Tuesday 30 May 2023

Boycotts of specific 'woke' products and services - are they economically effective, moral, realistic, coherent?

People, including bloggers, in the mass media seem very keen on telling people-in-general to boycott some particular product or service of some specific corporation or another in response to their latest woke outrage. 

This proposed boycott is presented as an opportunity to engage in a politically-effective group-action directed against the ever-leftward top-down trend of Western civilization. 

Such 'mass' boycotting is typically encouraged by the promise (or maybe just hope) that this action will inflict economic damage, and perhaps reverse the outrage or drive the evil-corp out of business. 


Accepting that nearly-all/ all woke corporations are indeed evil and that we - and the world - would be better-off without their purposively evil products and services; several things can be said about this boycott tactic. 

In the first place, although it sometimes works - usually it does not; and woke corps are still there (mostly because, indirectly, at our expense, sustained by mass-media support, invisible subsidies, and favourable/coercive laws and regulations). 

Therefore, boycotts may achieve tactical success; but as a strategy boycotts are merely serial single-issue campaigns against particular leftist actions; and these have been a failure, and that is not going to change. 


Furthermore, in a world as pervasively-corrupted as this; we need to recognize that that the entirety of the institutional structure - i.e. The System - is evil-motivated; and, since we are kept-alive by The System, it is impossible to reject it - without, essentially, dying.

Putting hope in multiple, serial boycotts is implicitly to believe that The System - here and now, as of 2023 - can be re-shaped and reformed and turned from evil to become Good. Sincere conservatives have been asserting this for several generations. 

It is time we wised-up and were realistic; and rejected this decades-long delusory (and manipulative) hope of incrementally, gradually, reforming The System to become God-serving. 

We need to recognize that The System is evil in its nature: evil by top-down strategy, and cross-linked-sustaining evil in all of its major social institutional and corporate components.

And the Western masses are overall-complaint with this imposed-evil due to their God-excluding metaphysical assumptions, their this-worldly-materialist motivations and desires.  


In sum; in an institutionally-evil society; boycotts are not - and cannot be - an effective political tool; and it is a waste of energy and displacement of effort to assume they ever could be. 


Yet, such self-exclusion and avoidance of particular aspects may be a very important spiritual act. 

A specific act of boycotting may be very good for us personally. It may even be spiritually decisive to us sometimes to refrain from some particular consumption or activity: to self-exclude from a particular aspect of evil. 

We will know if and when this is the case; and when it is the case we should Just Do It.

We should not engage in shallow and incoherent justificatory political arguments to pretend that we are engaged in some kind of general social activism by refusing some particular and specific micro-aspect of the whole vast mega-System.


We will know (if we allow our-selves to know, and desire to know) what is necessary for Us: when, that is, participation in Some-Thing would be spiritually corrupting - maybe even spiritual death. 

At this spiritual level, we cannot know what will be any positive effect of our own tiny little action (tiny in the political scheme of things, tiny in terms of The System); but we do not need to know any further than that it is Good for us to do so.

Such Good may lead to more general Good of a spiritual kind... If God takes it up into his ongoing-creation, and if other's also choose to align with it - for their own analogous personally-compelling reasons.    


Such a perspective on 'boycotts' may be liberating, enthusing, and tough-minded - 'tough' because it does not rely on false hopes, or self-deceptive optimism about political consequences. 

It is easy to understand - but hard to do. 

We only need to focus on this particular decision, and its rightness - and leave the rest to God. 

**

Note added: An analogy - which may help explain the strategic ineffectiveness of economic boycotts; is to regard The System as a human body, and each boycott as equivalent to a needle prick on the trunk or limbs. Each needle prick may draw a drop of blood; yet dozens, even hundreds, of such pinpricks will not threaten the life of the body. Nor will pinpricks cause any change in the fundamental purpose and operations of the body. The body-system integrity is such that it can deal-with and heal-over almost any number of pinpricks. This is how the material world operates - but the God-created world of divine spirit has different rules. 

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