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No, that’s not heartwarming, that’s just capitalism

How the feel-good stories the media is feeding you actually expose the deepest flaws in our society.

In January this year, a young boy from Vancouver, Washington sold keychains in order to pay off his peers’ lunch debts. The story hit international news. 8-year-old Keoni Ching, spurred on by the spirit of his primary school’s ‘Kindness Week’, sold the bespoke items for $5 a pop in what quickly became a national phenomenon. As CNN put it ‘Once word of Keoni’s key chains and his heartwarming cause got out, people from all over the country started sending in their requests for one of the custom key chains’. Ultimately, Keoni was able to raise $4015 through the exaltation of a few warmed hearts from affluent homes – or the equivalent of almost 3 months’ work on US minimum wage. Now his peers and their families will not be billed for outstanding food debts.

Image result for keoni ching

‘Feel-good’ stories like this frequently metastasise in the cockles of the internet’s heart through various publications, interested in telling us about the homeless man in California who recently landed a job through handing out resumes on a highway in 35-degree heat, or the successful GoFundMe that allowed a leukaemia patient to pay his medical bills, or the dad who worked three jobs to buy his daughter a prom dress, or the university student who ran 20 miles to work after his car broke down and was subsequently given a new sedan by his boss. These tales of fortitude despite overwhelming odds are always handed down to us with the same mawkish, forced grin we’re expected to wear when we receive them.

And what’s more, many people do lap these stories up: like J Alfred Prufrock’s urban anaesthetic, or perhaps more accurately like Marx’s opiate. They’re ostensibly designed to remind us of the resilience of the human condition, and the potential boon of a system predicated on human generosity. These stories shout ‘Look over here at this shiny act of kindness, bravery, and fortitude!’ And presenting in such a sickly-sweet package, how can we help but look? But whilst we stare slack-jawed and smiling at the feel-good human-interest stories, we’re prevented from looking the other way and seeing the systematic failures that made such kindness, bravery, and fortitude necessary.

Nowadays, our notion of what constitutes a tale of heartwarming embattlement and what constitutes unnecessary and systematically enforced embattlement has been upended. Rather than being life affirming, stories like this should fill us with icy fear. Blogger and technologist Anil Dash said it best when he Tweeted:

‘Most of what gets shared as heartwarming stories are usually temporary, small-scale responses to systematic failures. I wish we found it just as inspirational to make structural changes to unjust systems.’

And it’s in the small systematic eroding of our personal freedoms that we can find companies spotlighting the occasional shiny foil nuggets in a trash heap. This reality we find ourselves in is given the sobriquet ‘a boring dystopia’ by cultural theorist Mark Fisher in 2015.

The boring dystopia refers to our Dali-esque surrealist landscape bumping up uncomfortably with the metal acridness of A Handmaid’s Tale in ways that are less sensational than either. It’s the bland, mildly coercive signs that abound in late-stage capitalist society that foster a sense of isolation or unease. The small, institutional reminders that the American Dream has gnawed at our freedom and usurped our life-force in service of a society that doesn’t support us.

Image result for sell plasma to buy book boring dystopia

Image result for boring dystopia

Image result for spikes on park benches

For a time in 2015 Fisher maintained a popular Facebook group bringing together examples of what he called ‘Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising… [distracting] us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have’. What we do have, according to Fisher, is just a bunch of ‘crappy robots’. Fisher, who spend his life as an academic and philosopher poking holes in the wallpaper of capitalism, committed suicide in 2017. His legacy was to gesture to the water we’re all swimming in.

The true insidiousness of stories like Keoni’s is that they seem to suggest that equality and prosperity can be reached through benevolence under capitalism. But, in reality, Keoni and those like him are the exceptions to the rule. What you don’t see are the hundreds of thousands of US children that will end the year still in their lunch debt due to a top-heavy economic system that punishes the already poor and enforces a parent’s financial burdens on their children.

This year, Good Morning America gleefully reported on Missouri mum Angela Hughes, whose was given by her colleagues over 80 hours of their vacation time after she failed to qualify for maternity leave. ‘Donating vacation time to new moms is a trendy – and generous – co-worker baby shower gift’ chirpily asserts the articles Twitter caption. As if to emphasise the farcical uncanniness of this corporate ghettoising, the mother on the article’s title image is not Angela Hughes, who is a black woman, but a young, white, Colgate alternative. As if we needed further evidence that articles like this are designed to project a falsified image of contentedness.

