister in this light.

If you wonder what the full unedited substance of these people's conversations was, too bad. As like as not, they probably were made at some point to sign away the rights to publicly disclose any of it.

It's true. Heineken is indeed Socially Aware. This ad proves it. All the social awareness of a highly successful sociopath.

I like this very much. Commercial art is the poetry of video/film/digital communications. This works on that level. I'll be back to expand a bit more on my take of this, but wanted to slip in early before the skeptics speak : )

I think it's a great ad. But it doesn't make me want a Heinekin, since I prefer a really good beer, like Sam Adams, or Kilt Lifter.

That being said, this is a FAR cry from the 1970's when stereotypes were used in ads and almost every ad was dripping with stuff that would make the typical university snowflake melt into a dew.

It's an exceptional ad, actually, whether it's scripted, or real. Scripted, or actual, it's still an exceptionally good ad.

You do have a point, that there were no doubt - if this is real - a far greater majority of people who DID NOT gel like these people did. And why would that be? Oh gosh, let me fink on dat one...

D'oh! Because a very large portion of humanity are simply NOT that clever, NOT that open-minded, and NOT that charming. (Which is why global socialism will never work.)

I still don't want a Heinie-kin, since I think it tastes like skunk pee*. But I love the ad.

*No skunks were harmed in the writing of this post, and no skunk pee was consumed.

AZ, at the end of paragraph 6, do you mean "better" or should that be "worse"?

Matt

It looks like he meant "worse". Probably a typo.

Don't worry, Jim - I won't say a word (my head is still in the sand with the ostriches...)

Ann, please expand. What is wrong with this ad? I mean, except for the fact that Heinekin tastes like skunk pee?

By the by, I have started a thread. It's here on GD. Please jump in with whatever thoughts you have. No one will be harmed. Promise.

Mr. Foreman, I hear your points and also find anything like this suspect but I wonder if a total dismissal of it by the sociopath you name Heineken exists as fully and as autonomous as you fear. Probably there are human individuals involved in this for good reasons and with noble intent alongside the expected bean counters and psychologically trained manipulators (who may very well be running the show). Can a fairly healthy and hopeful message like this be totally controlled and reigned in, with its effects in the world reaped only Heineken in the form of sales? Are their more than one actors here, and maybe more than one actions? When propaganda messes with such loaded issues without directing them to a totalizing answers it in danger of being subverted on its own territory? It is hard to imagine a beer ad using less imagery and more actual content than this without becoming self destructive and at odds with the corporations own needs. Which they won't. Ever. Surprise. But again, I don't disagree with your suspicions. Interesting post. Thanks.

Mr. Baurle, the combination of your focus on socialism paired with your seeming lack understanding of its actual workings and forms making your posts a bit strained.

We discussed this before:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=28080

This will explain about the ostriches.

I found the ad pretty silly and simplistic. I'm betting they just didn't use the sequence where a Trump-supporting skinhead with a swastika tattoo beat a Hillary supporter senseless with a Heineken bottle. But since they found such warm, nice and friendly people and put them in a stylized set in front of a production crew of witnesses, and probably paid them for their time, I'm not surprised they managed to behave themselves even as they suffered the final indignity of being served beer with no munchies (let alone a frosted mug).

[quote=Roger Slater;397068] I'm betting they just didn't use the sequence where a Trump-supporting skinhead with a swastika tattoo beat a Hillary supporter senseless with a Heineken bottle. QUOTE]

Roger, he would have used a Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle. Any beer in a green bottle must be made by some damn furriner.

Though up here in Maine, he would have used an Allen's Coffee Brandy bottle.

Thank you, Emitt! I needed a good laugh tonight!

Perhaps you can tutor me as to these "actual workings" of socialism? In this thread or by private message?

And you might want to try the edit button and fix that bit I quoted? I could fix it for you if you want?

Or the sissy antifa university professor with the bicycle lock bashing the head of the Trump supporter. They left that one out, too. Oh wait, that actually happened.

Mr. Baurle, the combination of your focus on socialism paired with your seeming lack understanding of its actual workings and forms making your posts a bit strained.

