My Message Every citizen of the United States participates in a continuing natural social experiment called the American Revolution. The Revolution is not a moribund event that expired two centuries ago. Only battle with the British empire ended, but the processes and institutions created by the people who sustained the Revolution continue to provide the pulse for its influence on national and world events. If you study these people behind the Revolution, some likely your ancestors, you will find, instead of irrelevant fossils, that you share many of the same difficulties, perspectives, and aspirations, as well as their genes. Today, we may not join a militia force to defend our homes and liberty as our ancestors did, but rather engage in our struggle for liberty at more personal levels. It is ironic that the amazing successes our ancestors had in creating the modern condition of plenty and leisure in our society also produced many opportunities for excess and misadventure that limit our own personal freedom. In the following, I examine a few of the areas in the personal sphere where liberty can be won or lost by our own individual efforts. Two types of pleasures Many philosophers speculate that humans spend the brief time between their births and deaths striving to obtain happiness or pleasure. Pleasures differ in how they affect happiness and contribute to personal freedom. Freedom, in turn, can enhance and extend happiness. Some pleasures are merely empty distractions that are enjoyed only as long as their cause continues. This type of pleasure contributes little to happiness and restricts freedom. Other pleasures persist beyond their immediate cause and resonate into other spheres of activity to make them more enjoyable, more satisfying, or more meaningful long after the original pleasurable activity ceases. This synergy increases the freedom to choose activities that promote happiness. The contrast between these two pleasures is analogous to a person with back pain who can choose to ingest an anodyne that relieves the pain and induces mild euphoria or to stretch and strengthen the back muscles with exercise. With the former approach, the drug-induced pleasure lasts only while the medication is present in the body, does nothing to eliminate the root cause of the pain, and ultimately results in further disability and restrictions on movement. By addressing the source of the problem with exercise, which itself may be an occasion for pleasant activity, the body is able to engage in more activities that can increase the opportunities for additional pleasurable activities and the pursuit of happiness. Promises of empty pleasures decrease liberty The marketers and advertisers that dominate today's mass media and other communications channels promise that purchasing their products brings pleasure, with a meta-message that you cannot be happy unless you are shopping. Shopping addictions are a result of succumbing to this subliminal message. The advertiser uses powerful techniques to influence people to purchase their anodynes, the empty pleasures they sell and the fruitless activities related to them. For example, each of us sometimes needs a model person or example to emulate, and marketers exploit this need today by creating celebrities for their fans to imitate. These celebrities fit every conceivable consumer type to serve as customized commercial spokespersons, constantly hawking products that enhance their own and their employer's income. Each celebrity appears in every guise and situation possible, working through the range of their employer's international corporate facilities, the radio and television stations, the sporting venue, the theater and stage outlet, the retail stores, the web sites, etc., maximizing their exposure, building their familiarity, increasing their celebrity status. It is not hard to apprehend these facts, as virtually the entire content of commercial broadcast television and radio consists of examples of this strategy, from the "talk shows" to the "news" where every program is merely an extension of the explicit advertisement. An exercise can improve perception of television celebrities. As you watch each host, guest, spokesperson, actor, performer, anchor, or any person that appears on television, focus on what they are selling, not on what they say or do to entertain, but whether they are promoting their book, film, expertise, CD, video, or some other product of their own or their employer's. You will find that every celebrity is but a marketing tool, regardless of their talent, groomed to appeal to a certain market segment. Those few people with media exposure who are not creations of the corporate marketing mavens are exploited to the degree possible in service of marketing objectives. Selling the promise of happiness has permeated the fabric of social life to such an extent today that, combined with the great numbers of shape-shifting celebrities, discerning reality from fiction in the media is increasingly difficult. An irony concerning the spread of American culture to every part of the globe is that its success depends, in part, on efforts to grow markets, but the legacy of this marketing achievement depends upon whether its promises are as empty elsewhere as in the country of origin. Substitute real people for celebrity images My purpose here is not to lampoon celebrities and marketing, but to suggest that your interests might better be served by attending to people who are more important for your life than celebrities, members of your own family, for example. Do you know the names and life activities of your eight great-grandparents? If not, then certainly you are missing an opportunity to find in them the role models or resources that can serve you much better than celebrities. You will find that getting to know your