Category: Analysis

Living in the Age of the Coronavirus, we lose touch with reality. We live in the “eternal present.” Isolated from normal activities and places—and restricted in our actions—we lose our outside reference points. We rely, more than ever, on the information and opinions of mainstream media, government officials, and (God forbid) social media.

That makes us vulnerable to gaslighting.

That term, which comes from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton called Gas Light, refers to a deliberate process of making someone doubt their sense of reality. In the play, a husband drives his wife mad by manipulating minor elements of her environment—and then denies anything has changed. The man turns off the house’s gaslight at odd times and then, when his wife asks, denies there has been any change at all. When she asks about noises in the night—she heard him rummaging in the attic for the jewels of a woman he killed—he denies hearing any such sounds. Slowly, the wife goes mad. That was his goal since he seeks to have her institutionalized for insanity.

Gaslighting is abuse. It’s a sadistic form of mind control. It aims not just to shape the way people think. It also aims to undermine people’s ability to trust their own perceptions and thinking.

“Gaslighters use your own words against you, plot against you, lie to your face, deny your needs, show excessive displays of power, try to convince you of ‘alternative facts,’ turn family and friends against you,” says Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist and author. They revel in “watching you suffer, consolidating their power, and increasing your dependence on them.”

In a time of crisis and confusion, gaslighters fill the air with denials of simple reality (that the coronavirus is “just like” seasonal flu), false charges (that Democrats stoke fear of the virus to undermine the president), fake theories (like the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab), offer false assurances (the virus will disappear “magically” and “it’s something we have tremendous control of”), sell sketchy remedies (like prescribing hydroxychloroquine, injections of disinfectants, or the use of ultraviolet light in the body), prevent people from getting the basic tools they need for gathering accurate data (like testing and tracing systems), and then deny basic facts including their own statements (“I felt this was a pandemic long before it was a pandemic”).

When gaslighters persuade even a small group of the population to believe propaganda, they undermine the very possibility of public debates with reliable information.  When autocrats shout “Fake News!” at reporters and purvey thousands of lies on social media, their aim is not to win an argument. Their aim is to prevent a true argument even happening. Might makes right.

But listen up: You have the power to screen out the lies and deceptions. It takes hard work to find true experts, people with sterling reputations who display respect for facts. You need to give up your own desire for easy and quick answers. You need to accept the complexity of the situation and accept that even the smartest people cannot make reliable predictions in a volatile situation.

When you hear people making wild claims, which run counter to those of the experts, ask some simple questions:

• Does this person have training and expertise in the field? Does he have experience with the scientific issues at issue? Has he done research or worked on the front lines?

• Does he consider and acknowledge all of the facts, even the inconvenient ones? Does he avoid cherry-picking facts and claims to bolster his claims? Does he welcome new troves of data and information, even when they contradict his working theory of the issue?

• Does he avoid generalizations on topics that remain matters of serious debate? Does he avoid taking slivers of possible truths and pretending they are final and authoritative?

• Does he adopt a scientist’s mindset? Does he look for evidence against his hypothesis? Does he look for weak links in his own argument?

• Does he acknowledge mistakes when they occur? Does he adjust his thinking and actions when new information comes to light?

• Does he treat people with respect when they question his and others’ statements and records? Is he hungry for different perspectives on issues?

When you can answer “yes” to these questions, you can trust the source. Otherwise, remain wary and vigilant. Don’t get sucked into debates that do not respect facts or values.

It’s understandable why so many people fall for propaganda and false narratives. Most people want to believe the authority figures that they like and trust. We all want to belong to a larger tribe. We are social creatures. We want to fit in.

We also crave answers to complex questions. Given our limited time and expertise, we want to find a shortcut to understanding. We want to know when the pandemic will end. We want to embrace a model for understanding this nightmare.

So it’s understandable why people submit to false prophets and easy answers.

But if you fall for the fakery of the gaslighters—whether it’s the president or a propagandist on cable TV or a snake-oil salesman on Facebook—you will lose your sense of reality. You will forfeit your greatest power, which is the ability to think for yourself.

