Too Easy

I’ve made a few snarky comments in this space about Gwyenth Paltrow’s “lifestyle” brand company “GOOP” – it’s hard not to, actually. When you can find online ads for stickers that are purported to enhance some aspect of your health despite having the exact medicinal properties of postage stamps, it’s really hard not to wax sarcastic about any company that would attempt to sell such a product, or about consumers who would shell out money for that product. It gets even sillier when you can find other electronic snake-oil salespersons selling almost exactly the same products but offering entirely different explanations about how they supposedly work. But despite the commonly-held belief that the people behind the “GOOP” brand are delusional, it appears there may be an even simpler explanation…

An article this week on the AV Club site reports that not only does the company make no particular effort to check or support any of the health or wellness claims made about its products, it has actively avoided any efforts to let anyone else check them. The Goop magazine was originally going to be a collaboration with Conde Nast, but the kind of unsubstantiated question and answer babbling they wanted to print did not meet the Conde Nast print standards. Goop wound up producing their own “magazine” and forgoing the boost that they could have realized by working with an established publisher just because they didn’t want anyone else to fact-check their claims either…

Now, if the Goop enterprise was just an extended, online version of the Gwyenth Paltrow Fan Club, I don’t suppose anyone would have noticed, or cared if they did. There’s a tradition going back nearly a century at this point of celebrities of various types offering their fans “lifestyle” information about lives that they (the celebrities) may or may not actually live, along with pictures, newsletters, or whatever helps to increase their popularity. If Paltrow wanted to tell her fans that she wears bits of paper with adhesive backing stuck to her skin for the health benefits they supposedly offer, that wouldn’t have any more impact on anyone else’s health than, say, bizarre and otherworldly claims about living on absurdly tiny amounts of food money each month. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case…

I could go on for hundreds of additional words here – and in the past I have – about the ethics or morals of selling worthless, high-priced crap to people who should know better, or about how if making money off of the gullible, credulous, or stupid became illegal our economy would probably collapse. The problem is, at this point in American history, it’s just too easy to do that. Like it or not, we are living in a society where the President of the United States is going on national television and telling you that the things you are seeing and hearing aren’t real, and the nasty anti-intellectual streak in our society is getting out of hand…

The real take-away from this story, and the dozens of others like it that we’ve been seeing lately, is that just as A-list celebrities can afford personal trainers, wardrobe consultants, nutritionists, publicists, and agents, they can also afford to stick their heads in the sand and just ignore fact-checking activities that might mean actually having to think about the truth (or lack thereof) in what they are saying – but the rest of us can’t. We’ve reached the point where you can either do your own due diligence, check all of the things people tell you are facts, or accept the risks involved with spending hundreds of dollars on “health stickers” and looking like an idiot…