buy this

so, i was eating a bag of chips on the bus this afternoon. and i was reading the bag, because hey, i'm on a bus, and there are only so many things you can do on a bus that won't get you arrested... or something... anyway... there on the package, in bold lettering, highlighted, was the following:
NO TRANS FATS!
EXCELLENT SOURCE OF VITAMIN E!
NO CHOLESTEROL!

i gotta tell you, i was excited. but i had to check it out. went to the nutritional information box. and sure enough, if you were to eat this whole bag of chips in a day (250 grams is a lot of chips, but let's not delude ourselves into believing there are not many, many people out there capable of such a feat), you would get 250 per cent of your daily recommended percentage of vitamin E. great. can't go wrong with vitamin E. but that's not the whole story... it never is. because, if you were indeed to devour this entire bag of chips, you would also manage to consume 115 per cent of your daily recommended intake of fat. still excited? that's marketing for you.
can you imagine if we did this in every facet of society? like perscription medicines? as it stands now, side-effects are the FIRST thing that people look for, want to know about, ask about until they feel they're safe. you wouldn't just take something that fought acne, say, but gave you rampant and uncontrollable diarhea in the process. that's not a good trade off. however, if we were to apply marketing's concepts to this, we'd hide the unfortunate side of the drug until it was too late. not only that, we'd probably make it into something good. "fights acne, and completely prevents constipation!" or something equally horrid. we are probably the first society in history so wrapped up in profit that we could bill a block heater that often bursts into flames as something that "exceeds any and all heat output expectations!"
but meanwhile, cars are burning everywhere, children are getting fat on vitamin E, and we're all turning a blind eye to all the things we don't want to see, convinced that they don't matter until we have no choice but to see them. and by then, thank God, it's too late, we can't do anything about the problem but we can benefit from some retroactive sense of morality, like we would have tried to do something if only we would have known... completely forgetting that the ignorance was self-imposed. it's all doublethink, and the concept behind truly functioning doublethink is to forget you're doing it while relying on it to get through the things that require it.
this would all be bad enough if we didn't perpetuate the problems. but we do. not only do we ignore the bad and sell the good, but we do it knowingly, and a lot of the time, we're selling things to peole that we don't even use ourselves. we've become a society of toothpaste salesmen with yellow teeth, fat people selling diet pills, and illeterates peddling books. and nowhere is this more prevalant than in the church, where the rules are supposed to be different, but arn't. it's expected in most of society, it's all going to hell in a handbasket, and we know it. but a church is supposed to be on a different plane, the people there are supposed to be telling us how to cut down on fat intake, but they're still selling us chips with vitamin E, just like everyone else. they're a different flavor, but at the end of the day, they'll still be a contributing factor to your heart failure.
so what, then? be less greedy, realize there's a point at which personal extravagance comes at too high a cost, understand that production can't keep up to ever increasing demand without cutting corners, that if we diminishing the visibility of consequences while increasing the actual consequences we'll all suffer in the end?
if not, come over to my house... i'm serving chips.