diAmnonds

By now, [music] you probably know the top line of this whole situation. Companies like Debeers have manipulated the public with advertising [music] and marketing to convince us that diamonds have some intrinsic value that we must pursue and buy and adore when in reality diamonds are worthless common [music] stones. But there is something happening here which people almost always ignore. Consider a magic trick. [music] When we learn how the trick is performed, it generally loses its appeal. Well, we have learned how this diamond trick [music] is performed. The truths of the diamond industry are all but common knowledge at this point. Still, every year, more and more people [music] buy diamonds. We know the trick and we still fall for it. Why is that? How is that? When we get these answers, we can understand a whole lot more than just diamonds. I wouldn't be able to make videos like these if we didn't have free flowing, balanced access to information. In fact, I wouldn't be able to understand the world. Unfortunately, we are at risk of this kind of danger. On September 18th, President Trump banned CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House in an egregiously anti-free speech move. Thankfully, just yesterday, at time of recording, a judge ruled this unconstitutional and overturned the ban. When I read this story on ground news, I get the reassuring news that both sides of the political spectrum are covering it pretty evenly, but with subtly different messaging. Left-leaning outlets are saying Trump had banned these news networks because they were fake news and fiction and lies. Right- leaning outlets, meanwhile, vaguely note that the administration cited national security concerns for the ban. Fortunately, there's not really a reason to think Trump is done trying to censor the media. In times like these, getting a full picture of the world's events is more than important. It's one of the best ways to fight back against top-down censorship. Over the past couple of years, Ground News has been my only sponsor. It's because I'm not interested in promoting predatory gambling companies or surveillance state mobile games. I genuinely believe in the work that the team at Ground News is doing and I believe more people should be using the service. Unlike other platforms, they don't push or suppress stories to influence your perception of the world. Their platform pulls in thousands of articles from around the world and organizes them by story to show how the left, center, and right are framing the story differently. For every news item, the color-coded layout makes it easy to see the political bias of each so-called unbiased outlet and a history of failing fact checks and even which sources are independently owned or owned by large media conglomerates with corporate interests. When it comes to news, finding the truth is getting more difficult every day. I sincerely believe ground news can help us write the ship on this whole issue. Ground News is fully independent and supported by readers like us, but I partnered with them to get my viewers 40% off the same Vantage plan I've been using. Go to ground.news/horses by clicking the link in my description or scan my QR code to get a great deal on the Vantage plan with all the features I just mentioned. By signing up, you're directly supporting the work I do here and your ability to think critically. I think the less time we spend on this the better, but some background is important. Debeers is the world's leading diamond company. They specialize in mining, trading, and marketing of diamonds, and the company basically has a monopoly on the industry. In the 1930s, new mines in Africa and a sluggish depression era economy had dragged diamond prices downward. By this time, Debeers had spent decades consolidating all of the world's diamonds into a single limited supply. Debeers accumulated diamonds to sell them as much as they did to control their market price. But now, Debeers needed to control demand in the same way they already controlled supply. So, in 1938, the Beers hired an ad agency to help make this happen. This is a whole story in of itself, but is not really what this video is about. Suffice to say, the ad campaign was a huge success. It ultimately established a few cultural tenants about diamonds. The agency put diamonds on the rich and famous, gave lectures to high school about diamond etiquette, and had stories published in newspapers about what diamonds celebrities were wearing. So now the stone was the aspirational object in American society. The agency also tied diamond size to love. The bigger the diamond, the more a man loved his fiance. The implicit opposite was also true. The less he spent on the diamond, the less he loved his partner. The agency invented the 2 months salary budget rule for an engagement ring, which later became 3 months. Finally, they came up with the line, "A diamond is forever," which cemented the diamond as an eternal symbol of love. There is historical precedent for people liking diamonds. Diamond mining appears to have originated around 700 B.CE in ancient India. Historical royals and elites have treasured or gifted diamonds to one another. But altogether, these are examples of a sparse exclusive tradition. It is true that Debeers invented the diamond culture we have today. And that's exactly where the puzzle emerges. Most people know