Mad Men is not only one of the greatest TV shows of all time. It’s also a guide to the techniques of persuasion. Here are a half-dozen of those techniques, arranged by the arc of life.

The Innocence of Babies: ‘You’ve Got the Cutest Little Baby Face’

In her new job at Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough, Peggy devises an ad campaign for Koss headphones. The ad shows a man in a toga, listening to music on headphones. The slogan: “Lend Me Your Ears.”

Then a comic’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” creates a crisis. The comic jokes about an Army G.I. in Vietnam who cut off the ears of Vietcong and created a necklace with the ears. The G.I. was court-martialed. The incident, symbolizing the brutality of the war, has gone viral.

And so late one December night, Peggy gets a call. The people at Koss are upset about the potential association of the headphones with the atrocity in Vietnam. The slogan “Lend Me Your Ears” has to go. Koss will air a commercial on the Super Bowl and needs a new campaign—right away.

At first, Peggy resists. “As horrible as this is,” she says, “I don’t think anyone has made this connection outside of this comedian.” But the client insists on a new campaign. So Peggy gets to work.

She brainstorms the way Don Draper taught her. She writes a letter to a friend, describing the product, , how  it works, how it makes her feel, why she loves it so much. As she brainstorms, she gives the headphones to her boyfriend Abe and asks him to think of words that describe the experience.

As Abe gets carried away by the music, bobbing and swaying, she smiles. That image plants a seed.

Peggy and three of her underlings continue to work on the campaign on New Year’s Even Her boss Ted Chaough shows up to offer moral support. Peggy shows Ted an outtake of a shoot of a guy “clowning around” while listening to music on Koss headphones.

Peggy describes her latest idea: “I think you can show him with no sound, making these faces and no music and saying something like: ‘Koss headhones: ‘Sounds so sharp and clear you can actually see it.’”

Ted is immediately impressed. He likes it better than the “Lend Me Your Ears” campaign. “Makes me smile more than the original,” he says.

Tip: Evoke the Universal Appeal of a Baby

What will viewers of Peggy’s ad experience when they view the images of a pudgy, smiling man, softly rocking and swaying to the sounds from Koss earphones?

Subconsciously, they will see a cute baby. And that image will arouse feelings of attraction, a desire to approach and engage. Baby-like traits include a round face, high forehead, big eyes, and a small nose and mouth. Psychologists call this cuteness factor a “baby schema.”

Melanie Glocker and her associates describe the power of this attraction:

Cute infants are rated as more likeable, friendly, healthy and competent than the less cute infants, an effect that may be mediated by the baby schema. Furthermore, cute infants are rated as most adoptable. The baby schema response can have behavioral consequences. For example, cute infants are looked at longer, and mothers of more attractive infants are more affectionate and playful. Other factors such as an infant’s behavior or the caretaker’s familiarity with the infant may also be important for adult’s evaluation of children. Nevertheless, our results show that baby schema in infant faces is an intrinsic trigger of cute- ness perception and motivation for caretaking. This effect generalizes to adult faces with enlarged eyes and lips who elicit more helping behavior than their mature counterparts.

As Linda Meisler and her associates found, the cuteness effect translates to the design of products. When a product has many of the same expressive traits as babies—like a Volkswagen Beetle or a Mini Cooper—people are attracted in the same ways they are attracted to babies.

Cuteness doesn’t just arouse people. It also prompts a need to dosomething. Consider an experiment by Yale graduate students Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon. The psychology students presented 109 subjects with pictures of cute, funny, or normal animals. They asked the subjects how they wanted to respond after seeing the pictures. How much did they agree with statements like “I can’t handle it” and “Grr” and “I want to squeeze something”?

The cuter the image, the more respondents agreed with those statements about needing to act on their feelings.

