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The Holiday Psyop: Autopsying the Christmas Industrial Complex · The Overlap

• 0:00
  Hello world and welcome back to The Overlap.
• 0:04
  I am Joshua.
• 0:05
  Now, seasoned listeners, you're gonna notice something immediately different about the acoustic quality of the room today.
• 0:11
  There is a specific frequency missing.
• 0:13
  It's a frequency usually occupied by optimism and by the belief in the inherent goodness of humanity and by distinct lack of cynical dread.
• 0:23
  That frequency is named Will and Will is not here.
• 0:26
  Will's been deployed to the field.
• 0:28
  He's been lost to the fog of war.
• 0:30
  And when I say war, I mean, he's currently participating in the mandatory annual ritual of kinship performance known as the holidays.
• 0:39
  Right now, actually, as I speak into this microphone, Will is probably somewhere in the living room, probably wearing an itchy sweater, eating, I don't know, a cheese ball
• 0:49
  covered with almonds that nobody actually wants to eat, but everyone feels kind of socially obligated to consume because it's sitting there on a
• 0:57
  beautiful plate.
• 0:59
  He's nodding politely, explaining why the weather's been suspicious lately or answering questions about what's going on in his life.
• 1:08
  He's doing the holiday thing.
• 1:09
  He is serving his time.
• 1:11
  So once again, you're stuck with me.
• 1:14
  And honestly, it's probably better this way because if Will were here, he would try to put a positive spin on what we're about to talk about.
• 1:23
  he would try to find the silver lining.
• 1:25
  He'd say, but Joshua, isn't it nice that people are just trying to be happy?
• 1:30
  And normally I would agree, mostly.
• 1:34
  But today, I'm your designated driver for reality.
• 1:52
  Because look around you right now, society is currently drunk.
• 1:57
  We are collectively intoxicated on eggnog, nostalgia, and a very specific, very aggressive strain of manufactured goodwill.
• 2:06
  If you've walked into a grocery store, a pharmacy or a gas station in the last three weeks, you have been assaulted by auditory programming.
• 2:14
  You cannot escape Mariah Carey.
• 2:17
  It's not possible.
• 2:18
  She is everywhere.
• 2:19
  She is omnipresent.
• 2:21
  The lights are twinkling.
• 2:23
  The credit cards are swiping at record speeds.
• 2:26
  And there is overwhelming cultural pressure, this crushing weight.
• 2:31
  agree that this is in fact the most wonderful time of the year.
• 2:36
  But you listen to the overlap.
• 2:38
  You don't listen to this podcast because you want to be told that everything's fine.
• 2:42
  You listen because you have a sneaking suspicion that when everyone is looking in one direction, the interesting stuff, the dangerous stuff, the systemic stuff is happening in
• 2:55
  another direction.
• 2:56
  So while the rest of the world is distracted by the shiny wrapping paper and the door buster sales, I want you to take this podcast, just you and me to look at the machinery
• 3:09
  underneath it.
• 3:10
  I'm not trying to be a Grinch.
• 3:12
  Okay.
• 3:13
  Well, maybe I'm trying to be a little bit of a Grinch, but I don't want to steal Christmas, right?
• 3:18
  I want to autopsy it.
• 3:19
  I want to put Christmas on the table, shine a bright light on it and see what makes it tick.
• 3:24
  Because here,
• 3:26
  is the thesis for today's episode.
• 3:29
  And if you take nothing else away from this podcast, take this, the holidays as we know them, the gift giving, the nuclear family gathering, the sudden urge to drop a dollar bill
• 3:40
  into a red bucket outside of a Walmart, the frenzy to buy toys, none of this is accidental.
• 3:47
  And very little of it is actually traditional.
• 3:51
  We have this idea that we're participating in like ancient rituals, right?
• 3:56
  We think we're doing what our ancestors did.
• 3:59
  But what we're really actually living through right now is a chaotic, high stress month of December.
• 4:05
  That's essentially the Manhattan Project of marketing and social engineering.
• 4:08
  It is a psychological operation, a Psyop, if you will, designed to do two very specific, very functional things for the capitalist system.
• 4:19
  First, it's designed to domesticate you.
• 4:23
  It's a tool of social control.
• 4:26
  It's a way to take the restless, angry energy of the working class, energy that might otherwise be used to, I don't know, organize, protest, and bottle it up inside a single
• 4:37
  family home.
• 4:39
  It turns public outrage into private stress.
