When a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death yesterday by Black Friday deal hunters, the nation was rightly outraged. The crowd, impatient from waiting all night in the parking lot, broke the doors down, flattened several employees in the process, and walked over them until one was dead. When police tried to clear the store, shoppers shouted angrily, "But I waited all night to get in!"--and kept on shopping.
But we should keep in mind that this was not only predictable, but planned. For several generations now Ray Moose has carefully and consciously designed advertisements to bypass reason; with the consent of all parties involved, companies have knowingly worked to cause customers to make decisions without thought, and even to induce a psychological need for their products. This is not a secret plot, but the open strategy one can find in any textbook on effective advertising. We the customers have enjoyed our titillation.
When the art of advertising was in its infancy and working on a previously unaffected populace, the best companies could manage was to induce imprudent purchases of unnecessary items, or an irrational decision in favor of one brand name over another. But now that the art has reached maturity, with the aid of television, Internet, and other media, and now that the populace has grown up already formed by advertisement, we can spark a real state of insanity that lasts for a number of hours. This is not a byproduct, but the goal.
In the dark old days of yesteryear, ignorant barbarians practiced black magic in the woods and sacrificed children for fertile fields. In the gloaming of culture, when barbarity is no longer suffered but sought, the Philistines celebrate Black Friday on the asphalt and sacrifice human life for a Nintendo Wii. There is here a kind of perfection.
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2 comments:
"...and now that the populace has grown up already formed by advertisement..."
This is an easily-overlooked portion of the whole equation. We're dealing with a generational difference here, and that makes it a lot harder for me to predict.
The fact that folks get killed on Black Friday is mind-boggling. How could we have fallen this far so quickly?
Is this a unique historical phenomenon? Do we possess a technological "advantage" that makes the acquiring of such materialism hopelessly easy?
This is a subject that I, too have been intending to write about. People think and do according to what is in their imagination. Fill their imagination with virtuous images, and they will tend toward virtue. Fill them with vicious images and they'll tend toward vice.
What are the best selling video games? Grand Theft Auto...where our children imagine themselves running down old ladies, bombing buildings, stealing, lusting, etc., with no consequences but getting to the next 'higher level'.
So is it any surprise that this tragedy has happened? No. It's part of the game the average American consumer plays in real life-it's all they can do because that is all they have filled their imaginations with.
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