Military Industrial Complexes and Symbolic Threat as Marketing

Sure, a nation like the US needs military defences and a deterrent against aggressors, as does a nation like Australia with our enormous coastline and religious fundamentalist neighbours. However, this very real need/requirement is easily used by unethical, self-centred, military-marketing profiteers for the purposes of profit making at what becomes the expense of the security and wellbeing of everyone else.

Free-market capitalism plus good government can be a great pairing to produce a progressive, healthy nation and economy. The truth is that innovation comes out of BOTH government and private research. Government does need to curb militarism in corporations that can affect our national and regional security however. There needs to be more careful, sober social psychology and less cavalier marketing psychology going on.

Oh yes. Government is increasingly about psychology, and you ignore this fact at your peril. After all - any economist worth their salt will tell you that economics and marketing are just as much about human psychology as they are about money markets and GDP. Most recent economic modelling and the models deployed by economists takes this into account.

Marketing psychology is all about making people feel a need for something where it is not really needed. There is a lot of psychology of the emotions and social psychology that goes with the marketing of military expansion and arms races. However, any time symbolic threat becomes key to the marketing in an industry we should be exceedingly wary. MIC elitists likely do not care if the marketed MIC solution to a problem further drives the problem. Notice that this generates further 'market opportunities'.

Take just these two very popular marketing-psychology doctrines which are beloved by many in business:

- Chaos creates opportunities to be exploited (so create a little chaos).

- Successful marketing is all about creating the perception of a need, whether there is a need or not.

If you combine these with the social psychological and cognitive psychological dynamics/principles of ingroup-outgroup homogenisation, symbolic threat, and terror management, you have an instant very powerful set of tools to manipulate people's emotions and beliefs by playing on their fears.

Tell me you didn't notice ASPI doing this with AUKUS. Really?

It matters. It's not soccer teams we're talking about. Even a pragmatic political absurdist like myself can accede to that much.

Symbolic threat and ingroup-outgroup psychology also avails MIC marketing manipulators like ASPI of a powerful tool with which to influence public opinion and make financial and career opportunities for themselves and their megacult friends.

Kim 'Bomber' Beazley is a classic example of a Christian megacultist who uses his completely insane ingroup ideology and beliefs in conjunction with symbolic threat to further his own ends and those of his megacult toxic network. The transnational MIC marketing machine is a money funnel under which he happily stands.

But "Defence of the nation!" - right?

Is it, though?

But that's not the only problem with the marketing mechanisms of the transnational MIC. They're also intimately tied into the game-theory and systems-theory of arms races, geostrategy, and global conflict. The bottom line is that when the US wants to sell us B-21s and ASPI wants to be their MIC's actual marketing department: we have to be discerning and judicial about what is national defence and what is business for profit. They're two different things, albeit related by economic and industrial realities.

Our government surely has a responsibility to not just be led around by the nose by any MIC marketing imperatives. It has a legal responsibility not to be per our foreign influence laws. Government MPs - whether left or right or something else - surely have the ethical and professional responsibility to not just cheer the whole MIC marketing machine on and find an MIC money funnel to stand under. Stating this requirement doesn't entail, imply, nor infer that one is attacking free-market innovation and is come kind of communist fanatic. To assert as much is ridiculous equivocation and child-minded idiocy. It's national and regional security that we are talking about, not soccer matches and Beasley's imaginary friend fantasy.

There are other ways to secure regional and national security, and fair-minded treaties and the assiduous avoidance of participating - and especially taking sides - in arms-race-accelerating MIC posturing based in zero sum games are both requisites for securing - security.

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