The Real Thing
The Real Thing
“When you find the real thing, you walk away from everything else.” – Aaron Sorkin
One of the greatest marketing campaigns ever came from Coca-Cola®. Often hailed for its innovative approach to audiences, this campaign targeted the 1960s youth counterculture movement and shifted advertising toward ideology, community, and authenticity. The ad played for years and was known to young people throughout the 70s and 80s. From a hilltop, a diverse crowd of people sang these words (click here to view the ad):
“I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony; I’d like to buy the world a Coke® and keep it company — it’s the real thing.”
It offered an ideology the brand could connect to. It made sharing a Coke with someone feel like it served a higher purpose than refreshment. In a highly divided time period, it showed a unified community coming together around something that could connect people globally through something they could all access. In the process, an idea far bigger than a soft drink became a powerful strategy for engaging the public: ideology. An idea attached to a product could be communicated as a higher truth, and if it connected to an ideological perspective, people would not only buy the product, but anchor that brand allegiance in their ideological framework, or, as we say these days, their worldview.
It may sound strange to look back at the influences of consumer culture, but the reality is that today’s marketing of ideology is one of the most elusive influences in our world. The illusion that is put forward is so subtle that many people cannot tell what is real, true, or right from what is marketed to them. We see the masterwork of C.S.Lewis’ Screwtape in its influence. Rather than stand boldly and divert people from one pole to another, quiet, subtle subterfuge nudges someone slightly toward an idea, a product, or an understanding. Through affinity and association, identity is built, solidified, and ideologically accepted. By the time someone realizes their allegiance to an ideology, it has become part of their values, worldview, and identity.
The psychology behind these ideas has propelled marketing, propaganda, and duplicity in transferring allegiance through ideology over the last 50 years. Particularly in the last 25 years, with the rise of technology, social media, celebrity-focus, and self-centric culture, the illusion that amplifies, accelerates, and obfuscates the truth has become almost indistinguishable in 21st-century culture. Under these influences, truth has become obscured by powerful delusion and a myriad of marketing efforts. That may seem like a stretch to some (especially when it comes to the power of a soft drink), but others see the platforming of fake news, conspiracies, subjective values, and relativistic approaches to authority, meaning, and purpose wound up in the same ball of wax.
If there is a framework to understand the current era, it’s an ideological one. 21st-century societal values have shifted into a spectrum of truth built on the shifting sands of feelings, preferences, and desires. Ideology is so pervasive in marketing that we often dismiss informational intent without even thinking about where truth is validated. We live in the aftermath of postmodernism’s effort to erode authority from anywhere outside the self. We also suffer the ill effects of illusion being woven into almost every idea about the world, our identity, our meaning, and our purpose.
At the same time Coke declared a soft drink “the real thing,” philosophy pronounced the value of a web of personal truth: a subjective perspective of the world centered on the self. Building on critical theory, postmodern critique, and the counterculture movement, self-realization became a force for determining higher value, purpose, and meaning through this web. In this interconnected reassertion of truth, experience is elevated, traditions are left behind, religions are deconstructed, heroes are torn down for their mistakes, and the edifice of historical wisdom is replaced by nuanced perspectives that suit our contemporary tastes.
As metamodernism has risen over the last decade, people oscillate between personal and collective values, picking and choosing their own bespoke perspectives while building a syncretic worldview along the way. In this process, ideological authority has woven itself into the fabric of society. Unfortunately, illusion has become intertwined with the web; knitting together subjective truth, feelings, passions, experience, and identity. At this point, the real thing is hard to ascertain, as ideology is marketed to us from all sides, all the time.
An Age of Illusion
In the 1980’s, keeping up with the Joneses was at its apogee. In fact, a sub-generation between Gen-X and the Late Boomers, called Generation Jones (click here for more information), particularly reflects the values that came from this philosophy. In this period, consumer culture moved from its infancy (as in Coke’s case) to an explosion of associative ideologies that became hallmarks of status. A mix of ambition, postmodern criticism, anti-authoritarian sentiment, and the financial capacity to afford autonomy grew a Western world that decadently pursued itself above all things. Since then, many people have spent their lives chasing careers, relationships, experiences, achievements, and acquisitions. In essence, Screwtape got put on steroids. An age of illusion has enveloped culture, purpose, and meaning across the generations of contemporary Western culture.
