Many marketers have put this message quoted by Adolf Hitler into practice. Actually, it has become the marketing mantra of many service and product manufacturers. It will sure amaze you but it is not only third parties who use this, our parents, children, siblings and relatives use this mantra some time or the other in their life.
Do you remember yourself as a kid wanting to evade school for some test and saying to your mother ‘Mumma my stomach is paining, I cannot go to school’ Subconsciously you realized that your mom could not really know whether your stomach is paining since she did not posses x-ray vision therefore this was the safest bet. Best part, you kept saying it repeatedly and also must have added some dramatics till your mission was accomplished. The result, Mom decided to let you stay at home! Seldom have we also found parents doing the same. I remember my mom saying that you will become ‘fair’ if you drink milk. They kept saying it and we did drink milk, didn’t we? Now when you think about these small incidents, you find it archived as a very sweet childhood memory.
Now that I look back, growing-up actually seemed like fun. Many of us will remember threatening our siblings usually, younger ones with ghosts being in cabinets that we do not wish to show them. We would go to the extent of adding some form of audio/visual to make it seem real. Eventually, your siblings would be so petrified that they would believe it and even spread the word around. Thus your secret actually remained a ‘SECRET’.
Now that we are parents, we adopt the same thing. I really have fun applying this rule on my little niece. The little princess that she is I keep telling her that if she is a good girl and listens to her mommy, her hair will grow like Princess Rupensil. If she disobeys then, her hair will grow shorter. Now the beauty of this lie is that she TOTALLY believes it. In fact, after being good, I often find her checking the length of her hair. Believe me it is a sight to see.
When I read this quote, all I could first sense is so much of negatively. These relative incidents, which we consider as good memories often, establish the fact that a lie that does GOOD to someone is not considered a lie at all!
:) I remember the tea fact....drinking lot of tea leads to darker skin and I used to believed that. Though, it is a rather weird/racist and negative example to pick, but that's what I could recall after reading your post....
ReplyDeleteI drink a lot of tea now :D and so many different kinds...