Screw the Golden Years #6

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Madison Avenue raised Wall Street’s Gold Standard from feces to fantasy — from poo-poo to foo foo.

The Mint Act of 1792 established silver as the dollar unit, not gold.

Gold was based on the value of the silver dollar, not the other way around.

Gold was reckoned as the money of the rich, and it was owned principally by the aristocrats of the day.

Wilson Bryan Key (The Age of Manipulation: The Con in Confidence, The Sin in Sincere, 1989) wrote …

“The symbolic meaning of gold includes an identification with solar light, often comparable to the sun, divine intelligence, a fruit of the spirit, supreme illumination, constancy, dignity, an elixir of life, excellence, love, perfection, power, purity, wealth, and wisdom. In the folklore of many cultures, a person is frequently drawn up to heaven by a gold chain that binds heaven to earth. These symbolic or archetypal meanings for gold — interpreted somewhat differently by men and women — have been traced back to the beginning of recorded history. The preciousness of gold has always been in its symbolic value rather than in its functional or monetary use.”

One specific ad alone cost International Gold Corporation (renamed Lode-Star Gold, Inc. in 2014) millions of dollars.

According to Wilson Bryan Key …

“The ad appears unexplainable and unjustifiable as a multi-million-dollar investment at any conscious level of consideration. Published in numerous national magazines, the ad cost IGC several million dollars, not including the $25,000 to $50,000 for the art production. The symbolic concept of gold is a powerful force in any of the world’s cultures at the conscious level but far more powerful at the unconscious level. Directed at women, the ad stimulates strong — though nonspecific — conscious feelings.

“The seemingly inept, out-of-focus ad is only worth the money invested if consumers rush out to the nearest jewelry store and buy. Like most ads, the layout was designed to be read in a few seconds, or less. The ad details may never, at any point, surface consciously in a reader’s perception.”

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Wilson Bryan Key (1925-2008) was an expert in subliminal persuasion, and a friend of media guru Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

Professor Key wrote four books; the first sold over a million copies, and his next three sold a million copies collectively …

1) Subliminal Seduction: Are You Being Sexually Aroused By This Picture? a.k.a. Ad Media’s Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, 1974

2) Media Sexploitation, 1976

3) The Clam-Plate Orgy: And Other Subliminal Techniques for Manipulating Your Behavior, 1980 (reprinted as Subliminal Ad-Ventures in Erotic Art, 1992

4) The Age of Manipulation: The Con in Confidence, The Sin in Sincere, 1989

Mainstream Media’s “useful idiots” have gone out of their way to disparage and discredit Professor Key, including The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams, who wrote slights like …

“Wilson Bryan Key is the kind of guy who could find something suggestive in a dial tone.”

This guy doesn’t have sex embedded in his pictures, he’s got sex embedded in the brain.”

(Continue)