Scams as wish lists
KeithHandy posted in Business, Your Soul on November 12th, 2007
I don’t really have a shape to this thought, so if you know what I’m getting at, feel free to pick up the ball and run with it.
It’s about things that are advertised, which we intellectually know to be untrue or misleading, but emotionally we’re kind of drawn to it anyway. Get rich quick schemes, for example. Mixed in with their misrepresentation of how feasible or sustainable their system is, is generally a valid motivational hook: have more free time to spend with your family and doing what you love, etc.. As much as this hook manipulates the gullible viewer’s perception of the scheme, by causing his sense of “good reason” to spill over into his attitude about the mechanics of the scheme itself, it works the opposite way for the skeptic: our intellectual knowledge of the flaws in the scheme spill over into a rationalization that “more free time” is impossible.
Instead of us shaking our heads in disgust that the worms on the hooks are made of rubber, why don’t we look at those fake worms as models, wish lists, or “vision boards“? We can say, yeah, that particular worm is fake, but how can we all work together to fill the world with real worms, so instead of running schemes to merely move wealth from person A to person B, we’d actually be creating more of that wealth for everyone?
And by wealth, I don’t just mean money, I mean time as well — actually more so, because unlike most of western culture, I value time more than money — and also the actual goods and services that money itself is just a medium of exchange for.
That said, my long term desire to free the entire world from long “check your human rights at the door” workdays and workweeks needs to be put aside in the short term. I can’t save the world until I figure out how to save me.
