Ancient truths for a trust-starved world

Truth is the foundation on which brands are built. It is the canvas we paint on every time we use strategic vision and creativity to solve real world problems. Truth unlocks insights that let us design and build amazing new things that can, themselves, stand the test of time.

To be sure, the truth is in bad shape today, brutalized by decades of political spin, PR talking points, and marketing double-speak. But without truth there can be no trust. And only trust can fuel the communications, experiences, and, ultimately, relationships that drive world-class brands forward.

Can we really know this truth? Isn’t the real and true always culturally and historically contingent, always social constructed by the media, or elites, or the West, or other dominant institutions and power players?

Fortunately, the truth is far older than that.

We exist as embodied beings with evolved minds in human communities fully nested in an ancient world that’s all too real in its awesome complexity. Our environment has undergone enormous change since we first started building our personal brands on the cave walls of Lascaux, but our social minds remain largely the same. And it is those minds that construct our social realities in predictable, perennial ways.

Through Ancient LLC’s workshop and brand design practices, we surface the aesthetic, empirical, and moral truths at the heart of the strategic problems we are working to solve. This process is key to achieving alignment, collaborating constructively, and having some fun while we do it.

So the truth is out there. It comes in three flavors without which there can be no strategy or creativity. And I can prove it.

I. Aesthetic Truth

Creativity is novelty, right? Upending conventions. Avoiding tropes. Doing something original. Creativity viewed in this way, as iconoclastic self-expression, leaves room for only one valid critique: “I’ve seen that before.” Only this take on creativity as irreverent novelty is false. Whether we’re naming a product or building a brand identity, the symbols and language we use are ancient, acting on perceptual systems that predate us by millennia. Pure novelty is, therefore, incoherent. And contrary to the cliche that “there are no wrong answers”, there are, indeed, objectively better and worse solutions for even the most apparently subjective or aesthetic design decisions.

II. Empirical Truth

Experts predict that global temperatures will rise three degrees above pre-industrial levels by the 2030s. Most of us don’t want this to be true. But reality doesn’t care about what we choose to believe. Luckily we’re smart enough to identify perennial patterns in our world - the things we call facts - that occur with such regularity we can use them to accurately map the unknown and predict the future. Without these empirical truths, there can be no planning, no strategy, no science, only empty rhetoric and delusional politics. Whether it’s climate change or non-viewable ads, this tribal wish-fullfilment leads to only one thing in the long-term - system failure.

III. Moral Truth

You don’t need to be a game theorist to know that people will eventually stop playing broken games that are stacked against them. Without fair play and transparency, markets stop working. Trust breaks down. All truth claims become suspect. And all stakeholders, from employees to customers, start seeing themselves as competitors locked in a zero-sum game. Since a brand is a promise to deliver life-enhancing value, without integrity a brand can’t keep its word. The most purposeful brands understand that putting good work into the world is inseparable from performing good works in the world. And some version of this truth is the moral of the stories these brands tell.