Indeed, wrote Peter Jaret, “a healthy diet, quality sleep
and regular exercise can help any man build muscle, improve libido and raise
energy levels. No prescription required” (AARP Bulletin, Jul-Aug, 2014). Jaret’s
article, “Low-T: Real Problem or Ad-Driven Fad?” contests current marketing
protocol targeting American men. This is standard advertising practice that
flies in the face of governmental regulations on truth in advertising, et al.
Marketing ploys would have us believe, “Millions of men 45
or older may have low T … So talk to your doctor about low T.” His rationale
includes this warning from Dr. Stephen Woloshin, professor of medicine at the
Dartmouth Institute for health Policy and Clinical Practice, who calls this practice, “the mother of all disease mongering.”
An increasing mountain of evidence supports what I already
knew deep in my gut: business and the insatiable thirst for greater profits has
led to the media taking the public captive and feeding it an increasing dosage
of narcissisms, when our society is already addicted to me-ism in all of its
variant forms.
Sex sells anything! The result is you cannot buy a new car
without being tantalized by a sensuous woman to lust after, or be seduced by.
You cannot watch a ball game without reading a Viagra sign to remind you that
if your sex drive is decreasing with age, you are abnormal rather than simply experiencing
normal aging. Never mind the fact that we have a real social problem today with
an overabundance of sexual predators and that our families and children are
under constant threat!
These are deeply symptomatic of a far greater problem. Our
troubled society has deep-seated difficulty with sorting fact from fiction and
reason from feeling. Data shows, suggests Jaret, that data from Internal
Medicine (IMS) Health shows “T sales rose from $324 million in 2002 to nearly
$2.3 billion in 2012. Sales could hit $5 billion by 2018.” What this really means
is that by simply adjusting the truth to accommodate false illusions, lying to
the public has become both acceptably legal and very profitable.” It further
suggests that contemporary political protocol allows “lying” as an accepted
behavior and business practice.
Amid our distrust today of government, and even truth
itself; there remains little truth anywhere, because everywhere truth is re-packaged
and slanted into the skins of justification to produce a product of
phoney-baloney that marketers have found both highly productive and grossly profitable
The net result is an increasing amount of distrust of everything and everybody
everywhere. The end product is where we find ourselves – living in a truthless and
ruthless society where truth is only what one perceives it to be; we no longer have
moral absolutes.
Need I go further? It has come to the point that I am so
dissatisfied with my culture that I am thoroughly tempted to disconnect my
cable and flatly refuse to longer participate in that captive audience owned by the
advertisers. They don’t know that they have already offended me to the point that
their commercials turn me away from further purchasing their product; they lied
to me and betrayed my trust!
While I cannot extricate myself from this predicament, I can
become a very self-determining individual that will selectively buy by my
standards rather than theirs, that I will buy only what I need for my day to
day existence, and that I will as much as is within me base my choices upon my
principles of financial management, which in my case begins with being a good
financial steward before the God of the Bible.
When Jesus uttered his famous words, “you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32), I suggest he was not
simply proclaiming his belief in an antiquated provincial religion; he was
affirming the ultimate ground of reality anchored in God Almighty. Jesus was
reminding humanity of an ultimate realm of moral absolutes; he was affirming
that compromising these absolutes will ultimately destroy all that is of value
in our humanity and our human relationships.
We can philosophize all we want over this issue, from any
and all perspectives of religion, ethics and morality but lying is a deceptive
practice of human behavior. When accepted as a social norm it will eventually
destroy all bases for our living together in any kind of social relationship. It
is slowly destroying America and adulterating our so-called democracy. It
allows a fast-growing cancer to speed up its growth as it slowly destroys this
global body we call our world civilization.
From Warner’s World, the next time you are tempted to accept-or-offer
a slanted half-truth as a whole perspective, consider the lie that destroys our common ground for relating to one another.
Walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com
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