A sham: an endeavor or system wherein deception in inherent, but not in a way designed to cause joy or laughter.
A friendlier word here is misdirection. Some things require saying one one thing and doing another. It’s not always bad (the joy of the tooth fairy, pulling a prank on a friend, a magic trick). But others cannot afford the privilege of plausible deniability or excusability. In that second category, I shall place most of the modern Western economy.
Most needs are met - but wants are undefined. Girard lays thorough groundwork here: we don’t know what to want, so we merely decide to want what we see others wanting. It’s probably an astute evolutionary instinct, which effectively maximizes the intelligence of a group over that of an individual. After all, none of us has the time to truly research the best brand for every item we purchase. Going with name brands is a simple mechanism to rely on the collective decision-making, which is right most of the time.
There are other elements, inherent not to the system but to a person. For example, people on average want 40% more than they have. This is irrespective of starting point, salaries, or class. Somehow, we all have the instinct that a 40% raise would solve all of our problems. Part of this stems from a broken paradigm, of “worth” over “priority.”
The math here is simple. There are items and experiences where you or your friend will say, “it costs $X, but it’s so worth the price.” What constitutes price worthiness is another conversation, but for the purposes of this discussion, it’s worth noting that the sum of worthiness exceeds total capacity. There are easy examples of this. I love a good night’s sleep - how much is that worth to me? Probably an easy $50 or $100 (maybe more). When life is stable and I can manage it, I always choose rest over sleeplessness. But if I am signed up for prolonged travel (as I am now), I simply would not be able to afford that price (I would choose the $110 motel over the $210 Airbnb for almost any length of stay over 2 days).
[insert drawing that everyone’s value of what they’d pay for, is more than they can afford]
This reality is at the core of lifestyle creep, budgeting issues, and why the rich still go broke. In reality, people must prioritize, decide between two worthwhile things and only pick one. But this mismatch obscures a lot of our understanding of human value.
[a vertical bar, with a list of priorities, where the line of what they can pay for doesn’t cover all of it. basically a prioritized version of the previous graph]
Because of these two axes - what someone wants, and what they can afford, we often mistake an expansion into a new zone as value creation. In truth, the expansion only comes from two places: more money to spend, or reprioritizing. And the reprioritizing is the work of the social. Here we return to Girard - humans mostly reprioritize based on observation of others.
It may tempting at this point to hold that priorities are external, that needs fill so much of the stack that it is really poverty, or high cost of living, or lack of innovation that is driving that list. But I guarantee if you go to some of the poorest places in the world, you will still see phones and smartphones - which one can hardly call needs in the way that food is. Which means that, somehow, the world convinced itself that a smartphone is one of the most important needs a person can have (that narrative, self-fulfilling or not, is why Apple is currently the most valuable company in the US).
I kind of lose the thread her
So, how does one create human value?
- find the people who have more than what they’ve paid for, and show them more things to want.
- make things in their outer circle cheaper and more accessible
The US economy was built on television. Today it is built on the internet as well.
[insert graph showing TV watching in US vs. other countries] [same for internet]
Advertising is the driving force of US consumerism, the mimetic desire to own the nicer thing, the faster car, the better phone camera. After a certain point, there is no benefit nor drawback to these things. The more advertising, the more purchasing, the bigger the economy, the same baseline happiness of the people.
The only winner is whoever benefits from that larger economy, which is simple: the government. And the only thing a government can really buy with that is power, through military or trade. This is the only reason why GDP growth matters (past a certain point), why we need the economy to be strong, etc.
draw cycle with offshoot to government