In case you haven’t noticed it, a significant segment of our nation’s economy is based on the promotion of scorn as an attitudinal pre-requisite for life as we know it. This industry includes bloviators and scorn stars, certainly, but there’s also money to be made in other segments of this burgeoning enterprise. (Here think of politicians ratcheting up hate speech to encourage campaign contributions; merchants selling mockery-themed garments or doodads; and even pseudo-televangelists who know how spiritual condemnation can be made profitable.)
The scorn industry seems to be doing well. Money flows where money has always gone: To the places where attention aggregates. Merch jumps off the shelves of online stores. Professional ridiculers gather subscribing customers who consume their daily allotment of bile. Successful mockers inspire entrepreneurial imitators.
Money is a finite thing, so the profits that mockery merchants garner isn’t available elsewhere. It’s possible that derision dollars are being diverted from more hopeful and helpful human enterprises—like savings, investments, charities or even churches.
Sellers make money only when someone buys their goods or services. If the scorn industry is growing, you and I could be among the root causes for its success. If we announce, “That’s ridiculous,” we’re self-anointing our disdain of others’ identities, experiences or viewpoints with imagined authority. Then we can justify our brand of contempt because of others’ ignorance or our right to repudiate what’s wrong. We can legitimate our sarcasm as a semi-righteous form of persuasion, or our caricature of others as some sort of vengeful truth-telling.
If we don’t want disciples of disdain to bleed society dry, we, too, have to shut down our impulses to engage in that kind of thinking and acting. That may be the best way to shrink this business to the size it deserves:
Bankruptcy!
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