Today society looks at the world through what is often referred to as a “global lens.” The lens of which there are many perspectives, many interests, many ways to approach the information we receive. However, Globalism’s secret is largely something that’s never discussed, because it’s an extremely powerful tool for some to laud over others. What Globalism is, essentially, is a loss of understanding for the smaller pictures in the modern world. Downtown communities are not rural beltways, but Wal-Mart and Apple treat them the same way. Globalism is a strategy companies employ to create a company-based group think, one that eventually leads into industry and at our current standing, culture. Industry thinks globally in relation to borders, morals, and money. The fighting for minerals is a small price to pay if everyone gets an iPhone. But industry is, in today’s society, a mechanical and somewhat obfuscated term that refers to corporations. Industry tends to bring with it the assumption that work is being done, that there is a great societal maxim that needs to be addressed and by our collective effort, the question can be answered. The corporate world however is one that has moved away from simply being a builder of things, and has now become a creator of culture. Culture is a fuzzy creation that has a difficult definition, but for the sake of argument, assume culture is tied up in tradition.
Now, before getting back to Globalism and how it relates to culture, let’s start with understanding the definition of culture as it exists when tied up with tradition. Religions are perhaps the largest purveyors of tradition, but they are not the only source by which tradition once existed. Tradition started largely as a result of creating a communicative story, a sense of shared of history amongst groups. These stories were told for various reasons, some for the purpose of historical recollection, and others for morality or ethics. Stories existed for the sake of memory, as recalling a story is generally easier than recalling a moral or why it’s important, not to mention that stories answer the overarching question of why the moral is or is not important. Families came together under auspicious occasions to retell the past, communities met at festivals where long-held stories amongst a small group could then be retold, and in a sense, re-sold to the audience. Religions established much of this as paganism, leading to many bloody purges, but these purges were largely based on fear that the religion itself was not the only purveyor of common wisdom. Essentially, many people were telling stories, but those with swords liked their version of history (or herstory) better than those without, and decided, collectively, that it would be retold with certain imagery. Many stories and traditions faded during historical purges, but purges of tradition today are perhaps a bit more insidious. The reason for that relates to the fact that tradition, like culture, is a creation. Culture is somewhat different in that it is not just a tradition, but tied up in questions of identity. Unfortunately, corporations have become major purveyors of identity worldwide, and as such, put the definition of culture in a difficult position.
Because culture is not just about the past, but about identity, it is difficult to find where culture is independent of those players who attempt to sell culture. Selling culture is largely a byproduct of corporations becoming so large as to encompass entire sectors of our everyday lives. Effectively, using certain objects in our day-to-day lives is dictated not by our ability to create, but by our subjectivity to a created environment. Certainly the individual has an option to do something as crazy as creating their own operating system, but unless that environment is better than other available environments and is available in a way that does not feel constricting, it seems unlikely that creating such an environment is actually effective at creating change or even aiding in determining identity. Thus, we use environments that are not of our own making every day. We are effectively aliens mapping ourselves into someone else’s constructed environments. Hundreds of years ago, this was not possible. This mapping that we do on an everyday basis, that is common, secondhand knowledge to us, would have been completely alien to someone born only a few centuries before. The acceleration at which human knowledge has increased is dramatic, but human processing is still at the same speed it has always been. The bigger problem with this is that identity itself is being compounded before the individual even has time to consider the problem. The idea of consumption has become one where the individual should gobble up all the information, rather than finding pieces, finding morsels that are truly delicious, and biting down deeply, succulently, into those.
The deeper problem is that culture at a level of swallowing everything also means that much of the flavor is lost. Rare is it a person who can give a full description of things which they own today, because they now own so much that the objects themselves have lost meaning. A general description, to be sure, is readily available for most any individual. But how many could tell you where a towel was made or who made the towel? And if they knew that information, would they think differently about the towel? Purchasing has become a psychological box where people often play games, where value is believed to be set, yet realistically makes little actual sense. It is in the effort of and towards objects that we identify most with. A bear made by the hand of our grandmother has an infinitely more powerful psychological worth than any bear that’s mass-produced. As a result, it seems safe to reason that what we want is indeed knowledge, and to another extent, the time of day to actually explore the objects with which we interact. Making the information about those objects readily available gives us, in a fashion, identity. However, the bear from the grandmother carries much greater weight in relation to our identity than something bought from a shopping mall. The reason for this is because we care about what the object does, rather than the history of the object.