Then, to test the response further, Dyer and Aragon conducted another experiment with 90 respondents. The purpose of the study, they told the subjects, was to test motor activity and memory. Dyer and Aragon gave subjects sheets of bubble wrap and told them to pop as many bubbles as they desired. Subjects viewing the cute images popped 120 bubbles; those viewing the neutral slides popped 1`00 in the same period of time, and those viewing the funny slides popped 80 bubbles.

In the right context, cuteness sells. If the Koss ad prompts automatic smiles, if it causes the viewer to want to approach the subject of the ad, it will cause people to at least consider getting headphones.

Peggy understands the power of this attachment to babylike cuteness. Remember the first season when Peggy gave birth and immediately gave up her baby for adoption? The nurse brought her the baby and asked her if she wanted to hold it. She refused. She knew that if she held the baby, she might want to keep it.

She knew the power of a baby to arouse uncontrollable feelings. And now she was using that power to sell earphones.

Help for the Overwhelmed Mother: Keep It Simple

The conclusion of Roman Polanski’s horror movie “Rosemary’s Baby” gives Peggy and Ted an idea for the St. Joseph’s Aspirin account.

In that scene, Rosemary has given birth to the devil’s baby. A crowd gathers in a living room to look at this unusual creature. An Asian man snaps pictures. Rosemary decides to raise the child, as best as she can, even though it is full of evil.

Peggy wants to depict Rosemary’s sense of being overwhelmed to sell St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin. The TV commercial will take the point of view of the baby, who is surrounded by forces trying to force themselves on him.

Peggy asks Don to sit down and pretend to be the baby in the commercial. Imagine, she says, feeling completely overwhelmed as a series of people press a solution on the infant with a headache or some other minor malady.

“What you need is a mustard plaster,” a crazy old lady, played by Peggy, says.

“You need a compress,” says a wrinkled old man, played by Ted.

“How ‘bout a bowl of chicken soup?” says an annoying nebbish neighbor.

One by one, the faces in the crowd press in on the baby. A Japanese man takes a picture, causing the scene to go white with the popping of the flashbulb.

Finally, the baby sees his radiant young mother. She holds out a St. Joseph’s aspirin. Ted intones the message of the ad: “You don’t need anyone’s help but St. Joseph’s.” 

Tip: Find the One Thing to Overcome Overwhelm

Childbirth is a joyous occasion for new parents and their families. After months of anticipation, an innocent being enters the world. In a room filled with flowers and balloons and cards, the newborn coos and cries to the delight of loving family and friends. The miracle of birth touches even the most cynical among us.

Underneath those joys are (often) fear and pain and a sense of overwhelm. Most modern mothers usually do not have to worry about losing their baby or dying in childbirth. But childbirth can be a major operation, which requires both physical and psychological recovery. The famed doctor T. Berry Brazelton notes:

 The immediate neonatal period is fraught with constant adjustment. Often she feels she has not fulfilled her ideal regarding delivery. … Any minor difficulty with the baby—psychological, psychophysiological—even the normal drowsiness of the newborn is blamed upon herself. These guilty feelings may obstruct her early adjustment. … Emotional depression joins forces with physiological depletion to produce the commonly recognized “blue period.”

Most young mothers—and fathers too—experience a feeling of being overwhelmed by the experience. Other people’s efforts to help them sometimes make young parents feel even more overwhelmed. In this time of transition, young parents welcome simple answers to their problems.

Peggy’s St. Joseph’s Aspirin pitch exploits young parents’ need for simplicity in a suddenly complicated life.

The ad depicts the infant as the overwhelmed character. Surrounded by busybody family and friends, the baby cries for help. That help comes when the baby’s mother—beautiful and radiant, who has nurtured the baby for months and now offers absolute love and sustenance—comes to the rescue. She holds out an aspirin made especially for children.

But make no mistake: It’s the mother who really needs the help that St. Joseph’s Aspirin offers. The mother needs to comfort this extension of herself—and to overcome the insecurity that comes with the awesome responsibility of motherhood.

Peggy has entered the most euphoric and scary moment in the mother’s life. She has stilled the noise with a simple offer of relief.