In the 21st century, while many people still seek to accumulate things, younger generations are collecting experiences. A technology-rich world has produced an economy around influence, social media traffic, and digital dopamine hits that elevate illusion around digital experience. We’ve retconned ideological marketing as a bespoke and intuitive “algorithm” of life; where ideological allure is just one of many options at the buffet of our choosing. We echo mantras of faking “it” until we make it. We promote truth-adjacent stories online if they echo our bias. We have grown comfortable with the illusion ingrained in our society, and we have no qualms about using it when it serves our purposes.
Oddly enough, in this environment, authenticity has become a value, but most people are satisfied with its appearance and don’t really care about the truth beneath. This is because authenticity is applied to the experience of something, rather than the thing itself. This simple twist is a contemporary sign of Screwtape’s power today. Illusion isn’t the issue for the masses as long as the experience it yields is worth it. That’s a dangerous combination for people who care less and less about the validity of truth in light of how relevant their feelings about it are.
With 8 billion personal perspectives traveling on the Good Ship Earth, it’s hard to find truth, much less verify it. We may be in an age of illusion, but humanity’s deception is a millennia-old endeavor, with 8 billion individuals standing on the shoulders of countless billions who came before them. In fact, ever since the Garden, we have been open to the nuance of illusion that sounded good, even if it wasn’t.
Our first parents thought that acquiring the Lord’s knowledge base was a better path than trusting Him and the good of His purpose. They were early victims of marketing that subtly moved them away from the truth. They took the Deceiver’s words to heart: “If you know good and evil, you will be able to know what to do on your own. Then you won’t have to rely on God to tell you what those things are.” Today, the Enemy still appeals to our autonomy, our desire for acquisition, and our drive for self-sufficiency. He adds ideology and illusion to this propaganda; finding us where we are and nudging us further and further from the truth.
The Enemy isn’t just showing us the allure of surpassing the Joneses; he is a master at weaving ideology, purpose, passion, and ambition into a trajectory away from what is actually good, true, beautiful, and right. He does it all by convincing us that our own personal truth is guiding us to our best life. The Wisdom of the Age tells us to rest in the assurance that no one is leading us astray; we are just stepping into our true selves, our purpose, or our own personal enlightenment.
In a subjective world, it’s just a matter of preference. But that’s where the illusion is strongest. It hides the world as it truly is. The world the Almighty created is a place where objective truth exists, where identity is anchored in something greater than ourselves, where human purpose does not rest on our finite ability, and where people do not have the power to save themselves. We were created for much more than we could ask for or imagine — infinitely more than what the world tells us we should be. If we are to find the truth that sets us free from this illusion, we need to see the world as it truly is. We need to see beyond the marketed ideology of the 21st century and the Enemy’s deception.
The Actual Real Thing
In an age of illusion, we need to call out today’s ideological idiosyncrasies and trade the appearance of good for what is authentically good. As in Paul’s letter to Timothy, he calls out those who live behind a facade of godliness without its power. Similarly, we need to be transformed in Christ so we can weigh the Wisdom of the Age against the world as it truly is and align with truth rather than illusion. We need to be wary of wolves in sheep’s clothing, and charismatic people who lure others away from what is good for what sounds better. As Sorkin penned in his political drama, The West Wing:
“When you find the real thing, you walk away from everything else.”
When we think about the real thing, we think of the Almighty made flesh, walking with His people here on Earth. He came up to some Galilean fishermen and gave them a simple command: “Follow Me.” Without hesitation, Peter, Andrew, James, and John dropped their nets to follow Jesus. In a moment, they left their jobs, their father (in John and James case), and their boats at the word of the Way, the Truth, and the Life. They didn’t know all that we know about Jesus when they made that decision. They didn’t have a 5-year plan, or a guarantee of future opportunities. Were Jesus’ words magic? Was there something in the way that He said it? Or were they just faced with the real thing and walked away from everything else?
Coming face to face with Jesus might be just that transformative for the person who is searching for purpose. But not everyone who saw Him followed Him. We often think of Thomas, who demanded seeing Him before he would believe. Yet Jesus blessed those who would never see Him in their lives but would believe in Him with all their hearts. The world as it truly is comes from God. He is the beginning and the end, the author and perfecter of our faith, and by whom, in whom, for whom, and through whom all things were made. He is the real thing. In a world covered in illusion and ideology, we need the real thing; the truth that sets us free.
So, what happens when we reach the end of all things and have been living in illusion? If we don’t know what is real, how can we find truth, fulfillment, restoration, completion, or our purpose? One of the places that we go to when this question comes up is Matthew 7. Many are haunted by Jesus’ words that people will come to Him at the end, declaring all that they did for Him (some of which are amazing things), and hear Him say that He never knew them. Protesting actions in His name or on His behalf cannot change the fact that they neither knew Him nor were known by Him. It’s a terrifying reality to believe that you know something at the core of who you are only to find out in the end that you were deceived. That’s not God’s intent, but it is a more common experience, where illusion dominates, and ideology seeps into everything.
