YouTube is Wonderful on Black Friday

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By Jason Michael

Our holidays are only as good as the things we get. We give in order that we might receive. Things have become the substitute of the values that once filled the emptiness inside us. Black Friday has become the starting whistle in our race to the abyss.

Until the sickness reached the shores of Britain and Ireland “Black Friday” was one of those special occasions we could be united in gleeful bewilderment at YouTube clips of hefty Americans behaving like a herd of panicked wildebeest, and fighting like hungry hyenas over television sets and designer brands. Now that we have succumbed to this insanity it’s not quite as funny. Watching our own families, friends, and neighbours ditching their self-respect and pride to squabble like seagulls over chips at the seaside is truly shameful. What have we become?

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However cringe-worthy all of this is, at some point we have to make our peace with it. Black Friday and the whole stinking mess that is Christmas is, after all, the logical end of a uniquely modern way of thinking. Secularism and modernity have conspired to strip us completely of any real and meaningful sense of value. The success of Christmas has come to be measured by sales; a good Christmas means that consumerism has been strong, and a bad Christmas one where spending has been low. Whether we like it or not these are our secular values. In a world that rejects all claims to truth, meaning – ultimate meaning and value – becomes the baby that is thrown out with the bathwater.

Understanding the social psychology of Black Friday – the prevailing philosophical nihilism and how people accommodate themselves to it – explains a great deal about our irrational and almost irresistible compulsion to spend. Humanity divorced from any form of value and meaning is in fact stripped of its humanity, and the drive to recover this becomes focused on replacing value with things – stuff, trinkets, shit. We have been transformed into magpies, unaware that the shiny things of the shop are in themselves meaningless and contribute to our deepening value void.

We can wonder why the sheeple abandon the ideas of community and the family in favour of self-centredness and individualism, and why those people who bother to vote support politicians who promise wealth – but the answers are already before us. Nothing has value. Everything has been reduced to a cost equivalent, and the only quality in our lives is that which can be measured in money. Bang for the buck becomes the only virtue worth striving for, and it is this mode of thinking that leads us to fat people (people whose only god is their own belly) scrapping over a bargain.

Black Friday Is Not What It Seems