Tapping the Memories (and Projections) of Family

Kodak has invented a new device for projecting slides  onto a screen. It’s a wheel that holds the slides in slots, and turns around to capture one image at a time.

It’s a funny device—old-fashioned and cutting-edge at the same time.

Few inventions are older than the wheel. The wheel turns in countless machines—cars, engines, factories, shelving, doors.  How much can you say about a wheel?

But at the same time, this wheel offers a great innovation. Until now, slide shows required placing one slide into the machine at a time. Making presentations was a clumsy process. It’s hard to produce a flow, to explain a sequence of ideas or tell a story, with those constant interruptions.

Now this new technology makes it easy to project a seamless, continuous show.

After much soul-searching—looking though old family photographs, reflecting on the passages of life—Don discovers the answer.

In his presentation to the Kodak executives, Don starts by discussing the lure of technology.

“Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”

Don tells about his first job, writing copy in-house for a fur company, he talks about his Greek boss, a man named Teddy, who extolled the virtues of “new” because it “creates an itch.”

So Don sets up the explanation of his idea not with an abstract discussion, but with a story, with a character the audience can picture right away. Who cares if Teddy actually existed—or if the ideas Don attributes to Teddy were his. Don is creating anticipation with his sentimental yarn about his mentor.

Teddy, Don says, also understood that newness can be trumped by a deeper value—nostalgia. “It’s delicate,” Don says, “but potent.”

Now Don signals to turn on the projector. As he turns toward the screen, he talks about the deep meaning of nostalgia.

“Nostalgia, in Greek, means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”

Now Don gives a slide show of his own family—Don and Betty and Sally and Bobby—at a cookout, on Christmas morning, playing on the sofa, kissing.

“This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards … forwards … it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

The images click, one after another, to illustrate the power of memory and longing, dreaming and loving.

Don connects this device to the merry-go-round in an amusement park or a county fair, which creates a never-ending swirl of smiles and memories. This merry-go-round symbolizes family, youth, innocence, and memory.

“It’s not called the wheel,” Don tells his stunned Kodak clients. “It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, round and around, back home again, to a place we know we are loved.”

Tip: To Understand Desire, Tap Into the Past

Nostalgia, the old quip goes, ain’t what it used to be.

In fact, it ain’t. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, doctors treated nostalgia as an illness. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, nostalgia was considered a mental disorder. But now research suggests that it might actually offer benefits.

Nostalgia, researchers say, happens in all cultures across history. It inspires art, music, architecture, understanding of history, teaching pedagogies, and much more. So it must offer some kind of help in understanding and navigating the world.

Nostalgia operates on three dimensions.

First, stories and artifacts of nostalgia often conjure up a specific person important to the community. In families, we think of a grandparent or a parent. In politics, we think of legendary personages like John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. In sports, we think of transformative figures like Babe Ruth or Vince Lombardi.

Second, nostalgia focuses on a specific place. Family homes, old buildings or stadiums, lakes and beaches, workplaces and bars—all burn images into our memories. When we talk nostalgically, we remember what the place looked like, sounded like, even smelled and felt like. It’s a total sensory experience.

Finally, nostalgia often revolves around a specific event. The most memorable events involve surprise. Birthdays, promotions, weddings, first dates become the stuff of nostalgia. So do formal ceremonies, which draw people from distant places. But routine events and rituals—Thanksgiving dinners, summers at the lake, bar mitzvahs—also tap our nostalgia.

Don Draper’s carousel pitch merges these three elements perfectly. His slides show people, places, and events that touch all families emotionally. The very process of sharing family pictures is itself a nostalgic act; people do it when they come together for special moments..

To connect the past with the future, understand the power of nostalgia.

What Matters: Glamor or Functionality?

Playtex has given the Mad Men a challenge: Make its practical, utilitarian bra sexy.

The men at Sterling Cooper theorize, like graduate students, the deeper meanings of the bra—identity, appearance and reality, psychology, and the power of the subconscious.

Paul Kinsey reports that Playtex “has an amazing bra, but it doesn’t take you anywhere.”