Effectively, mass-produced objects carry with them a sense of the industry in which they are created. Cars have a certain look because they come from a car-based industry. What is lost on the individual in their quest for identity is understanding where and how the car eventually came to be there. Ask the car dealer where the car came from, and they may be able to give you a general idea, but to have lost the specifics, the odd twists and turns of the car that came to be yours, is really what the individual seeks in identity. In each path we seek a journey, and through that journey we seek growth. If objects are to truly be brilliant, the industry itself must be aware not just of the image they want to produce, but of the history they seek to lay upon the individual. If a car has no history, what chance is there that an individual will grow attached? Memory is the key to determining an industry’s worth, and perhaps why America’s industries have classically struggled to maintain their historic significance. Their memory is short, if non-existent. A moth, flickering. What is worse is that they are purveyors of a culture, and purveying amnesia is dangerous in any society. History has long since taught us that forgetting leads to the worst in man, and though memories are often unpleasant, they can serve as a stern reminder of why such ideas were unhelpful to the common good. In producing an entire society with collective amnesia however, the same mistakes have already been repeated a number of times in many industries, and corporatism has not led to fixing the problem–in fact, it may be reinforcing it.
The danger in corporatism is ultimately that it is concerned with itself, despite the fact that it is now clearly an influence that affects identity. Being fashionable in a certain manner puts a person in a certain group or identifying class, but corporate amnesia continues to shift these boundaries. The result is an unstable system of something quite central to who we are–our identity. And those controlling our identities by association are entities who we are not concerned with and who show no concern to us. At some point, there is a confluence where one must decide to either take the identity upon themselves or violently thrust it aside, yet that identity is no longer being determined by the individual–the corporation has taken from us a part of how we identify the world. True, an identity is never established alone entirely, but the corporately provided identity is much different than those of the past, one being largely communally based, concerned with tradition; the other religiously based, concerned with religious tenets. Thus, a corporate, industry-based world is concerned with buying and selling that which is of great value to us as individuals, but of little value to corporations themselves–identity. The poison here is a slow one, because while it’s hard at first to notice, when one of the brands that you associate with disappears, as it is sure to over one’s lifetime, there is a sudden shift in terms of identity. The individual now needs something to fill the gap that was left. While there are certainly many options available, the fact that we are ignoring is that the corporation was actually allowed to take up a space within our identity, by association. To a degree, this makes us dysfunctional, particularly if the particular corporate entity was a major part of our lives.
By being too caught up in finding identity in these mass-produced objects, we create easily accessible holes in our identity. Effectively we are being filled by products rather than by experiences, by histories, or memory. The product is robbing us, in a sense, of our ability to individualize, to think outside the solutions the product creates via existence. Identity is mostly about finding problems and addressing them, and doing so using another’s solutions means a mostly imperfect set of experiences will be thrust upon you. Solving these problems is a question of finding oneself in a local, rather than global environment. To find oneself in a smaller space means that we can then identify those things which give us identity and find objects with their own personality.
Globalism is actually a problem, not a solution. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s quite clear that trying to solve the same problems in the same way or with similar methodologies is unhelpful–it’s also an attribute that many people want to embody. But what does attempting to embody a “worldly” thought process do other than rob one of identity? Thinking locally is about thinking adaptively, and nurturing the individuality of creators. When people begin to think globally, they begin to lose track of themselves, of what it is they’re doing, and why it’s important within the space it exists. It’s easy to make something irrelevant on the scope of a world stage, but that’s because the only things that are really relevant on the world stage relate to matters of wars and politics, and neither of these are pleasant. Our “global” community is excellent from a standpoint of information exchange, in that we can all grow from having access to more information. That much is apparent, but assuming everyone will approach the information similarly is short-sighted. Information is to be taken with a degree of caution, and truth is an idea we could stand to question.
Globalism makes culture difficult. As brands grow in size and continue to adapt to sell their ideas elsewhere, the world eventually comes to purvey the same ideas, having the same collective amnesia. As these corporations get bigger and stretch out ever-further into the individual identity, they also have more control while having ever-shorter memories. Eventually, a catastrophic failure will happen, because these purveyors of identity are selling it through a market system that is doomed, as we have recently come to terms with. Though the governments can save many of these institutions for now, it’s apparent that these lurching titans will one day fall. What then can one say in relation to who they are? As we become more attached to these created identities, we become less able to fully comprehend the value or reason as to why we ourselves created stories, why we tell stories to our children, why we seek to pass on a certain kind of identity. Be wary of falling prey to corporate identity. It is always lurking, and looking to make everyone a victim of its story. Tell stories of old, make-up new stories all your own, but be wary of passing the buck on to someone else in relation to identity. You only get one, and kids won’t listen forever. Stories are wonderful lenses to focus a shared past.
Here’s an old Russian tale, Vasilisa the Beautiful.
And some wonderful Nordic stories, the Poetic Edda.
If you want other stories to tell that might be more related to your particular culture, please comment and I will attempt to find some that delineate more ancient texts. There are wonderful volumes of prose and poetry from every culture, to enrich and enjoy.