“Blank” Friday Sale!

It got a little misty in the hours after Thanksgiving dinner. A marine layer filled the air just enough to blur the omnipresent police flashers as a gaggle of cops redirected traffic around a bottlenecked parking lot. 11pm, an hour before Black Friday, and shoppers were literally lined up outside Best Buy to pounce on once-in-a lifetime deals. 

The ultimate laugh is that every item these committed consumers shorted their family time for, so they could push and shove their fellow consumers out of the way, will be available at an even lower price in a few weeks, when all of these box stores dump last year’s inventory for next year’s. Never have the masses been so hook-line-and-sinkered.

But getting these same folks off the couch to vote, or do volunteer work, and you’ll experience the true meaning of apathy. Consumerism is a formidable opiate. It not only gets us high, it’s also great for the economy! 

This fallacy is so wide spread, so deeply ingrained, that it’s impossible for us to imagine any other form of world order. The reward for hard work is buying shit you don’t really need. It’s cause and effect. The fallacy on the seller’s side is the illusion of scarcity.  Scarcity determines value.  But today, that thing we so desire, that’s on sale right now, today only, starting at midnight, will never run out.  It will never run out because without it, the fallacy is uncovered for the ruse that it is, and that can’t ever happen.

Consumerism has some powerful friends, too. The rapidity with which our culture is acting and reacting due to the impulsive nature of social media is its best friend. There’s less time to observe, process, debate because our collective bandwidths are maxed out keeping up with everything seemingly vital. They know how we think better than we do, and lesson number one is that the choice to purchase happens in the first few seconds of exposure to an ad.

We’ve grown numb to the naked fact that we’re being pitched and programmed from the second we wake to the moment we sleep. The sheer repetition of it all is so far beyond the horror imagined by George Orwell or Philip K. Dick that it’s laughable. Big Brother is not just watching, he’s playing an active roll in manipulating every single desire we think we have. How outrageous is it that we now see the exact same commercials during a football game for example. It’s literally ten times throughout the broadcast.

So what is it about speed and repetition that’s so valuable?  We can get all our shit faster than ever now, but aside from an organ transplant, how often does it matter?  What it does is fulfill the desire faster, thus creating another loop of wanting something else you don’t have.

We’ve all heard diatribes on corporate mind control: how capitalist ideology repackages itself to capture and assimilate any contrarian impulse we might feel and turn it into yet another commodity. You can read Michele Foucault and Jean Baudrillard for how the system co-opts and absorbs our objections and repurposes them over time.

I just wonder what a world order would look like where value is not based on the acquisition of bullshit built to become obsolete so we can buy it again in the latest model. How would things be different if social status was based on giving back instead of accumulating? What would it be like competing with each other for that?

Instead we blunt our awareness every chance we get, with pharmaceuticals, with tik tok, with impulse shopping.  It’s the post-modern pathology, and it’s increasing in velocity.  The horror is that we’re all voluntarily (or not) participating in this acceleration to some degree. You can’t be alive in America and not be.

Similar to the propagation of the false-scarcity myth, happiness attained via bio-chemistry, or the engagement we get from the network manufactured conflicts on reality tv, will never satisfy us, because if it did, the cycle would cease. The show would be over. We buying the lie for the short term endorphin release. But ask any Capitalist, and they will tell you, it’s always better selling dreams than buying them.

But what if, instead of an official national shopping binge ominously labeled Black Friday, we spent the day after Thanksgiving in group meditating and called it, Blank Friday? Meditation has been proven to increase serenity (not happiness). It’s been proven to last if practiced. It would require a radical shift in our devout self-preoccupation, but as we’ve seen, humans are capable of far more astounding behavior.

You don’t see Tibetan monks body checking one another at Costco for a reason. That scene is the pinnacle of the Western nightmare. But leave them in silence for five hours in an unadorned room, and hook them up to an EEG machine, and you’ll see massive spikes in the left prefrontal cortex, the area that correlates most with bliss. The brain’s other pleasure centers, the left fore brain bundle, the anterior insula and the precentral gyrus, also spike after meditation. And it’s been proven that while meditators are more aware of their feelings, they’re also less affected by them.

What if, instead of hyperventilating through life to amass more shit, we meditated on how consumerism continues to stratify society and erode community.  Or how protecting our ecosystem might prolong our children’s lives?  How would our national awareness shift with a deeper understanding of something that actually is threatened by scarcity? Like clean water, or non-gmo corn?  What would it be like for everyone to set aside a few hours to consider what it is they’re giving back?

‘Tis the season, and for another year, we’re told that buying more is the best thing we can do for our economy.  It will boost the markets and trickle down. We are all slaves to the consumer index.

Milton Friedman and Unregulated Capitalism can fuck off.  How many more “corrections”, aka, scandals and collapses, do we have to trudge through for us to understand that “The Market” doesn’t know best. “The Market,” as it turns out, is just as paranoid and neurotic and irrational and asinine as we are. It needs hardcore disciplinarians helicoptering its every move, at all times, in perpetuity.

The corporatization of everything– our food, energy, the internet, health care, Hollywood– has not only poisoned the source, it’s diluted the common good by pitting us against one another in a thinly veiled consumption-a-thon. And for many, the incessant scramble for the next rung has plunged them into debilitating financial and worse, emotional debt. And the latter is even harder to pay back.

If there ever was a sign of an empire in decline, it’s when people start deferring to hope over reason.  Haven’t we essentially replaced our faith (blindness) in God with a faith (blindness) in capitalism?  That this giant, all knowing, all-powerful entity is going to take care of us without us really having to DO anything?

I think a national meditation day would do wonders for the Empire.  It would be a challenge, I know, but we could ease our way into this new self-awareness by declaring to all Americans that there’s gonna to be a big fucking SALE! SALE! SALE! on CALM SELF REFLECTION. Starting at midnight, December 31st next year. Get in line before it runs out!