After a murmur of approval from Don, Paul continues his thesis on the psychology of women.

Women, he says, have fantasies—but they’re not fantasies of adventure, of travel or conquest. Instead, women fantasize about matters much closer to home. And they live those fantasies every day.

“It’s right here in America—Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe,” he says. “Every single woman is one of them.”

He walks the other Mad Men to the door for a peek into the vast open office space of the firm. Their eyes dart from one secretary to another. Here is a woman with brunette hair and a businesslike dress, like Jackie. There is a woman with blonde hair and a more suggestive dress. Jackie. Marilyn. Jackie. Jackie. Marilyn.

Don is impressed. Peggy is too, but she doesn’t see herself in either role.

“I don’t know if all women are a Jackie or a Marilyn,” she says. “Maybe men see them that way.”

Pete falls back on a standard chauvinist line—that women care only about pleasing men, so all products should be designed for men.

Sal distills the discussion.

“You’re a Jackie or a Marilyn,” he says. “A line or a curve. Nothing goes better together.”

Don later summarizes the thinking to Duck Phillips: “Jackie by day, Marilyn by night.”

Tip: Appeal to People’s Views of their Whole Selves

How we look at people depends on whether we see them as whole beings or as a collection of their body parts. We see figures like Jacqueline Kennedy as a whole—a refined, educated, charismatic wife, mother, and social icon. We see figures like Marilyn Monroe as a collection of body parts—lips, cheeks, hair, breasts, legs, and bottom.

Sexism—viewing women as less than complete, whole beings—results in part from this bias.

In an ingenious 2012 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, research subjects viewed photographs of both men and women from the waist up. Then they viewed two more pictures—the original picture and another with one of the body parts altered in some way.

After looking at the pictures, respondents were asked which picture they had seen before. Men and women both identified the altered pictures of women by focusing on the body parts. They identified the altered pictures of men by looking at the whole pictures.

People look at objects in two ways—globally or locally. When we look globally, we see the whole image or idea; we might call this the right-brain or forest approach. When we look locally, we focus on the discrete parts of the picture or idea; we might call this the left-brain or trees approach.

The tendency to look at women locally—that is, to pay attention to their lips or breasts or hips or legs, rather than their whole body—objectifies women. It makes women important not for their whole selves, but for their pieces.

But all is not lost. In another experiment, the researchers showed subjects pictures of letters made up of collections of tiny letters—an H made up of lots of tiny T’s, for example.

When participants focused on the little pictures—all the T’s—they then viewed women as collections of body parts. But when they focused on the big picture—the single H—they viewed women as whole persons.

“Our findings suggest people fundamentally process women and men differently,” says the study, written by Sarah Gervais of the University of Nebraska and four colleagues. “But we are also showing that a very simple manipulation counteracts this effect, and perceivers can be prompted to see women globally, just as they do men. Based on these findings, there are several new avenues to explore.”

The upshot: With prompting, all of us can view women as Jacqueline Kennedys rather than as Marilyn Monroes.

Focus on What People Want, Not What They Fear: ‘It’s Toasted’

The Need to Choose Authenticity: ‘It’s Not Ann-Margret’

A star was born in 1963. And what was obvious about her appeal—her busty, wholesome good looks—sometimes obscured the charisma that she brought to the silver screen.

The star, Ann-Margret, played a high school girl named Kim McAfee in the movie Bye, Bye Birdie. Kim won a competition to participate in the final performance of a rock star named Birdie, who has been drafted by the Army and is leaving to serve.

The high point of the film is its opening, when Ann-Margret sings a song written especially for the movie. Her energy—sexual but safe—bursts onto the screen.

Now Pepsico wants to use that excitement to sell Patio, its new diet soda. And so the executives at the soda company ask the Mad Men to adapt Ann-Margret’s effervescent scene to a commercial for Patio.

After showing the opening scene to Don, Peggy asks whether Ann-Margret’s voice is “shrill.”

“She’s throwing herself at the camera,” Don says. “It’s pure. It makes your heart hurt.”

