What have you forgotten?

 The 12 Biggest Life Secrets Forgotten by Mankind, this post prompted me to consider what we left behind when we grew up, put away our toys and became realistic adults. It's so much easier to ignore what we know when everyone else seems to be doing the same. I'm not sure if I agree with this list, but the idea got me thinking.

What's really in my face now is that we're forgotten that the world is not a either/or place. The universe is not a zero-sum game where every gain in one area must be balanced by a loss somewhere else. This play out in all the big areas a conflict in the world, in politics and business and personal relationships. At the heart of every conflict, there is some person or group that insists that there is only one acceptable outcome, and any other solution is a total loss, for them.

The job of business and advertising is to "create" demand. The businesses of the world spend untold billions every year to create a demand for their products. But they only care about demand that they can fulfill, everything else is drowned out by the incessant hype of advertising. Things that we need, that may even be essential to life, are pushed aside and ignored. especially if they might conflict with the illusion of endless growth without consequences. This is all from the belief that if you win, I lose.

Single use plastic bags are a good example. Nobody needs these bags, they are not essential to anyones life. Not only can we all survive just fine without them, but they cause an amazing amount of environmental damage, clogging water ways and sewers, choking wildlife and they just look awful. But it's a fight to get rid of them. People want to protect their businesses. But the only reason those business exist in the first place is because everyone "forgot" that a single-use bag doesn't just go "poof" and disappear after it's used. We also "forgot" about the other business that were displaced by these bags. The plastic bag people never seemed to worry about all the people their product put out of work, or would be put back to work if their product went away. We're supposed to forget about that. 

In a way, you could say that the plastic bag makers want welfare. They made a poor choice when they got into the business without considering the obvious, long-term, effects of their product, and now they want everyone else to pay the price of cleaning up the mess so they can stay in business. You know that they would scream bloody murder if they were handed a bill every month for the cost of picking up and recycling all those bags. They want everyone to "forget" about all the mess and damage they their product and only think about their bottom line. The fact that this is even an argument is a testament to how easily we can be persuaded to forget what someone with money wants us to forget.