My Vietnamese ex wife and her extended family of about 35 people had their fill of the "actual workings" of socialism from 1975 to the middle of 1980, when they got on a leaky boat and headed out to sea. They have since had much better lives in Canada, France, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand.

Your doing the same thing as Bill. Socialism has many permutations. State socialism being one of those. What discussion of Viet Nam in the late seventies can you have without examining the repercussions of the misguided domino theory and the alienation of Ho Chi Minh? Is the supposed predilection to violence of a socialist state in Asia in 1970's able to be calculated without adding the previous decade of napalm to the equation? Doubtful at best.

What Bill has spent the last months raving about are ideas in the present spectrum of US politics that have no trackable commonplace with say the Khmer Rouge or Stalinism. The murderous campaigns in those regimes have much more to do with ideas of power, purity, and the fear of counter revolution that with any desire to check the accumulation of wealth of the few. In the Khmer especially, being a regime based on a very tight cult of personality in Pol Pot and Leader Number 2 and focused on a destruction of all art and cultural experience have almost nothing in common with ideas of the so-called regressive left. Socialist experiments in Chiapas and Rojava would be just as applicable if not more so than any of the war time rampages born out of the violent nationalisms of the last century.

It is not mere lip service to say that a human socialism was betrayed by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in the service of the State. If you wish to make leaps like you are making then capitalism is nothing but Sinclair's Jungle or child labor of the turn of the twentieth century. The question is what is innate to the ideas and what is created by particulars of the time. A politic based in the idea of "to each according to her needs", that recognizes that all wealth in the modern world is based in an access to structures lifted up on the shoulders of others is hardly innately connected to the Killing Fields or the Gulag. Vaclav Havel, a man as aware as any body in any boat of the dangers of State socialism said in 1994:

Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together.

A disaster looms for human society and the biomes of the world. The promise that a solution to this disaster which has been brought to its peak by unfettered capitalism (among other players) will look more like that same capitalism and less like the as yet unrealized aspirations of socialist dreamers is, to me, a very strained bluster.

All that serious business aside, if you don't find conflating the women on the View, some loner adjunct goofball with a bike lock, and Stalin with the idea that we cannot allow the wealth disparity and the war on the worlds resources to go uncontested, maybe even to the point of blood, strained gobblygook then I don't know what to tell you. There is long history of many permutations of these ideas on the left.

It is no accident that when there is any real danger of a human Socialism coming to be as with Allende, Spain or now Rojava the interests of concentrated power on all sides unite against it. Bill speaks of the true left with obviously no experience wrestling with the presence of say Gramsci, or Luxemborg, or Kropotkin. I think the charge of lack of depth to his argument stands even without noticing how often his phrases and language seem parroted right out internet talking points of the far right despite their being sandwiched in constant claims of the center.

Truth is I am no anything-ist myself. I think these categories are way past obsolete. But I respect their arguments and find nothing remotely resembling the actual Left in the windmills Bill is charging at. Stupid internet-filled fans rooting for the Blue Jersies, maybe. But no one I hear speaking at any meetings where serious tactics are being discussed.

Exactly.

Emitt,

I think socialism can work on a small scale, as in tribal societies, and in things like work farms and communes, but it has been proven to fail time and time again when tried in large, industrialized populations. It has cost millions and millions of lives, and has caused untold suffering and deprivation. It isn't that it's good in theory, but hasn't been put into practice correctly. It is rotten in theory, which is why it fails in practice.

And hey, I'm not exactly the first guy to have noticed this! Hello!

Von Mises predicted that Marxism would be a total disaster, in 1922.

Mao and Stalin proudly referred to their politics as communist. Americans find it convenient to refer to it as socialist, thus blanketing everything to the left of capitalism as of a piece with those blood-soaked tyrants. I will go further and say that Ho Chi Minh and the state he created were also communist.
Western Europe has been running what are in essence social democracies for several decades - for instance, with universal healthcare. Anyone is of course welcome to refer to this as failed socialist experiments, but I see value there which the United States - with, for instance, its crap healthcare statistics and extreme wealth inequalities - does not match.
OK, that's my 2c.
Oh - I'll just add, with Orwell, that language matters.

As I said in my prior post, socialist systems can work, on smaller scales, and are even what I would call necessary, for tribal communities in particular, where there is no such thing as rich and poor.

