Granfalloon tactics

People Who Drive Silver or Blue Cars Should NOT Read This

Nice piece, although I disagree with a part of the conclusion;

You are not the brand of car you drive. You are not the label on your shirt. You are not the political party you vote for, the stores you shop at, nor the type of house you live in. You can adore sports and hate Gatorade, you can love God and not be a member of their church, and choosy mothers don't necessarily choose Jif.

You are the stuff of your deeply held beliefs, the stuff of the accomplishments you worked hard for, the stuff of whatever you and you alone define as truly important.

The second paragraph above is where he is wrong. You are not your deeply held beliefs, nor are you the "stuff of the accomplishments you worked hard for", or "stuff of whatever you and you alone define as truly important". His position is problemmatic for two reasons.

First, your deeply held beliefs and the accomplishments you work for and view as important can and are manipulated by advertising and other types of psycho-social manipulation. As if you really have a choice. He is violating his own combating the first rule of marketing rule., that is "that nobody believes they can be manipulated by marketers all that much. But that's the key reason why marketers can manipulate them so much." The author thinks that he can really define who he is.

Second, and much more profoundly, it is absurd to define yourself as he describes at all. You are you thoughts, your beliefs? As your beliefs change do you? Are you really a different person (ontologically speaking) when you are in a good mood or bad mood, or if you covert religions? What the heck would it mean to say we are our beliefs? The beliefs in our brains connected with our bodies that are influenced by our environment? Where would these beliefs begin and end. I think you get my point.

The same can be said for his other statements. You are the stuff you work hard for? This is even more absurd. Besides such an unclear definition (stuff?) this position quickly unravels under scrutiny. What about all the stuff of the stuff I didn't work hard for. What about the stuff I got for my birthday? The point here, I guess, is not just how arbitrary his choice of self-identification is, it also has nothing to do with who you really are in any non-superficial sense.

Now, am I going to tell you I think you really are? No. I could give you my theoretical mumbo-jumbo about it, but you wouldn't believe me. So, this is what I recommend if you are interested. Sit down and try to think it through. Ask yourself, who am I? And try to come up with an answer, and then follow it through until its logical conclusion. Are you your thoughts? If so, where do they start and where do they end? Try it, it is an interesting exercise.