How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know.
For my part, I nearly forgot myself because of them, so persuasively did they speak.
And yet they have said, so to speak, nothing true.
­Socrates ¹

Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.
­Nietzsche ²

Truth + Advertising = Insanity.

That, at least, is the formula of the comedy film Crazy People. ³ It is the story of an advertising copy man who works at a respectable New York firm run by a CEO who insists: "You have to drill, drill, drill that target audience until they are consuming your product, not because they love it, but because they can't escape it." ⁴ Skeptical of this philosophy, our leading man one day decides to mend his ways and tell the truth. "Let's not fool the public anymore.... Let's level with America," he implores a co­worker. ⁵ The reponse is predictable: "We can't level, you crazy bastard. We're in advertising!" ⁶

Ignoring this sane advice, our truth­in­advertising crusader writes ads such as these:

• Buy [Car X]. They're boxy. But they're good. We know they're not sexy. This is not a smart time to be sexy anyway with so many new diseases around. Be safe instead of sexy. ⁷

• [Ad for national phone company]. We're tired of taking your crap. If we fold, you'll have no damn phones. ⁸

Not surprisingly, our noble friend is chauffeured off to a sanitarium.

Exaggerated as it may be, this modern­day morality play is comic precisely because it is absurd. In a commercial culture where image is all, truth is irrelevant, and there is no right to know, ⁹ the notion that mass advertising might be rational, honest, and fully informative seems preposterous. In fact, both on and off the screen, the ad man's novel idea was viewed not only as ludicrous but as dangerous. Thus, in the real world, ABC and CBS refused to air promotional commercials for the film, fearing that they might offend the networks' major advertisers. ¹⁰ In light of this, how would a call for truth in commercial­speech jurisprudence be received? What would happen if the "hype" about rational decisionmaking and self­realization were stripped from the commercial­speech doctrine? Would the exponent of such views be treated similarly as senseless and threatening? If so, what would this say about the psychology of contemporary First Amendment scholarship?