small correction: the article I think you’re referencing in the title ( https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/07/30/armys-troubled-11-million-marketing-deal-rock-and-ufl-seemingly-didnt-yield-single-recruit.html) says that it resulted in a projected loss of 38 enlistments, rather than resulted in 38 recruits de-listing.
To respond to your extra thoughts -
You’re hitting the mark on there being issues with referring to any social problems as “rational”. What would be best for everyone in the long run would be the abolition of all bigotry: even the most privileged people in the world would likely live happier lives if society was truly rationally-structured. So it is not rational for anyone, in the long run, to act bigoted.
I do think though that there’s an incentive to defend one’s social and economic position which manifests itself in an irrational emotion that serves a “rational” purpose: keeping yourself, at least temporarily, ahead of others. While it may be insulting to say that X bigotry is rational, I think it’s just plainly true that most, e.g. racists, are racist because they benefit from racism, rather than because racist ideas have been maliciously imposed onto their psyche. Even those with a nebulous material connection to racism can benefit psychologically from indulging the feeling that they’re better than those other people.
I think when people say that people who uphold oppressions are rational, they’re using shorthand for “oppressions are often perpetuated by people who benefit from their existence.” They don’t meant to say that they’re good.
Similarly, the broader values we inherit from capitalist society serve in a sense to justify our economic system and our hegemony. We think of our country as uniquely “free,” full of “independent” people, because that lubricates our existence within a society based on fierce competition. It justifies the individualizing nature of capitalist competition and hierarchical relations, and it also invents a criteria on which we can decide other nations aren’t worthy of our cooperation.
As much as we’re repetitively advertised to to accept capitalist values, I think a greater amount of our acceptance of them comes from our (“rational”) desire to fit in with our societal structure; our desire to not feel guilt when we benefit from the oppressions enabled by a society built on competition at all levels.
I disagree with your opinion about ads being about memory and pure repetition - many of them are trying to be memorable, but we can tell with most ads that the company is trying to create a brand image more than a purely-memorable experience. Your argument is not very far removed from the “emotional inception” argument that the author makes a good case against wrt bedsheets and gas.
I also don’t think it has to rely on tricking anyone. If you see an ad that ties X product to relaxation, you don’t need to think “other people will be tricked by this into associating X product with relaxation” to want to buy it to signal that you’re a chill person. All you need to think is “other people will understand that I mean to associate myself with the message of relaxation when I buy this”.
I think Roderic Day was correct to add this essay to his otherwise-about-communism site because it shows yet another area in society where we assume people are acting irrationally when really they’re just following their interests - the narrative of irrationality being used to deny the support many people have had for their own communist governments. He has a couple good essays on “brainwashing”, and this was filed under the tag that he also put on those.
The article is referring to GDP (PPP), so this has been true for a while now.
The Tricontinental has an in-depth discussion on the fall of US hegemony, if anyone’s interested in something to expand on this article. The bit about the Pentagon losing its own war games wrt Taiwan isn’t discussed there, though.