"Sanely applied advertising could remake the world"
About this Quote
The provocation in Stuart Chase's line is the word sanely. Advertising, in his era, was already proving it could rearrange desire faster than politics could rearrange laws. Chase doesn't marvel at that power; he tries to quarantine it. "Sanely applied" is a moral leash on a machine he knows is otherwise reckless: if persuasion can manufacture cravings, it can also manufacture consent for public goods, thrift, health, even peace. The phrase "remake the world" borrows the grandiosity of utopian politics, then hands the tools to copywriters.
The subtext is a Progressive-era wager dressed in 20th-century mass media: experts can steer society if they can steer attention. Chase wrote in a moment when radio, national magazines, and the new science of public relations were turning the public into an addressable mass. Post-World War I disillusionment, the boom-and-bust anxieties of industrial capitalism, and the rise of "consumer engineering" made it plausible that the same apparatus selling cigarettes could sell civic responsibility.
But Chase's optimism also exposes its own vulnerability. Advertising's core skill isn't truth; it's salience. It elevates one slice of reality until it feels like reality itself. So "sanely applied" is doing enormous work, quietly admitting that the industry lacks an internal brake. The line reads like a plea to redirect a cultural force that had already escaped its creators: don't abolish persuasion, domesticate it. Chase is imagining a benevolent propaganda for a rational society, and you can hear the tension between democratic ideals and the technocratic temptation to manage the public for its own good.
The subtext is a Progressive-era wager dressed in 20th-century mass media: experts can steer society if they can steer attention. Chase wrote in a moment when radio, national magazines, and the new science of public relations were turning the public into an addressable mass. Post-World War I disillusionment, the boom-and-bust anxieties of industrial capitalism, and the rise of "consumer engineering" made it plausible that the same apparatus selling cigarettes could sell civic responsibility.
But Chase's optimism also exposes its own vulnerability. Advertising's core skill isn't truth; it's salience. It elevates one slice of reality until it feels like reality itself. So "sanely applied" is doing enormous work, quietly admitting that the industry lacks an internal brake. The line reads like a plea to redirect a cultural force that had already escaped its creators: don't abolish persuasion, domesticate it. Chase is imagining a benevolent propaganda for a rational society, and you can hear the tension between democratic ideals and the technocratic temptation to manage the public for its own good.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
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