some version of this already. Most people know the entire diamond industry is built on basically pure nonsense. You, the individual, may have no interest in buying a diamond. Many people feel this way, but data shows that while it's a little complicated, diamond sales are generally increasing every year. So why does this charade still work? Most objects function as pretty straightforward signs. A sign is anything that stands for something in the eyes of the individual. A stethoscope around the neck is a sign. We interpret that person to be a doctor. A company logo is a sign. We see the Nike swoosh and think physical activity or sneakers or whatever. Even a red octagon is a sign. We in America anyways think to stop. Diamonds are also a sign. A sign can work in three ways. The first is by being a symbol. Consider a red and white barber pole, a skull and crossbones meaning pirates, or a stop sign. If something communicates its meaning through being a symbol, this is entirely arbitrary without all of us just agreeing on this meaning. It can be changed. There's no obvious physical reason in particular that a red and white pole should mean haircuts or a skull and crossbones should mean piracy. We could change all stop signs to purple circles and eventually that shape would carry the same meaning as the red octagon does. Now, diamonds can work this way as well. Diamond companies have toyed with this through advertising. Big stones were once in vogue, then small, then colored stones. This type of sign is so arbitrary that it's incredibly easy to change. So, while diamonds can work as a symbol, this is artificial and doesn't really solve our problem here. A sign can also communicate meaning by being an icon. This means it physically resembles the thing it represents. For example, the picture of a man on the door of a men's restroom, a smiling emoticon, a model of an airplane. Diamonds subtly work in this way, and this has been exploited by advertisers. Diamonds have high clarity, and they're very hard. The ideal of love is one that is transparent and everlasting. Think a diamond is forever. This connection is tenuous and it is one that has been made more actual purely by advertising. But it is based in some amount of physical reality. However, the true power of diamonds relies in their function as the third kind of sign, an index. An index is something that has a real actual link to another thing in the physical tangible sense of the word. Smoke is an index of fire. A scar is a mark of an injury in a specific place on the body. This is more than a social agreement or a cultural imprint. A diamond is often an index. An individual's diamond has a connection to some event or action. Their spouse gave them the diamond when they proposed. Their grandparents passed on the diamond before they died. These things are divorced from the whims and marketing strategies of companies like Debeers. They are real. They are significant and meaningful in a way that marketing really cannot be. There is another layer to all of this. We learn the meanings of signs just like we learn vocabulary. This should explain the installation of the diamond myth. The beers spent years linking diamonds in love or luxury or exclusivity. It would be easy then in turn to say that once we learn diamonds actually carry almost no natural meaning, we should lose interest entirely and that if we do not lose interest, we are weak-minded victims of marketing. However, there is a problem with this model, especially when it comes to diamonds. In this model, meaning exists entirely outside of the individual and entirely in the collective. It does not account for the U and the individual is exactly the reason this model fails when we talk about diamonds. The meaning of an object is not so much a fixed concrete thing in the way that the meaning of a word is. Instead, the meaning of an object is an event which occurs every time we encounter that object. It can and does change from one year to the next or from one person to the next. Consider, for example, your favorite toy from childhood. As a child, your reaction to it was jubilant. As a teenager, it likely struck you as childish and embarrassing. Then, as an adult, this toy could very well ignite feelings of fond nostalgia. And of course, another person would have a totally different and likely more ambivalent opinion of that toy. So in addition to the object and what cultural implications have been bestowed upon it, there is also the you the interpreter. This interpreting process produces massively different results depending on who's doing the interpreting and what they know, remember, or feel. The object then doesn't only hold the meaning that culture, marketing, or society has given it, but the meaning that an individual person brings to it. be it a diamond, a toy, a stop sign, or anything else. When this happens, people are able to feel one way about a category of items while still feeling a completely different way about their own example of that item. This is why so many people know that diamonds are something like a scam while simultaneously treasuring their own example. their diamond has some meaning which is entirely different from the meaning of the category as a whole. This should not denigrate people's love for their diamonds. This meaning that people find as individuals is profoundly real and true. It is not just some