There was no advertising in the Soviet Union. It was wonderful. In many ways people were happier and freer there. I will add that in the USSR people's labor was exploited in the sense that you produced more value generally than you were paid for. But, unlike in capitalism, people's consumption was not exploited. In fact, they didn't want you shopping and buying things because that meant someone had to serve you in shops and produce things for you in factories instead of getting drunk with friends and telling jokes to each other far into the night.

For balance, a Reddit thread, People from former Soviet republics. What is something people who never lived under communism just don't get about communism? One comment: "My dad described it as living in a country run by the world's most powerful and vindictive HOA. You can't paint your fence, and if you complain about it, you might just disappear."

I'm optimistic, because if there has been even one society without advertising, that proves that it's possible, and can probably be done without all the drawbacks of Soviet life or Medieval life. So what other things, that Americans don't think can be done, can be done?

It's funny, the guy who ruined Communism, the guy who ruined Christianity, and the guy who ruined America, all said the same thing. Vladimir Lenin: "He who does not work shall not eat." Paul the Apostle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Ronald Reagan: "There is no free lunch."

Is that true? It's definitely not a universal rule, just look at all the plants getting free sunlight. It's not even true for all humans. I've mentioned before how some primitive cultures don't even have the concept of freeloading. I finally got around to digging up the actual quote, from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pages 851-2:

A third fact about hunter-gatherer economies also runs counter to the notion of economic man central to modern economic theory: no necessary connection exists between production by individuals and distribution to individuals. Economists argue that sharing has an economically rational basis. The person we share our catch with today may feed us tomorrow when our luck or skill fails. In this view, sharing is a kind of insurance policy that rationally spreads the risk of not having anything to eat. Sharing in hunter-gatherer cultures, however, is much more profound than this. In many cultures at least, there is no connection between who produces and who receives the economic output. According to Woodburn, for example, some members of the Hadza do virtually no work their entire lives. Many Hadza men gamble with spear points, and many are reluctant to hunt for fear of damaging their gambling "chips", yet these men continue to get their full share of the game animals killed. Although "freeloading" is always a potential problem in all cultures, disdain for those not engaged in productive activity is evidently a culturally specific emotion.

Thus the "demonic" is properly understood less as a specific category of supernatural being than a collective reflection on unfortunate occurrences, on the ambivalence of deities, on tensions surrounding social and sexual roles, and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible people, places, and activities.

I can learn stuff from this book, but it's difficult and not fun to read. The other book is for a popular audience: The Eighth Tower, a.k.a. The Cosmic Question, by my favorite paranormal author, John Keel. Keel writes constantly about what the entities actually are, but rather than settling on a truth and defending it, he just spins out wild speculations with no attempt to make them consistent. It's great fun to read. A sample:

Over and over again the Bible tells us how men were instructed to create solid gold objects and leave them on mountain tops where the gods could get them. The gods were gold hungry. But why? ... If the ancient gods were real in some sense, they may have come from a space-time continuum so different from ours that their atomic structure was different. They could walk through walls because their atoms were able to pass through the atoms of stone. Gold was one of the few earthly substances dense enough for them to handle. If they sat in a wooden chair, they would sink through it. They needed gold furniture during their visits.