The Mad Men find an Ann-Margret type, film her homage to the “Bye, Bye Birdie” number, and show the clients their work.

“Bye, bye, sugar!” the alluring young woman in the commercial croons. “Hello, Patio!”

But when the lights go up, there’s an uneasiness in the room.

“I don’t know, this isn’t what I thought it would be,” the client says. “There’s something not right about it. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“It’s an exact copy, frame for frame,” accounts manager Ken Cosgrove protests.

“I’m sorry, I wish I could explain it but it’s just not right,” the client responds.

After the clients leave the room, Harry Crane agrees with the clients: “It’s true. It’s not right. It doesn’t make any sense. It looks right, sounds right, smells right. Something’s not right. What is it?”

Roger understands the ineffable quality of charisma. He looks at his young ad man. “It’s not Ann- Margret,” he says, arching an eyebrow and walking away. 

Tip: Know What’s Authentic

How do we know what’s authentic? It’s something that we feel, deep down, based on a lifetime of experiences with real and fake things. And experts can tell in the blink of an eye.

Consider the kouros that an art dealer named Gianfranco Becchini tried to sell to the Getty Museum—until, in a blink, experts on art warned was a fake.

A kouros is a Greek statue that dates back six centuries before Christ. Archaologists have found only 200 of these relics, so another would be a great find.

When Becchini offered to sell the statue for $10 million, the Getty inspected the relic. Becchini offered documents to verify its authenticity. The Getty hired a geologist to inspect the statue. Using the latest equipment, the expert concluded that the statue was genuine. It was made of dolomite marble and it was coated with a layer of calcite—just what you would expect with an old object like this. The people at the Getty were giddy.

But when the statue went on display, art experts immediately suspected something was wrong. Federico Zeri sensed something about the statue’s fingernails that didn’t seem right. Evelyn Harrison intuited that something was amiss in the first split-second she saw it. Thomas Hoving instantly thought it looked “fresh” for a 2,600-year-old relic. Geogios Dontas said he “felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.”

Something in these experts subconscious told them the kouros was a fraud. Their collective centuries of experience working with ancient art burned images into the brains of what an authentic one looked like. They didn’t have to think to know; in fact, thinking might have undermined their assessment. And this statue didn’t pass muster.

Malcolm Gladwell recounts the case of the fake kouros in Blink, which argues that people make smart decisions without thinking. In a wide range of situations—gambling, chicken farming, marital relations, hiring decisions—people can make good decisions in a snap.

That’s why the Patio representative didn’t like the Ann-Margret lookalike. Superficially, she looked and sounded like Ann-Margret. But there’s only one Ann-Margret.

Creating Ersatz Family in a Distracted Age

To overcome it, embrace it.
—Nietzsche

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—William Butler Yeats

What happens when groups fall apart? When the anchor gets pulled away? And how can the center be restored in a time of tumult?

Those are the key issues at play as Don Draper struggles to become relevant once more in Mad Men’s mythical advertising agency Sterling Cooper and Partners, just as Peggy Olson struggles to find a pitch for a fast food restaurant.

Sterling Cooper loses its mojo when Draper, its creative mastermind, Don Draper, is banished from the company and then brought back only to be humiliated and marginalized.

Lots of creative people still work at the agency. Peggy has a first-class mind; as Pete says in his ever-insulting way, “You know, she’s every bit as good as any woman in this business.” Stan’s got his own creative chops. Ginsberg is a genius—that is, until his paranoid schizophrenia kicks in and he begins to imagine conspiracies in the VW-size IBM computer humming in the glass room.

But every team needs a leader, someone who not only has the brains to solve problems, but also creates a guiding vision and makes everyone better. That’s Don. But because of his boozing, self-destructive ways, he has been dislodged from his leading role in the firm. Now, even though he’s still a partner, he is a minion whom other partners humiliate at every turn. Even his protege Peggy looks down on him.