petty half-hearted excuse to like a shiny object. If anything, this kind of meaning is probably the most honest of them all. It is born out of one's own self rather than installed artificially by marketing apparatuses or societal pressure. This is more or less why people are so okay with falling for the diamond scam. Objects are not just empty meaningless things that wait for some advertiser or culture to fill them. People individually in ways not attached to some big herd also provide these meanings. You found an antique on your honeymoon. Now this dusty old thing carries the weight of love. Your grandmother gave you a diamond ring before she died. Now the diamond is separate from the idea of diamonds as a whole. Really though, all of this fuss is just a tiny microcosm of a much larger conversation. see our relationship with material things in a really polarized sort of way. We think that things are things and people are people. An individual may be a greedy ostentatious materialist enamored and romanced by things and money. Or a person may be the presumably holier option, a monkish minimalist who has become so wise that objects have no meaning. These ideas seem to orbit around a central sort of thesis. We live in a period with so much stuff that we value our stuff way more than we value anything else. It feels like a sort of default enlightened option to believe that attachment to objects replaces attachment to people or self-worth or some other ostensibly more pure version of happiness. Attachment to material things within this way of thinking is compensation for some other iteration of failure or sadness. But I don't think this is true at all. To be clear, I'm also not of the opinion that more possessions is always a good thing or that objects are inherently good for you. But the ideas that we should either aspire to accumulate everything or aspire to cast off all things, I think they do rob us of much of life's color. It is really not the quantity of things which demands attention. Having a thousand things has no more accurate or profound meaning than having just one. The number alone does not tell you anything. Instead, we must look at the depth and intensity of the things. Not all objects, of course, are created or possessed equally. You go to Walmart and buy a stack of styrofoam cups, chances are those really have no meaning. You could lose them and very little disruption would occur. But this isn't true for everything. A ring inherited or a collector's most soughtafter book carries meaning that allows it to transcend its own physical properties or even its own practical function. Just like a wall or a beam in a house, an object can be loadbearing. This idea can be manifested in many different ways. Some objects are irreplaceable and they carry with them a biography much in the way that people do. An inherited item carries with it a legacy of past generations. An antique has lived a life more full than most people. These things, these loadbearing objects are so intimately tied to their biographies that even if you were given an exact, perfect, onetoone cloned replica, you would still feel a sense of loss. A loadbearing object may also carry the weight of a relationship, perhaps even a relationship that no longer exists. If an object was given, inherited, chosen together, used together, or argued over, all of that becomes imbued in the object itself. A whole relationship may be carried on through some material inanimate object. Memory is fallible. People come and go from our lives like a breeze through the trees. But when an object has been imbued with the heft of a relationship, suddenly that person or that time period becomes concrete. Certainly we cannot call this meaningless. We regard the accumulation of things as some kind of moral failing. We make many mistakes. One of them is displayed when we think about so many human practices that can be called admirable. Generosity involves the giving of things. Hospitality places objects at your guest's disposal. Food, drinks, a chair, a room, a house. Caring for your friends and loved ones may involve the handling of medicine, bedding, or food. Craft is one of the most incredible traits a person can have, and it is almost entirely manifested in the material world. How well can this thing look, operate, perform, or sustain its existence? Objects in these types of contexts certainly have intensely real meanings. There's also a notion that our things pollute some truer version of ourselves. That we are all actually encumbered and made more clumsy by material possessions. So if we remove them, we become more pure or true. But the fact is that objects do in part form who we are. This is true even before we have any concepts of materialism or minimalism. If you take a toy or a blanket from a baby, that child will be quite upset. This is not because the child is some Scrooge about his great material gains. Of course, it is because the object in question has genuine real meaning. It teaches the child about what he likes, what he doesn't like, what the world does, and how to operate within it. I think this probably holds true in adulthood. For example, look around your home. Look at all of those things that you have. Now imagine them disappearing one by one. The decor that you chose disappears from the walls. Your favorite books, the gifts you've been given by loved ones, the souvenirs