A culture that lives at that level of illusion will shape its entire worldview around it. That means if people cannot see the real thing, they will form their own ideas about everything around them. They will tell themselves who Jesus is, rather than seek His Word for what He says about Himself. Sadly, this is common in a world of subjective truths. People have been making gods in their own image since the dawn of man. In an ideological age, we take our syncretic worldview and borrow attributes of God, attaching our political bent and our culture’s values, in order to craft our own version of Jesus to follow. We can spend a lifetime following a god of our own making, calling it Jesus and believing in an echo chamber of our own salvation.
Yet the Master calls us to seek Him first, not to lean on our own understanding, and to be transformed in Christ. He calls us to deny ourselves and follow Him. His call is to know Him and be known by Him; not to know our perception of Him or evangelize our own picture of who we believe He is. He has revealed Himself clearly in the scriptures and called us to seek Him above all else. He has promised that when we seek Him, we will find Him — not seeking ideas about Him, not thinking great thoughts about Him, and not articulating enlightened perspectives about all that He is; seek Him, experience Him, know Him, and be known by Him.
When we think of the disciples seeing and following Him, it wasn’t some magical aura that overwhelmed them; they saw the real thing and left everything for Him. They knew in the core of their being that this person was different from everything else the world had to offer. The same thing is true today. The God of the Universe, who sent His Son out of love, is calling everyone to leave their illusion and see the world as it truly is. He is calling them to seek Him and be found by Him. He has called them to relinquish their own understanding and depend on His. Before each of us is the real thing, and we must choose whether to keep going forward for ourselves or walk away from our illusion and ideology and seek Him.
Today is the day to make that choice. Embrace His reality and let it overwhelm everything else. Transformation awaits. No marketing needed. Just lay the world as you know it before Him and submit to His Lordship. Believe in Him. Trust Him. Know Him and be known by Him. See the world as it truly is, and find the purpose you were created for in Him. You will come to know the real thing as well, walking away from everything else to follow the One True God and Savior, Jesus Christ. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Click here if you have further questions about being transformed in this way.
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The Real Thing
“When you find the real thing, you walk away from everything else.” – Aaron Sorkin
One of the greatest marketing campaigns ever came from Coca-Cola®. Often hailed for its innovative approach to audiences, this campaign targeted the 1960s youth counterculture movement and shifted advertising toward ideology, community, and authenticity. The ad played for years and was known to young people throughout the 70s and 80s. From a hilltop, a diverse crowd of people sang these words (click here to view the ad):
“I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony; I’d like to buy the world a Coke® and keep it company — it’s the real thing.”
It offered an ideology the brand could connect to. It made sharing a Coke with someone feel like it served a higher purpose than refreshment. In a highly divided time period, it showed a unified community coming together around something that could connect people globally through something they could all access. In the process, an idea far bigger than a soft drink became a powerful strategy for engaging the public: ideology. An idea attached to a product could be communicated as a higher truth, and if it connected to an ideological perspective, people would not only buy the product, but anchor that brand allegiance in their ideological framework, or, as we say these days, their worldview.
It may sound strange to look back at the influences of consumer culture, but the reality is that today’s marketing of ideology is one of the most elusive influences in our world. The illusion that is put forward is so subtle that many people cannot tell what is real, true, or right from what is marketed to them. We see the masterwork of C.S.Lewis’ Screwtape in its influence. Rather than stand boldly and divert people from one pole to another, quiet, subtle subterfuge nudges someone slightly toward an idea, a product, or an understanding. Through affinity and association, identity is built, solidified, and ideologically accepted. By the time someone realizes their allegiance to an ideology, it has become part of their values, worldview, and identity.
The psychology behind these ideas has propelled marketing, propaganda, and duplicity in transferring allegiance through ideology over the last 50 years. Particularly in the last 25 years, with the rise of technology, social media, celebrity-focus, and self-centric culture, the illusion that amplifies, accelerates, and obfuscates the truth has become almost indistinguishable in 21st-century culture. Under these influences, truth has become obscured by powerful delusion and a myriad of marketing efforts. That may seem like a stretch to some (especially when it comes to the power of a soft drink), but others see the platforming of fake news, conspiracies, subjective values, and relativistic approaches to authority, meaning, and purpose wound up in the same ball of wax.