Now Peggy is leading the creative process for the Burger Chef campaign. Burger Chef is one of the many McDonald’s wannabes. To grow, it needs an identity. It needs to speak to people’s inner longings the way McDonald’s does. It needs to come to mind when distracted and harried Americans need to eat but don’t want to cook or even take TV dinners out of the fridge.

Peggy comes up with an idea aimed at the era’s frazzled mother: Make Burger Chef an expression of love. “All the research points to the fact that mothers feel guilty,” Peggy explains in her pitch to Lou Avery, SC’s new creative director. “And even when they get home they’re embarrassed. Our job is to turn Burger Chef into a special treat, served with love.”

Somehow, Peggy says, “we need to give mothers permission” to take the easy way out and order a bag of fast-food burgers and fries. To Lou, the answer is simple: “Well, who gives moms permission? Dads.”

Peggy’s TV commercial shows a mom in a car with her two kids. The mom is talking to herself about all the things that need to be done: Let’s see. Check that list for the marching band fundraiser. Get the sink trap checked. Get Jim to take down the storm windows…. Then, as she realizes that her husband’s about to get home, the kids start complaining that they’re hungry. “One more stop,” mom announces. Then, as if in a dream, a handsome man comes bearing a bag full of Burger Chef food—and then kisses her deeply. It’s Jim, the husband! Triumph!

The idea is forced, but Lou is too witless to know and Don knows that he can’t speak up. Later Don suggests changing the POV from the mother to the kids. Still resentful and scornful of Don, Peggy rejects Don’s idea as “terrible.” But she’s got this nagging feeling that her own pitch is terrible too.

How can Peggy get the Burger Chef pitch right?

Working on a weekend, Peggy is surprised to see Don come into the office. She dismisses him for presuming to save the day. “Did you park your white horse outside?” she huffs. “Spare me the suspense and tell me what your save-the-day plan is.”

Don has no plan, but he knows how to start over. And so Don and Peggy start brainstorming a new concept.

Now, over the course of the episode, all of the characters in this drama look more alone than ever. Megan leaves for L.A. after a brief visit. Pete’s estranged wife avoids him, his child barely recognizes him, and his new amour leaves for L.A. Joan rejects Bob’s foolish proposal. No one’s happy. No one belongs to the kind of family these ad gurus celebrate in commercials. And Peggy, who sleeps alone every night and gets testier by the day, is full of regrets.

“Does this family exist anymore? Are there people who eat dinner and smile at each other instead of watching TV?” She’s pensive. “What the hell do I know about being a mom?” Peggy’s just turned 30 and now frets about never making her own family.

Don admits his own worries: “That I never did anything … and that I don’t have anyone.”

“What did I do wrong?” Peggy asks.

“You’re doing great,” Don says.

Finally, after letting down her guard and getting in touch with her real feelings, Peggy has the ability to follow Don’s advice earlier in the scene. “You can’t tell people what they want,” Don told her. “It has to be what you want.”

So Peggy asks: “What if there was a place where there was no TV and you could break bread and whoever you were sitting with was family?”

She’s finally got her campaign.

At the heart of the best Mad Men stories beats an existential truth. The truth of this story was expressed best by Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone,” Welles said. “Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

That’s the foundation for Peggy’s new Burger Chef campaign. The fast-food joint isn’t just for takeout. It’s a third place, between work and home. It’s a gathering place for family, friends, classmates, colleagues, everyone. The traditional family might be disintegrating in the heat of the 1960s, but the core need for companionship—to overcome the aloneness of life—remains.

Peggy and Don introduce the idea to Pete at a Burger Chef restaurant. “Look around,” Peggy says as she parcels out cokes and burgers. “I want to shoot the ad in here.”

“It’s not a home,” Pete grumps.

“It’s better,” she says. “It’s a clean, well-lighted place. … It’s about family. Every table there is the family table.”

And so the three of them—whose only true family is each other—eat their meal. In a scene reminiscent of Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” the three are alone, together.

Finding Your Zen Set Point: ‘I’d Like to Sell the World a Coke’

Don Draper’s journey has been a long one, from the bloodshed of Korea to the hustling of New York to the utopian promise of California.

