Khane ‘s Corner is where I talk about real topics, things on my mind, funny stuff, and other things from the internet. Views expressed in this column are exclusively my own.
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Laws exist to make us behave, a social act of conditioning to get along with each other even if we don’t. Laws tell us what we should covet, what we shouldn’t, and in modern times who gets to have those things and who doesn’t.
Laws even tell us what we can and can’t have in our homes, they also tell us who we should envy inside of our homes and who we shouldn’t. Cute, right? In reality, laws are more like childproof caps or covers found in one’s kitchen — mostly ineffective but nearly impossible to ignore if one’s desire is strong enough.
You can ban porn, regulate who marries whom, tax the hell out of weed and alcohol, and even limit who gets to purchase things like luxury or designer items. But it doesn’t do anything. Instead, it creates a black market. Because humans want it more. Desire is like a predator that hunts scarcity, and the law? It never quite holds up to one of man’s most powerful drugs.
A prime example of this would be Medevil Europe. The sumptuary laws of the time dictated who could wear silk, gold, and even fur. Like in modern times, the elite and the wealthiest of the wealthy flaunted theirs, but everyone else was forbidden. One might easily call this The Haves and the Have Nots on a grand scale. The point, of course, wasn’t to own everything; in fact, it was something much darker.
They wanted (the elites) to make sure that everyone else knew their place. But unfortunately for them, human nature is impervious to etiquette. And at some point or another the forbidden becomes the irresistible.
Another example? Let’s fast forward to Prohibition in the United States. The 18th Amendment attempted to corral Americans into a corner and force upon them ‘moral clarity’ which at the time meant a society free from the chaos and uproars usually caused and brought on by alcohol consumption.
This is where government manipulation plays a part and a major role in modern consumption in the United States. Starting with the prohibition era, people practically in all forms and literally overnight became lawbreakers. In expected fashion at the time, people weren’t drinking to merely do it — they were doing to buck the system that had told them they couldn’t.
The government had proven its point that it probably wanted to keep secret. They knew that at the time by outlawing desire it was among the most profitable ways to actually generate it. It wasn’t that people stopped wanting the alcohol that was prohibited, they had just given the finger to the government because the laws at the time did not align with the general public.
In fact, there’s more. Modern luxury houses such as Chanel, Balenciaga, Tom Ford, Gucci, Ferragamo, and others share this very same principle. Sneakers sell out in minutes, waitlist bags at Hermes will set you back years, and the same iPhone every year generates zombie-level frenzies across the world.
Why? Because for every 5 people who won’t buy one of these things, there are ten more. Because the manipulating idea that one must one-up the other; obtain a status symbol because someone else doesn’t have it, live and die by high-end fashion, or only buy in scarcity, transforms these entire brands not into something of importance but a totem-pole-of-status.
The thought process behind it all is actually pretty straight forward. Human nature is to be competitive and to be competitive is to be compared. What one has the other must have otherwise feelings of social inadequacy become the onset.
And it is all by design. Governments have always been aware of this. They don’t just know what human desire is, they cultivate it; repackage it, and sell it back to American citizens and those visiting the United States. But all isn’t just some historical curiosity. Today, it’s louder, more dramatic, and just about on every street corner in every city no matter where one is in the world. Desire and the law aren’t just two words that exist in the English language — desire thrives on it.
When all is said and done nothing is as it seems. Constructed luxury, scarcity, and social engineering are 3 pressure points in human society that are penetrable. The more rules that are present the more desire flourishes. The more the rules apply to thee but not to thou the law becomes an invitation not an expectation.
So let’s be honest. Laws exist to contain human behavior, but they are always two steps behind desire. Scarcity intensifies cravings and therefore creates a stronger desire. Comparison and competition fuel obsession and mania. Luxury and one-upsmanship become the cultural norms.
In reality, we chase the next bag, gadget, or high-end item. We assume that as humans who supposedly live in a free and Democratic world are exercising the idea of personal freedom and status. When behind the curtain we’ve surrendered ourselves to the very people intent on destroying the world in which we live.
They don’t want us to realize our real power is in how we associate, shop, herd together, and harness a collective power. This means that their systems of manipulation and control begin to falter and they can’t have that.
This is what happens when there is a government and a conjoined system in power that have never had the will of its people in mind.