The Drive Behind Black Friday: No, It's Not "Greedy Capitalists"
I think it's time that we looked around the Internet and talked about things which are important to our lives. If you live in the Western world, and in some places outside of it, one of those things is Black Friday.
For those outside of the Western world, let's go to one of our favorite sources for all knowledge, Wikipedia:
As you can imagine this is a pretty big deal. The traditional news cycle for the day is to focus on how crowded the stores are, "all the violence" (which is really terribly rare, which you know because if it weren't it wouldn't be news – but that's a different post altogether), and how bad everyone involved is that a moral level for engaging in such overt consumerism.
While selling papers and subscriptions to their news aggregators, notably. There is no sense of shame in journalism.
But not everyone is a complete anticapitalist tool, lucky for us or we wouldn't actually have anything. Some people have some real experience in the retail space and the wherewithal to talk about it.
One of my favorite writers in role-playing games and video games also has written an article about Black Friday, and it is one of the most insightful pieces that you are likely to read today. I want to focus on the closing paragraph, however – though you definitely need to read the whole thing:
Deconstructing this a little bit is worthwhile.
On Steemit (and to be fair a lot of other online communities), there is a strong bias toward believing in "the conspiracy". Not a specific conspiracy but the basic idea that conspiracies can and do run things, resulting in all the evil in the world. There made up of terrible, horrible people who disagree with whoever is speaking, are clearly inferior in reason and capability, but somehow have ended up in charge and controlling everything. The idea of conspiracy and conspirators infects everything, because how could everything possibly be so bad (despite being so good) unless there were evil people pulling the strings behind the scenes that we could never get to?
Conspiracies shift blame. They allow the speaker an easy out, because how could they possibly be responsible for what's going on? They allow the speaker to self-define themselves as enlightened, as opposed to the masses; special when compared to everyone else, and anyone like them is likewise special.
Black Friday is an opportunity for journalists in the West, in the Mercantile West, to pretend to be just like every other conspiracy minded individual and a shared "victim" with everyone else.
But that's just not so, not only because those standing on the street corner shilling a narrative that they helped create can't possibly be victims of it but because there are no victims of it – there are just participants. And "it" isn't evil, it's not even bad – it's a little banal and annoying at worst.
So when you go out and fight through the crowds this holiday season, maybe even today, maybe you've even done it today already, keep in mind that there is no conspiracy forcing you to do it, there's no terrible crime that you're participating in by engaging in your commercial interests on Black Friday, you're not destroying the world, you're not making the world a terrible place – and conversely, if you're not out shopping on Black Friday, you're not saving the world, you're not improving the world, and you're probably hanging out at home looking for the good deals on Steam, just like all the cool kids.
Smash the conspiracy. Stop believing in it.