By 1970, Don’s lies and betrayals have caught up with him. He has failed in two marriages. He remains close to his daughter Sally but barely knows his sons. People he cares about have died, at least one because of him. He heard about another, the department store heiress Rachel Mencken, only because a model in a casting call rekindled his lust. His value, as an ad man, is his ability to extract the hope and joy from life’s tragedies and ugliness long enough to turn them into a pitch. Now it looks like he’s lost that ace card.

So Don takes a road trip. He first tries to track down a waitress who he had a short affair with. His lies don’t fool her ex-husband. His standard practice—to use his charm to win people over, until he gets bored or scared and drifts away—doesn’t work. So he goes further west. He arrives at the home of the real Don Draper, the one from whom Dick Whitman stole an identity and a ticket home from the war. There he meets Stephanie, the real Don’s daughter, who has endured tragedies of her own. Stephanie takes him north, to an esalen retreat in northern California. This is not a comfortable place for Don. Here, people speak unspeakable truths. When a woman attacks Stephanie in an encounter group, she flees. The next morning, she is gone. She takes Don’s car, so he is stuck at the retreat for two or three more days.

The guilt that Don has been carrying—for all his life as Don—leads him to despair. He calls Peggy. She’s angry. Where the hell have you been? Get back here! Don’t you want to work on the Coke account? But another account is far from where Don want to be right now. He cracks.

“I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am,” he says. Peggy’s confused. She knows about his philandering and alcoholism, but not about growing up in a whorehouse, going AWOL in a war, or stealing another man’s identity.

“I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name. And made … nothing of it.”

After saying goodbye to Peggy—is he going to commit suicide?—a sympathetic woman brings Don to another encounter group. Here he listens to an anti-Don—a loyal, reliable, unremarkable, unnoticed, and unappreciated normal—who breaks down because he is invisible to everyone in his life. Don walks across the room and embraces him. The two cry. For the first time, maybe ever, Don can hear and care about another person on that person’s own terms.

In the next scene we see Don, sitting lotus style, on the edge of a hill. Dozens of others sit nearby. A bell chimes. The gathered, all together chant their mantra: Ommmm. For a flash, a Mona Lisa smile crosses Don’s face.

Fade to one of the iconic television advertisements of all time—Coca-Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony).”

What just happened? Matthew Weiner, the creator and head writer for Mad Men, obviously wants to maintain some room for debate. Maybe Don, having found peace—if only for a brief ommm—has decided to pursue a new life of enlightenment. But then, as he contemplates the oneness of the world at a time of war and riot and “ credibility gaps,” imagines people of all ages, races, creeds joining together. What brings them to gather is sharing a Coke, the modern equivalent of breaking bread.

I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony.
I’d like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company.

Or maybe not. Maybe Don embraces the communal life, while Peggy and the other creatives at McCann Erickson dream up the Coke ad. Maybe Don sheds his fake identity, befriends the invisible man, joins in a new communal life . . . We’ll never know. After all, it’s an ambiguous ending, right?

(Well, maybe not. Creator/director/writer Matt Weiner explains his final episode in this interview.)

If Don does in fact go from an experience of oneness to masterminding an ad campaign that exploits the longing for oneness, what are we to think of him? That he’s just a cynical con man? That, on the edge of enlightenment, he can’t stand the truth and needs to return to his life of lies? Maybe. But Edward Boches, an ad man and professor at Boston University, has a different idea:

“Somehow Matthew Weiner actually understands the motives that drive creative people,” he says. “They need to create. They can’t stop. They can doubt themselves. They can try to escape. They can question the value and purpose of what they do, but the never-ending urge to make something creative that solves a problem never goes away. And when a good idea comes? You have to see it through.”

Bird fly, fish swim, creators create. Don Draper finds himself—truly finds himself—when he creates something fresh and new. Fulfillment comes not from sitting on a hill, vibrating, but by doing something that changes the way people experience life.