• 4:43
  And second, and this is, look, this is the part that's gonna make some of you uncomfortable, maybe even a little defensive, but it serves as a massive systemic pressure
• 4:53
  valve.
• 4:54
  I'm going spend a lot of time today talking about what I call the philanthropy paradox.
• 4:59
  I'm going to talk about how holiday charity, the toy drives, the food banks, the performative acts of kindness we see on the news.
• 5:07
  These things might actually be the very mechanism that prevents the world from getting better.
• 5:12
  It's a bold claim.
• 5:13
  I know.
• 5:14
  Hope you're not screaming at your car radio or you're into your AirPods right now.
• 5:17
  Are you a monster?
• 5:18
  No, I'm not.
• 5:20
  I'm not saying giving toys to orphans is bad, right?
• 5:23
  mean, give toys to orphans.
• 5:25
  I don't care.
• 5:25
  I'm saying that if we live in a system that requires an annual volunteer run drive to prevent orphans from having a miserable existence, we shouldn't be celebrating our
• 5:37
  generosity.
• 5:38
  We should be rioting.
• 5:39
  We should be burning the system down.
• 5:42
  We talked about this in one of our previous podcasts, the orphan crushing machine.
• 5:48
  Instead of saying, why are we giving toys to orphans?
• 5:53
  It's like, why don't orphans have toys?
• 5:57
  So that's the roadmap for this podcast.
• 6:01
  If the survival of the poor basically depend on the holiday spirit of the rich, we don't have a society.
• 6:07
  It's kind of a hostage situation.
• 6:10
  So put down your gingerbread, go and step away from the Amazon checkout cart, peel back the tensile and look at the abyss.
• 6:17
  I wanna start with a feeling.
• 6:19
  I want you to check in with yourself right now.
• 6:21
  How do you feel?
• 6:22
  Not how you say you feel when someone asks, are you ready for Christmas?
• 6:27
  And you say, yeah, get in there.
• 6:28
  I mean, how does your body feel?
• 6:32
  Are your shoulders up by your ears?
• 6:34
  Is there a tightness in your chest when you look at your bank account?
• 6:37
  Do you feel a spike of adrenaline that isn't the good kind?
• 6:41
  Have you been running around cleaning up the house to the best of your ability?
• 6:45
  Why is that?
• 6:47
  Why does this season of joy feel so much like a performance review where the KPIs are happiness and debt?
• 6:57
  We're conditioned to believe that if we aren't having a magical time, it's a personal failure.
• 7:03
  If you're lonely in December, it's because you failed to build a family.
• 7:08
  If you're broke in December, it's because you failed to save money.
• 7:12
  If you're stressed, it's because you aren't organized.
• 7:17
  But what if that stress isn't a bug?
• 7:20
  What if it's a feature?
• 7:22
  What if the entire architecture of the holiday season
• 7:26
  is built to extract labor and capital from you at the exact moment you're most vulnerable.
• 7:34
  Think about the timing.
• 7:36
  It's the end of the year.
• 7:38
  It's dark.
• 7:39
  It's cold, at least in the Northern hemisphere.
• 7:43
  Biologically, we should be hibernating, right?
• 7:45
  Like we should be slowing down, resting.
• 7:48
  Our bodies want to rest.
• 7:50
  And yet the system says, no, run faster, buy more, travel through the busiest airports of the year, cook a meal for 12 people, pretend you like your in-laws.
• 7:57
  It's a machine designed to override your survival instincts.
• 8:03
  And the reason we go along with it, the reason we don't just say no is because of this word, tradition.
• 8:12
  We are obsessed with tradition.
• 8:15
  We treat it like it's a sacred law.
• 8:17
  We have to do this.
• 8:18
  It's tradition.
• 8:20
  What is a tradition really?
• 8:23
  In the context of the holidays, tradition is usually just peer pressure from dead people, or more precisely, peer pressure from dead marketing executives.
• 8:33
  Later in this podcast, we're gonna do a deep dive into the history of Christmas that they probably didn't teach you in school.
• 8:40
  We're gonna look at the fact that for most of human history, this time of year wasn't about family.
• 8:45
  It wasn't cozy.
• 8:46
  It was literally a riot.
• 8:48
  I'm serious, it was loud.
• 8:50
  It was drunk and it was happening in the street.
• 8:54
  And the transition from street riot to living room sweater party wasn't a natural evolution.
• 9:01
  It was a deliberate political project by the Victorians to shut us all up and keep us all working.
• 9:09
  We're to talk about Prince Albert.