But it's been proven not to work on a very large, industrial scale.

As for healthcare: there are still, state by state, systems in place to provide care for people under a certain income. In Arizona, people who have no income, or too little income, apply here and usually will meet criteria and receive care:

https://www.azahcccs.gov/

And, of course, that's just one state, and the most notoriously conservative state, at that. Every state has the same programs which provide low or no-cost healthcare to those who cannot pay.

I worked in a hospital for six years, and I've been a low-income wage earner since 2012, when I quit that job. I know of literally no-one, and I mean no-one, who cannot receive at least emergency and/or urgent care, even if they haven't got a cent.

Sure, millions of people owe thousands and thousands of dollars to various hospitals. But the collection agencies are not that aggressive, and most people can ignore those debts indefinitely.

**I'm one dem peeple! Yessiree Bob! Hell yeeah.

Good morning Bill,

Western Europe to my mind is not a tribal community...
I volunteered for nine years at a homeless day shelter in Indiana. Yes, our clients got emergency healthcare, by going to the ER, waiting several hours, and being seen by an MD for any ailment they had. They would then discard the bill when it arrived. This does not seem to me an ideal system, not least in economic terms. The cost (MDs cost money) is of course spread out onto the taxpaying and insurance-paying community, it is not magically eaten by mysterious forces.
As for outcomes, I am sure you are familiar with how US life expectancy, etc., rank in world terms. Not well.

Cheers,
John

We might also review the American prison system, in which unfettered capitalism plays I believe an important role. To name but one other example. It is sui generis; perhaps China is the closest large-scale equivalent.

Bakunin, the socialist, predicted the same in 1848.

One of the strengths of the present form of capitalism is its ability to export the suffering in such a way that you can write post number 16 without feeling any sense of hypocrisy. It called the Pinochet Syndrome.

The incongruity of socialist ideas with the scale of the nation-state is similar to the incongruity of most dreams of decency and compassion with that same life-threatening scale. John's points in his last post are well taken but the real trauma unfolding is across lines of species. Big agriculture is the Rosetta stone for translating Capital's actual promise. Go behind the closed doors and look it in the eye.

Emitt:"Go behind the closed doors and look it in the eye."

There's the rub.

You're damn right I don't feel any sense of hypocrisy, because there is nothing hypocritical in what I'm writing, in this thread, or anywhere else.

I have written this so many times, but you will ignore it, as so many of the others have done, who continually describe me as being right wing, which I am not.

Here goes:

I'm a classical liberal, look it up if you don't know what it means. I am left on some issues, and right on others. I am non-partizan. I think about each and every issue individually, weighing as much information from all sides, from every source I can find. I am not unique in this. There are MANY people like me, like Dave Rubin, who I regard as being one of the most rational thinkers currently in the public arena.

Now, I have explained this so many times it's ridiculous. I don't make assumptions about you, so from now on you will kindly not make assumptions about me.

As for Pinochet. Can you please search my posts, and quote any passage that would give any reasonable person the idea that I would admire or support a tyrant like that? This is a direct challenge to you. Please find anything that I've written, in any thread, on any subject, that gives you the idea that I think right wing militant murderers are a good thing?

I am for human rights, free speech, and a free market economy, first and foremost. Are you against these things? What is your position on the theory of rights? Are you okay with rights? How about free speech? How about a free market?

As for this Pinochet syndrome - I have read this bit about it, and it does not apply to me in the least. Did you mean to suggest that it applied to me? Or have I misunderstood you? Please explain further, and be very clear.

If you'd rather not go into it here, you may PM me, and/or I can give you my email address.

John,

Yes, capitalism has its problems, no doubt. I am no fan of greedy money-grubbers, and I have a major problem with big banks, which I think are now in the business of robbing people rather than helping them save money and gain financial security. The problem with a free market is the same as the problem with communism: human nature.

