Although the multinational rebranded Dunkin’ now sells countless numbers of their products all over the world, a purchase from most any small local doughnut shop will reveal the falseness of the claim that Dunkin’ actually makes real doughnuts. (Unfortunately, the local shop is probably spelling doughnut incorrectly, just like the big corporate chain. Such is the modern perversion of American English.) Go buy some doughnuts from your local shop, and you will understand the difference between a real doughnut and an artificial donut.

The amazing American innovation of giant fast food corporations has corrupted many other forms of food, of course. Compare the artificial chemical concoctions of what McDonald’s calls hamburgers with the real, meaty, simple, traditional hamburgers that most old-fashioned sit-down family restaurants still serve. (The sloppy disgusting creations of burger excess that are served by such large restaurant-bar chains as Applebee’s are another matter entirely.)

This is artificial food that masses of brainwashed people have been conditioned to crave by the clever marketing of American advertising companies, generating vast amounts of revenue for the creators of the fast-food crap. And keep in mind that the cravings promoted by the ubiquitous advertising campaigns are supplemented by the physically and emotionally addictive ingredients that the big corporations deviously add to the foods.

I believe that this concept of successful American marketing of artificiality can be extended far beyond the fast food business to encapsulate almost every sector of the giant-corporation-controlled U.S. economy today. In fact, I propose that what is often called America’s national and international “greatness” can be summarized with this equation: Artificiality x Marketing = American Greatness. A cruder way of articulating this concept would be to refer to The Triumph of Bullshit, which T.S Eliot once hilariously wrote about in a much different context.

Bullshit, within the corporate context that I am discussing here, can be viewed as the primary domestic product and export product of the United States today. I mean, we are hardly known for manufacturing steel or any other real things anymore, like we were back when the United States was a real country, instead of just a military with a stock market like it basically is today.

Consider the cell phones, “smart” phones, and other technological electronic gadgetry that enable the online, virtual connections to which the multitudes are now psychologically addicted. Mass marketing has convinced the masses of people today that they need these artificial corporation-made technologies to live, just as much as they need Mother Nature’s oxygen. Moreover, the corporate economic structure is now set up so that if you don’t use at least some of these electronic technologies, you effectively cannot even survive and function in the modern-day world.

So, a conscious, non-braindead person (unlike our current president, for example) cannot help but make the following observations these days: People walking down the street with their eyes and hands glued to their cell phones, oblivious to the real world (including the traffic) all around them. People eating or drinking out with friends or family but never even talking with or looking at their fellow humans sitting right next to them, as they are entirely focused on the virtual world emanating from their phones. Adults sacrificing real-life relationships for the convenience of make-believe online relationships or online pornography. Children no longer going out to play in the real world outside their homes, because, like their parents, they are addicted to their virtual worlds that can be easily accessed inside their homes via electronic devices.

And, of course, “virtual reality” devices today are expressly designed and marketed to remove users from reality and transport them to make-believe places. You can buy all the virtual reality and anything else you want from Amazon with your virtual money. You never have to use real money or go to a real store. You can pay with the make-believe money on your credit cards (for which you might go into deep debt as you never actually pay for your purchases, because that’s the American way). Or you can now use the new make-believe money of “cryptocurrency.” Wow, what monetary scam will this amazingly innovative American society think of next? I wouldn’t know. I still use cash and personal checks, American outcast that I am.

Technological devices and online virtuality are the most obvious consumerist manifestations of the successful American marketing of artificiality these days. But I observe this concept even extending into the marketing and consumption of political and societal policies and agendas, where make-believe and sophisticated propaganda (ie, slick BS lies) are viewed as much more important and successful in swaying public opinion than are grounded reality and objective truth.

This is clearly demonstrated in the astonishingly successful ways in which the American (and also Western European) elite “intellectual” classes have insidiously and thoroughly inserted phony “woke” agendas into almost every large institution today. Examples of such agendas include net zero, climate change; diversity, equity, inclusion; and environmental, social, governance, as well as the overall globalist WEF program. These agendas, which I believe are designed primarily to grow the power of the elites over the regular people, have no basis in reality, yet they now seemingly dominate the functions of almost every large American corporation, media organization, academic institution, and science and medical establishment. You just can’t escape it. In my view, many educated people who should know better go along with this stuff simply because they value their jobs, while uneducated or uninformed people go along with it because they don’t know any better.

This is how artificiality triumphs over reality, how bullshit beats truth.

The marketers of American and Western foreign policy have pushed the triumph of artificiality over reality to perhaps its greatest height yet. The most prominent current example is the war in Ukraine. The reality is that Russia is waging a legitimate war for its national security and is achieving success on the battlefield. Yet, we see that the real war on the battlefield is not as important as the propaganda war being waged online and in the mass media.

The same types of marketing geniuses who successfully convinced millions of people of the wonders and joys of the artificial doughnuts and hamburgers purchased from fast food joints and the artificial realities derived from cell phones and the Internet—not to mention the artificial “protection” obtained from ineffective masks and dangerous vaccines—have now apparently convinced most Americans that Russians are evil brutes hungering for more land, that Ukrainians are honorable and brave defenders of “democracy,” and that the United States is—yes, yet again—the great champion of global truth and justice! Most people in the European Union have also apparently been convinced of these propaganda points.

We’ve seen this same brand of BS propaganda many times before, from Vietnam to Iraq. All initially glorious triumphs for the U.S. military-industrial complex’s marketing machine, but ultimately not so good for the people in those countries and very costly for Americans.

So, we are told that the masses of people are eating up all this war propaganda—along with their Dunkin’ donuts and their McDonald’s hamburgers—and that they are buying all the other lies promoted in the media—just like they buy the latest iPhone and everything else they get from Amazon.

However, is that really true? Are most people really buying all that BS about the war, about climate change, about diversity, equity, inclusion, about environmental, social, governance, and all the other globalist nonsense? Or have people today, submerged in their various forms of virtual reality, become so oblivious to genuine reality that they just have no idea at all as to what is going on in the real world—whether it’s some distant foreign country, their own country, their own neighborhood, or even their own home and family?

I tend to believe the latter explanation.

The awesome triumph of the American-based corporate marketing of artificiality is on display every day in the phony society that we have in the United States and Western Europe today. From artificial foods to artificial relationships to artificial news to artificial economies to artificial educations to artificial science to artificial wars, we now live in a society consisting mostly of bullshit.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are still some isolated bastions of truth and reality out there, such as a few honest, independent, non-corporate news sources. And there will always be, I hope, the small, local doughnut shop. You just have to take the time and effort to look for these few pleasant good things hidden among all the putrid piles of crap.