If there is a framework to understand the current era, it’s an ideological one. 21st-century societal values have shifted into a spectrum of truth built on the shifting sands of feelings, preferences, and desires. Ideology is so pervasive in marketing that we often dismiss informational intent without even thinking about where truth is validated. We live in the aftermath of postmodernism’s effort to erode authority from anywhere outside the self. We also suffer the ill effects of illusion being woven into almost every idea about the world, our identity, our meaning, and our purpose.
At the same time Coke declared a soft drink “the real thing,” philosophy pronounced the value of a web of personal truth: a subjective perspective of the world centered on the self. Building on critical theory, postmodern critique, and the counterculture movement, self-realization became a force for determining higher value, purpose, and meaning through this web. In this interconnected reassertion of truth, experience is elevated, traditions are left behind, religions are deconstructed, heroes are torn down for their mistakes, and the edifice of historical wisdom is replaced by nuanced perspectives that suit our contemporary tastes.
As metamodernism has risen over the last decade, people oscillate between personal and collective values, picking and choosing their own bespoke perspectives while building a syncretic worldview along the way. In this process, ideological authority has woven itself into the fabric of society. Unfortunately, illusion has become intertwined with the web; knitting together subjective truth, feelings, passions, experience, and identity. At this point, the real thing is hard to ascertain, as ideology is marketed to us from all sides, all the time.
An Age of Illusion
In the 1980’s, keeping up with the Joneses was at its apogee. In fact, a sub-generation between Gen-X and the Late Boomers, called Generation Jones (click here for more information), particularly reflects the values that came from this philosophy. In this period, consumer culture moved from its infancy (as in Coke’s case) to an explosion of associative ideologies that became hallmarks of status. A mix of ambition, postmodern criticism, anti-authoritarian sentiment, and the financial capacity to afford autonomy grew a Western world that decadently pursued itself above all things. Since then, many people have spent their lives chasing careers, relationships, experiences, achievements, and acquisitions. In essence, Screwtape got put on steroids. An age of illusion has enveloped culture, purpose, and meaning across the generations of contemporary Western culture.
In the 21st century, while many people still seek to accumulate things, younger generations are collecting experiences. A technology-rich world has produced an economy around influence, social media traffic, and digital dopamine hits that elevate illusion around digital experience. We’ve retconned ideological marketing as a bespoke and intuitive “algorithm” of life; where ideological allure is just one of many options at the buffet of our choosing. We echo mantras of faking “it” until we make it. We promote truth-adjacent stories online if they echo our bias. We have grown comfortable with the illusion ingrained in our society, and we have no qualms about using it when it serves our purposes.
Oddly enough, in this environment, authenticity has become a value, but most people are satisfied with its appearance and don’t really care about the truth beneath. This is because authenticity is applied to the experience of something, rather than the thing itself. This simple twist is a contemporary sign of Screwtape’s power today. Illusion isn’t the issue for the masses as long as the experience it yields is worth it. That’s a dangerous combination for people who care less and less about the validity of truth in light of how relevant their feelings about it are.
With 8 billion personal perspectives traveling on the Good Ship Earth, it’s hard to find truth, much less verify it. We may be in an age of illusion, but humanity’s deception is a millennia-old endeavor, with 8 billion individuals standing on the shoulders of countless billions who came before them. In fact, ever since the Garden, we have been open to the nuance of illusion that sounded good, even if it wasn’t.
Our first parents thought that acquiring the Lord’s knowledge base was a better path than trusting Him and the good of His purpose. They were early victims of marketing that subtly moved them away from the truth. They took the Deceiver’s words to heart: “If you know good and evil, you will be able to know what to do on your own. Then you won’t have to rely on God to tell you what those things are.” Today, the Enemy still appeals to our autonomy, our desire for acquisition, and our drive for self-sufficiency. He adds ideology and illusion to this propaganda; finding us where we are and nudging us further and further from the truth.
The Enemy isn’t just showing us the allure of surpassing the Joneses; he is a master at weaving ideology, purpose, passion, and ambition into a trajectory away from what is actually good, true, beautiful, and right. He does it all by convincing us that our own personal truth is guiding us to our best life. The Wisdom of the Age tells us to rest in the assurance that no one is leading us astray; we are just stepping into our true selves, our purpose, or our own personal enlightenment.
In a subjective world, it’s just a matter of preference. But that’s where the illusion is strongest. It hides the world as it truly is. The world the Almighty created is a place where objective truth exists, where identity is anchored in something greater than ourselves, where human purpose does not rest on our finite ability, and where people do not have the power to save themselves. We were created for much more than we could ask for or imagine — infinitely more than what the world tells us we should be. If we are to find the truth that sets us free from this illusion, we need to see the world as it truly is. We need to see beyond the marketed ideology of the 21st century and the Enemy’s deception.