The point of the article is not presented as the broken system that created the need for this self-sacrificing workaround. The fact that Angela Hughes decided not to take a single day off during her pregnancy so that she could stockpile it for after the birth of her child is not mentioned. For Good Morning America the point of this story is not that the US is one of the only nations on earth, and the only western nation, to not have any form of mandatory maternity leave. The point for this publication is that this woman’s colleagues are just so, so generous.

Jessica M Goldstein of ThinkProgress has created a new term for this kind of news story: the feel-good feel-bad story. Whilst feel-good stories are a fine part of any media diet, providing the infrequent but frequently needed antidote to the news in the form of a baby giraffe and a baby swan becoming friends or something, the feel-good feel-bad story is a news item spun to you by some ostensibly authoritative voice – an official publication or a spokesperson – as an inspirational tale that actually points out the deep flaws in society.

Feel-good feel-bad stories are dispatches from the darkest cesspools of late-stage capitalism, where inequality is rife and poverty charges interest. In this form of society, those undergoing significant financial hardship must rely on the goodwill of others instead of appealing to the structures put in place to protect and uplift them. And then we celebrate this charity whilst ignoring the circumstances that caused the dependence. These stories are then picked up by the mainstream media, typically run by large capitalist companies, and shared by other conglomerates on social media. And so the cycle goes.

Perhaps the most Machiavellian thing about these stories is that their ultimate moral suggests that instead of fighting for a society that is more empathetic and humane the disenfranchised must simply give themselves over completely to capitalism in the hope that it will reward them. Take Walter Carr, who ran 20 miles to a new job after his car broke down and then was rewarded by his highest up boss, Bellhops CEO Luke Marklin, with his own Ford. ‘We set a really high bar for heart and grit and… you just blew it away’ Marklin said as he handed over the keys and rode of in his far, far more expensive car.

Our propensity to share and idolise the feel-good-feel-bad story might have a lot to do with the limited human attention span and our proclivity to attach meaning to simple, one-off events. We’re good at celebrating the guy who pulls someone out of a burning building, but the guy who spends his life doing risky compliance inspections on old wiring gets a late retirement. Additionally, those who’ve become victims of inequality may wish to populate their newsfeeds with stories of people who’ve managed to escape similar circumstances to make such a miracle appear more likely.

Though there’s an element of ‘more-fool-us’ at play here, it’s ultimately in the best interests of large media corporations and the governments they support to make these stories seem as attractive as possible. Together, they set the honey trap.

How deep we’ve fallen into the warped perception of inspiration is truly worrying, and there’s no very obvious cure. It seems obvious that, ultimately, it would be better for Keoni and his classmates if school lunches became free, funded by an increased tax on the wealthiest 1%, or a fractional decrease in defence spending. Currently, there are people working on implementing just that. But it’s harder to narrativize this slow graft towards institutional change as it’s usually carried out behind closed doors, in long arduous bills presented to congress or in the minutia of debates that go on for months in local courthouses.

The media needs to get better at telling these stories. They need to follow and uplift those implementing institutional change, not just momentarily defying the institution itself. We must find a way to make the 52-page report that economists Jesper Alex-Petersen, Petter Lundborg, and Dan-Olof Rooth wrote in 2017 about the benefits of free school lunches the main headline of this ongoing congressional debate. People like John Morgan, the personal injury lawyer in Florida pouring millions of his own money into a campaign to raise the minimum wage in his state to $15 an hour, must become the new protagonists of the news. Institutional and structural change needs to be the new heartwarming.

AP: Orlando attorney John Morgan

When viewing the plethora of feel-good-feel-bad stories that clog up our feeds, leaving their acidic aftertaste, one is once again reminded of Eliot and his infamous refrain in The Hollowmen

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Like the proverbial lobster in the boiling pot, the mundanity of our demise is what confirms it. But as the institutions and companies that litter social media would tell you, how can we call for an uprising when there’s just so much good in the world?! They point with enthusiasm to a chink of light in the curtain they’ve draped over us all.

 

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