How do you recycle a culture?
We know how to recycle bottles and cardboard and other forms of waste. But in what bin do you put an entire culture, or the larger part of it?
Let's start with Black Friday.
Black Friday may have a benign business connotation, marking the beginning of the holiday period on which most retailers hope to earn their profits for the year (as distinguished from the rest of the year when many are just treading water). But the darker side of this marketing morass is gaining prominence in defining the term.
The day after Thanksgiving is now noted for spectacles of random violence that were previously reserved for NASCAR racing and extreme boxing. But, more exciting than either of those and not exacting a price for admission, Retail Rampage is a group participatory sport, whether you want to join or not. Actually, it is elective. I elect not to go shopping during days of retail rage. But for the father who was erroneously injured by police responding to an assault he suffered from another contestant while protecting his son from The Hoard, the shopping experience was probably not the bargain he was hoping for. One lesson learned; one million pending.
Then there was the pepper spray incident by a better armed, more aggressive contestant. She was ready to take on the entire crowd. Thank God she wasn't packing heat with an extended clip. I'm sure she'll come better prepared next year if the law can't identify her first in the store security tapes. We are after all a 'learning' society. Or is that programable?
And what is the program, and who is the programmer?
Well, it's not the government, much maligned as it is as the source of all evil. It's Madison Avenue, and ultimately it's clients: Big Business.
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Allow me to digress for a moment to make an important distinction: Advertising and its broader discipline of marketing are not inherently evil. Nor is that other externality of corporate influence: lobbying. Both advertising and lobbying have valid applications within the ethical conduct of business in a diverse society. But when the outcomes of their application become repetitively harmful to the well-being of society, one has to question the moral and ethical value system of the beneficiaries on all sides of the transaction.
Marketing has become a profoundly destructive agent of cultural deformation, as corporate lobbying has become the same of the political process and its subordinate governmental institutions. They have created waste that is in fact measurable in consumer and governmental debt that may be beyond our ability to repay without painful sacrifice that will itself cripple the very engines of our destruction.
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Black Friday is not the only example of a society sinking into the abyss: it merely trumps others in intensity of media coverage. On an everyday basis, we have merchandisers extolling the virtues of pimping our young daughters in clothing that exceeds their age appropriate comprehension of the inferences. A society which on the one hand abhors pedophilia tolerates hawkers who consciously proffer youngsters dressed as sex objects, aided and abetted by parents who were probably brainwashed a generation ago in only slightly milder degrees.
Nor can we blame it all on the sixties and free love. Snippets of "Mad Men" remind us that the values were just as debouched then; merely more institutionalized, subliminal and constrained by a moral hypocrisy that hid the underlying moral rot. The virtue of the Age of Aquarius was that it unmasked the hypocrisy; not that it elevated our moral awareness, values and conduct. Unfortunately, we never took the next crucial step to elevate both our standards and our conduct. We replaced moral hypocrisy with tolerance of the immoral, amoral and pseudo-moral.
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So, let us review. Thus far, we have trashed merchandised holidays and merchandised child porn. What else?
By a show of hands:
- how many of you aspire to be overweight, verging on obese?
- How many of you are already there, whether by aspiration or not.
- How many of you have the self discipline and sense of responsibility to self manage a condition that is controllable?
- How many of you frankly don't give a damn?
- How many of you resent the Health Care Reform personal insurance mandate because government will force you to take some level of personal responsibility and set some level of personal priority for your own and your family's health that will otherwise fall to society in direct and indirect ways that will cost others who had no say in your life choices?
This last item gets to the point that our self-destructive culture is not just about big, bad business. It's ultimately and equally about us as consumers and our willing failure to submit our life choices to critical self-examination in our own best interest. It is ultimately about us because we still have the power to vote every day with our dollars. Failing to use that vote in a concerted and premeditated manner, we create, wittingly and unwittingly, the destructive consumer culture that now consumes us.
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There is one other waste product of our current culture, but it deserves its own post: human waste. No, not the result of the basic biological function of excretion. But the act of an economic system that progressively extracts human resource from the processes that are supposed to serve human needs and wants, but actually becomes the engine of its own destruction, as well as the culture that created its logic.
So, I will return to where I began. How do you recycle a culture? The answer probably resides in greater minds than mine; but, if I had to take a stab at it, I would suggest that you treat it like a collection of a thousand malignant tumors serving a giant host tumor that gives nothing and demands all. Slowly and steadily starve the thousand slave tumors of their blood supply, money. While you watch them atrophy and ultimately die, conceive and nourish quietly the cultural organisms that should succeed them.
Go quietly if you can. Go viral if you must. But, by all means, go forward.
Onward
20111207
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