The Actual Real Thing
In an age of illusion, we need to call out today’s ideological idiosyncrasies and trade the appearance of good for what is authentically good. As in Paul’s letter to Timothy, he calls out those who live behind a facade of godliness without its power. Similarly, we need to be transformed in Christ so we can weigh the Wisdom of the Age against the world as it truly is and align with truth rather than illusion. We need to be wary of wolves in sheep’s clothing, and charismatic people who lure others away from what is good for what sounds better. As Sorkin penned in his political drama, The West Wing:
“When you find the real thing, you walk away from everything else.”
When we think about the real thing, we think of the Almighty made flesh, walking with His people here on Earth. He came up to some Galilean fishermen and gave them a simple command: “Follow Me.” Without hesitation, Peter, Andrew, James, and John dropped their nets to follow Jesus. In a moment, they left their jobs, their father (in John and James case), and their boats at the word of the Way, the Truth, and the Life. They didn’t know all that we know about Jesus when they made that decision. They didn’t have a 5-year plan, or a guarantee of future opportunities. Were Jesus’ words magic? Was there something in the way that He said it? Or were they just faced with the real thing and walked away from everything else?
Coming face to face with Jesus might be just that transformative for the person who is searching for purpose. But not everyone who saw Him followed Him. We often think of Thomas, who demanded seeing Him before he would believe. Yet Jesus blessed those who would never see Him in their lives but would believe in Him with all their hearts. The world as it truly is comes from God. He is the beginning and the end, the author and perfecter of our faith, and by whom, in whom, for whom, and through whom all things were made. He is the real thing. In a world covered in illusion and ideology, we need the real thing; the truth that sets us free.
So, what happens when we reach the end of all things and have been living in illusion? If we don’t know what is real, how can we find truth, fulfillment, restoration, completion, or our purpose? One of the places that we go to when this question comes up is Matthew 7. Many are haunted by Jesus’ words that people will come to Him at the end, declaring all that they did for Him (some of which are amazing things), and hear Him say that He never knew them. Protesting actions in His name or on His behalf cannot change the fact that they neither knew Him nor were known by Him. It’s a terrifying reality to believe that you know something at the core of who you are only to find out in the end that you were deceived. That’s not God’s intent, but it is a more common experience, where illusion dominates, and ideology seeps into everything.
A culture that lives at that level of illusion will shape its entire worldview around it. That means if people cannot see the real thing, they will form their own ideas about everything around them. They will tell themselves who Jesus is, rather than seek His Word for what He says about Himself. Sadly, this is common in a world of subjective truths. People have been making gods in their own image since the dawn of man. In an ideological age, we take our syncretic worldview and borrow attributes of God, attaching our political bent and our culture’s values, in order to craft our own version of Jesus to follow. We can spend a lifetime following a god of our own making, calling it Jesus and believing in an echo chamber of our own salvation.
Yet the Master calls us to seek Him first, not to lean on our own understanding, and to be transformed in Christ. He calls us to deny ourselves and follow Him. His call is to know Him and be known by Him; not to know our perception of Him or evangelize our own picture of who we believe He is. He has revealed Himself clearly in the scriptures and called us to seek Him above all else. He has promised that when we seek Him, we will find Him — not seeking ideas about Him, not thinking great thoughts about Him, and not articulating enlightened perspectives about all that He is; seek Him, experience Him, know Him, and be known by Him.
When we think of the disciples seeing and following Him, it wasn’t some magical aura that overwhelmed them; they saw the real thing and left everything for Him. They knew in the core of their being that this person was different from everything else the world had to offer. The same thing is true today. The God of the Universe, who sent His Son out of love, is calling everyone to leave their illusion and see the world as it truly is. He is calling them to seek Him and be found by Him. He has called them to relinquish their own understanding and depend on His. Before each of us is the real thing, and we must choose whether to keep going forward for ourselves or walk away from our illusion and ideology and seek Him.
Today is the day to make that choice. Embrace His reality and let it overwhelm everything else. Transformation awaits. No marketing needed. Just lay the world as you know it before Him and submit to His Lordship. Believe in Him. Trust Him. Know Him and be known by Him. See the world as it truly is, and find the purpose you were created for in Him. You will come to know the real thing as well, walking away from everything else to follow the One True God and Savior, Jesus Christ. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Click here if you have further questions about being transformed in this way.