The act of naming is always a form of propaganda. When you name something, you are never perfectly describing what it is, but are instead influencing how it is perceived.
Marketers know this better than anyone. Prior to 1977, there was no such thing as the Chilean sea bass; the fish was called, instead, the Patagonian toothfish. The Chilean sea bass isn’t a type of bass at all, and most of them do not come from Chile. It was purely a marketing invention: an entrepreneur named Lee Lantz intuited that the American market might enjoy the taste of the Patagonian toothfish, but would never buy it under its given name. First, he chose to falsely call it a “bass” because Americans were comfortable with that type of fish. He then rejected the names “Pacific sea bass” and “South American sea bass,” on the grounds that they were too generic, and eventually settled on “Chilean sea bass” as a more exotic alternative.
The name of one of the most popular fish in the world therefore has nothing to do with what the fish really is. A type of cod that is primarily farmed near Antarctica became the Chilean sea bass as a Goldilocks branding compromise. The familiarity of the bass was married to the perceived exoticism of Chile so that an American entrepreneur could sell a fish nobody had ever heard of to high-end restaurants in the United States. This ploy worked so well that today nobody has ever heard of the Patagonian toothfish, while the Chilean sea bass has a secure and inalienable position on restaurant menus from sea to shining sea.
So its name is propaganda, but nobody cares. A lie that makes money will always be preferable to a truth that does not. Once you realize that every name is propaganda, it becomes readily apparent how much misconduct, greed, and corruption can be concealed behind an innocuously disingenuous name, especially a name that successfully evokes positive emotions in the general public.
Consider the word “nonprofit.” Whoever came up with the idea of calling these organizations “nonprofits” was a marketing genius on the level of Steve Jobs. When someone hears the word nonprofit, they assume that such an organization is working for the public good; that it serves the homeless, protects the weak, exists for the benefit and the betterment of society at large. Hearing that something is a “nonprofit” immediately gives a sense that the organization is trustworthy and the people running it are driven by a charitable agenda. It’s a word that shuts down the critical faculties and grants an instantaneous moral stature to any organization to which it is applied. Consequently, nonprofits receive a benefit of the doubt that would not be granted to any other form of private corporation.
Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be. As a consequence of the benefit of the doubt provided to nonprofits, there is rarely enough oversight to guarantee that they are doing what we pay them to do. In some cities, upwards of a billion dollars of public funds are paid to nonprofit organizations every year with glaringly insufficient safeguards to ensure that the money is used in a manner likely to serve the public interest.
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