Unfortunately, a lot of people can be completely comfortable making millions of dollars doing virtually nothing. I am not one of those people. I'm pretty sure that if I won the lottery and got a hundred million, I'd give ninety percent of it to family, friends, and worthy charities, keeping only what I needed to be happy. Don't forget, I've been subsisting on barely 20K per year since 2012. Luckily for me, I have inexpensive hobbies - reading, music, writing - and I live like a monk, essentially, with no social life because I'm socially inept, and I don't even go to restaurants, etc. I'm a bookworm, and I can be happy with a bare minimum. I'm also good with money, and whatever vices I have, like drinking, I can do in moderation. Some people are, frankly, absolutely terrible with money, and are irresponsible.

As a classical liberal, with a libertarian bent, I believe very strongly in personal responsibility and accountability. If you don't have a lot of money, don't spend it on lottery tickets, or on frivolous pleasures. Don't hang out in bars, or the beach, throwing your money away. If you make 12 bucks an hour, why is your body covered in colorful tattoos, which are expensive, and why are you making a 400 dollar car payment? I ask people I meet, hey, how much did that sleeve cost you? Just for one arm covered in tats, we're talking potentially thousands of dollars. And these are the people who will complain about not having enough money for food. Oh come on, get real! Why do you need that new Ford F-150? Hey dude, I need a truck! is the answer. Really? Why the F do you need a truck? And these people will complain when they run out of money. I live on the bottom, and I am not exaggerating in the least.

Yes, you're right, people ignoring hospital bills is NOT an ideal system. I am not advocating this kind of thing, just saying that if you spend several hours in the ER, and have an X-ray, or a test with an expensive piece of medical equipment, and are slapped with an outrageously high bill, then you can't blame people for not impoverishing themselves in an attempt to pay these exorbitant charges. I don't advocate making NO payments, but I would not encourage low wage earners to try and make large payments to these already wealthy companies.

I was in a big hospital for four days in Vegas, served awful food, and given terrible, cold, unconcerned care, only recently. My bedsheets weren't even changed in all that time. My left arm was bruised black and blue and swollen from having blood drawn every six hours. I was in pain, and they wouldn't give me anything for pain because it required a physician's order, and at that time I didn't have a doctor. I have a skin condition, which requires hydrocortisone ointment, especially if I don't shave. They couldn't even give me that without a doctor's order, so my face looked like a pizza, red and inflamed. I asked for a razor, and they gave me this plastic thing with one blade that tore up my face. GOD only knows how much I was charged for that piece of junk.

After all this I get a bill for 16,000 dollars. Well guess what, I have made small payments towards that bill, but it's going to take quite some time before I even make a dent in it! And I'm not terribly guilty over it, either, especially after seeing my ambulance bill, which was obscene.

NO, it's NOT a great system, but at least poor people will receive care. NO-ONE can be turned away from an emergency room in Arizona, and probably not in any other state. ANY person receives care first, then they get to the billing questions.

Good evening Bill,

As you say and illustrate, with your moving story, the United States healthcare system is far from ideal. I suggest that it is worth comparing with the universal healthcare in place in every other first-world country without exception. Not only is healthcare cheaper in the rest of the developed world; its outcomes are generally better (life expectancy and so forth).
I use this as a key example of the difference between unfettered capitalism and the social democracy common elsewhere. The American public has been taught not to distinguish socialism from communism, and even social democracy is often tarred with the same brush. This I find both unfortunate, immiserating, and in the strict sense Orwellian; the propagandist language is unsupported by fact. For instance, to name one example, communists in the Spanish Civil War were extremely good at distinguishing socialists from themselves, as the socialists' dead bodies testify. Again, Orwell is good on this.
This point applies equally to the communist regime of Ho Chi Minh, or that of Fidel Castro. It may be convenient for an American to call them socialist - and many have done so - but it does Lenin, not to mention Marx, an injustice against which I suspect they would loudly protest.
I will reiterate: Western Europe runs social democracies. Its citizens like that, and health outcomes, for instance, soundly beat those of the U.S. Facts are facts, and worth knowing about, as I'm sure you appreciate.

Cheers,
John

Thanks, John.

I have nothing to quibble about with regard to your last post. Very well stated.

Thank you, Bill!

I appreciate our common ground here.

Cheers,
John

If we want to think outside the proverbial "Box", I would suggest we can achieve single payer health care in the U.S. through regional healthcare systems networked together. It allows for proper scaling achieved in western European countries and with Scandinavian countries in particular.