from trips, your favorite clothes, your collection of whatever it is, all gone. Would you feel more like yourself? I think probably not. In fact, almost certainly the opposite. The things we own do help construct our identities. And that isn't necessarily bad. We find our tastes, express ourselves, and hold memories through these things. They are not at all meaningless. They are not some shroud cloaking a mysterious, serene, truer version of ourselves. There is further a strange thing which happens within the bounds of minimalism. Most primarily, casting off material possessions doesn't somehow unbound us from objects. Rather, it is a new alignment, a different material practice, not a non-material existence. Even the most pure versions of this non-materialism contradict themselves. Buddhism preaches detachment from material objects. But Buddhist temples, statues, and artworks are beautiful, maximal, often gilded expressions of faith. The Christian religion also has tenants rejecting material items. But even the oldest Christian churches and artwork have likewise always been magnificent and ornate. This is not to poke holes in either faith. I actually don't believe the teachings and the physical items are at odds. But as it almost always is, these rejections of material goods are not really rejections. They are realignments, selective material cultures rather than no material culture at all. Same thing tends to happen in more popular lifestyle versions of minimalism. Gurus or taste makers or whoever preach about casting off attachments to things so you can be happier. People look aspirationally at clean, minimal spaces and lifestyles. But this kind of thing only really works when you have money, which is in itself a material good. It costs money to not use your closets. It costs money to buy clothes which will last. It costs money to live in a big empty beautiful space. There is another thing to be considered as well. This whole idea that less stuff is better is only tenable if you have the option of owning stuff. It's easy to be blloze about material things when they are at your disposal, when you are poor. This most certainly is not the case. There are perfectly understandable reasons for people to reject the idea of things. In general, like any other cultural sentiment, minimalism is a reaction to the world around us. People believe civilization has become too excessive and indulgent and there is some past version of this place that was just right. This is understandable and it is something I often feel myself. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the material objects in our world and our abundance of choices and to simply give up and withdraw from it all is a understandable thing to do today. Everything is expensive. Real estate is impossible where there are jobs. Freelancing is on the rise. We've all been hoodwinkedked into benefitless occupations as independent contractors. There's hardly even a model for accumulation. And today's rich people seem to acrue wealth in strange, intentionally opaque ways that no one can really understand. The idea of ridding yourself of material things may feel like a good reaction. Having less feels a lot better when it is a choice. Meanwhile, if attaining things seems to appear only like a distant fantasy and economic outlook feels generally uncertain, owning fewer things is a rational decision. Furthermore, there are perfectly valid concerns about materialism. Hoarding is a very real disorder and should be treated as such. The treadmill of consumption is also real. You buy a nicer shirt, so now you need nicer pants, so now you need nicer shoes, so now you need a nicer closet, so now you need a nicer home, etc., etc. This never really ends. as a society. It is also true that we generally produce too many things in ways which are unsustainable. But all of this these are not problems inherent to things. They are other problems. And I'm not arguing against their respective existence. I am arguing though that a futile attempt to entirely divest from material things is no kind of solution. I was raised very poor. In adulthood, I was very poor for a long time. I have sold drugs, stolen money, and done much bad in pursuit of material things. For a period of several years, I lived in an abandoned radio station. I slept on a twin mattress on the floor, and I stole most of the things that I needed. It was hard to sleep. It was hard to eat. It was hard to be warm in the winter. If a man had come to me in that radio station and told me that actually material things are bad and you're lucky you don't have them, I would have been dumbfounded. I had no things and I knew that was bad. Stuff can bring over consumption, ecological damage, and obsession. But these are problems with the individual, not with the stuff itself. I think that stuff is just stuff. It's not inherently bad, nor is it inherently good. It's perfectly healthy to cherish your things. Ridding yourself of stuff is only a different material formation. It is not an exit from material life. It is not somehow above the petty orals of the rest of the world. Not owning requires money, effort, space, comfort, and indeed objects. Every day the things I own and value bring me great joy and comfort, and I cannot see what grand good it would do to renounce them. Cleaning your room is a very different thing [music] than cleaning your house.