great-grandparents is an enjoyable activity and prepares you to find even more of your ancestors, who can redouble your enjoyment. This knowledge will resonate into your other activities and provide you with a better sense of who you are. You may find, or yourself may become, the celebrity that you have sought. Beyond your own family, many potential role models and heroes are available in your community, school, and church, and their motives are unlikely to be financial gain. Take a step towards more freedom and greater happiness& by purging yourself of celebrity idols. List the musicians, the actors, the entertainers, the athletes, etc. whom you find to be worthy of your attention and why. Then, begin to substitute people who have a more substantial and closer connection to yourself, people in your neighborhood, family, and circle of acquaintances, rather than the minions of the ad agency. You can supplement this approach by not watching commercial television for a month or more, to distance yourself from the influence of advertisers and create time to make substitutions. A person who knows more about the real names of actors or the members of a sports team than the people who created and made his or her life possible has taken a perverse and wanting path. Participate in deeper pleasures and abandon the empty Undoubtably, some readers have already renounced the mass media and its superficial idols, so consider another example of pursuing more nourishing activities instead of empty and unsatisfying pleasures. Americans are eating more and enjoying it less. Judging from the concern of the government, the media, and health professionals, more Americans have become flabby than ever before, and apparently, from the deluge of pharmaceuticals and digestive aids, they also are more constipated, diarrheic, or otherwise afflicted with digestive problems. With increasing frequency, people get fat because they don't know how to eat; they get sick because they don't know how to excrete. This predicament is exacerbated in part by the massive marketing of junk foods, the incessant prompting to eat, and ready availability of tasty, but problematic, prepared foods. The most important factor, however, is that eating has become an empty, meaningless activity that emphasizes the immediate pleasureable impact on the senses, not the process of procuring, preparing, savoring, digesting, and becoming the food that we ingest. A person who raises and grows, gathers and slaughters, prepares and cooks the food that maintains the life of the family digests it much differently than one who simply purchases it at a convenience store. My suggestion is not that one needs to become a farmer to overcome obesity and digestive problems, but rather that one needs to focus greater attention on what foods most benefit oneself, appreciate the origins and history of the food and its role in good nutrition, learn the details of healthy digestion and excretion, and study how one's own body can achieve its optimal digestive functions. Most people could dispense with bottled fiber, medications, and dietary pills if they simply become more in tune with their own physiology, something that is not as easy as it sounds. If turning away from abusing one's own body for the sake of transient gustatory thrills rather than more satisfying digestive happiness sounds too effortful, let me raise the question whether someone unsuccessful in the fundamental process of eating and excreting, can claim success in other activities? To improve your diet and digestion, start by studying the types of foods and what digestive regularity entails. Then, prepare all your own food for a month, and avoid all prepared foods, including restaurant fare, frozen dinners, etc., for six months. Study how you react to the foods you eat, and what improves or interferes with your digestion and excretion. Summary To summarize my message presented here, personal freedom implies the opportunity to make choices that can improve or restrict freedom. Our selection of pleasures determines our opportunities for enhancing freedom and ultimately the limits of our happiness. Because the pursuit of pleasures is central to everyone's life, the efforts by others (principally, but not solely, marketers) to define and channel our selection of pleasures in the interest of profit are vigorous and ubiquitous. Unfortunately, the pleasures that can be purchased are, by themselves, typically superficial and empty, involve meaningless and unsatisfying behaviors, and result in unhappy outcomes. The ready availability in our culture of many brief and empty, but yet seductive and titillating, pleasures obscures an underlying scarcity of more satisfying outcomes, and makes opting for more rewarding choices less cogent. The examples of shopping addictions, dissociated eating, and idolizing celebrities, illustrate these points. The facade of civility in today's secured society masks the underlying fact that competition among individuals remains a primary dynamic for interpersonal conduct. Deception, fraud, and coercion are all too common techniques in the struggle to control resources, but the ruthless and relentless methods that are used to appropriate financial resources legally requires a more thoroughgoing approach for those who strive for greater freedom. Personal reform is often required to overcome the manipulations of others and the mistaken steps each of us takes in life, and I have suggested some exercises in regard to rejecting media stars and improving dietary habits that might serve to reset someone motivated towards reform in these areas. Personal reform is a complement to the social reforms that keep our political ideals alive. My biography above outlines such forces in my life, the sources of countervailing strengths, and some of my own efforts at reform.