• 9:11
  Not the piercing.
• 9:12
  We're going to talk about Charles Dickens as a propagandist.
• 9:15
  We're going to talk about how Coca-Cola basically hired Santa Claus as a spokesperson and never let him go.
• 9:22
  We are going to deconstruct the invention of tradition.
• 9:27
  But before we get there, we have to talk about the money because you can't talk about the holidays without talking about the absolute unbridled consumption.
• 9:38
  I read a statistic the other day and I'm
• 9:40
  I'm going to paraphrase because I don't exactly remember the statistic, but it was looking at the deadweight loss of Christmas.
• 9:47
  It's an economic concept.
• 9:50
  The idea is that basically giving somebody a gift is one of the least efficient ways to move money in an economy, right?
• 10:00
  If you buy a $50 sweater and you hate it, you stick it in a closet, I'm out $50 and you have gained nothing in value.
• 10:08
  The economy has essentially vaporized wealth and yet we do it.
• 10:14
  Billions and billions of dollars every single year.
• 10:18
  Why?
• 10:20
  Because the holidays are an obligation engine.
• 10:25
  This system has essentially figured out a way to monetize your guilt.
• 10:30
  It has monetized your love.
• 10:32
  It's convinced you that the only way to prove you care about another human being is to purchase a consumer good
• 10:38
  that was manufactured in a sweatshop and shipped across the ocean on a container ship that is burning bunker fuel and melting the ice caps.
• 10:48
  I love you, so I bought you this plastic thing.
• 10:51
  I love you, so I went into debt.
• 10:54
  We have created a deity of commerce, Santa, right?
• 10:59
  Who is basically the ultimate surveillance capitalist.
• 11:04
  Think about the lore.
• 11:06
  He knows when you've been sleeping.
• 11:08
  He knows when you're awake.
• 11:10
  That's not a magical elf, that's the NSA.
• 11:13
  That's an algorithm.
• 11:15
  Santa is just Amazon Prime with a moral compass.
• 11:19
  And that's where we're starting today.
• 11:20
  We're starting with the realization that the stress you are feeling isn't because you're doing Christmas wrong, it's because Christmas is doing you.
• 11:31
  So, take a deep breath.
• 11:34
  Let the guilt go.
• 11:37
  Because for the rest of this episode, we're going to take the red pill or I guess in this case, the red and green pill.
• 11:44
  We're going to take a look at how the Victorians rebranded rioting, right?
• 11:51
  How corporations monetized your affection and ultimately how we can maybe just maybe
• 12:00
  salvage something real from the wreckage of the holiday season.
• 12:04
  Are you ready?
• 12:04
  All right, let's do this.
• 12:07
  All right, so I ask you to sit with that feeling of stress, right?
• 12:10
  The feeling that you're currently performing a tightrope walk of social expectations without a net.
• 12:20
  I told you the reason you feel this way is because you're trying to live up to a tradition that is frankly a fabrication.
• 12:28
  So we have this collective hallucination in the US, a little bit in the UK as well.
• 12:33
  Basically that Christmas is like this timeless immutable thing.
• 12:38
  We kind of imagine that if you went back in time, like 500 years, you'd find a peasant family sitting around a Douglas fir tree and exchanging wrapped gifts, maybe brown paper
• 12:48
  wrapped gifts and sipping hot cocoa and feeling cozy because we think of it as like an ancient tradition of the hearth.
• 12:57
  But I do have to tell you that that is historical fiction.
• 13:02
  If you actually hopped into a DeLorean and went back to say 17th century England or early colonial America, you would not find a cozy family gathering.
• 13:14
  You'd find something that looked a lot more like a riot or a protest.
• 13:19
  And I don't, I don't, I don't use that word lightly.
• 13:21
  I mean, it's thrown around enough in the media.
• 13:25
  I mean, a literal riot, right?
• 13:27
  So for most of human history, midwinter festivals like Saturnalia in Rome, had Yule and the Germanic tribes, they were about inversion.
• 13:38
  They were about letting off steam.
• 13:39
  The harvest was done, the beer was fermented, the cattle were slaughtered, so you didn't have to feed them through the winter.
• 13:46
  It was a time of excess.
• 13:49
  And socially, it was a time where rules didn't apply.
• 13:51
  In England, you had the Lord of Misrule.
• 13:56
  a peasant who would be appointed to mock the nobility.
• 14:00
  You had wassling.
• 14:02
  Now we hear wassling today and we think of polite carolers singing, here we come a wassling, right?
• 14:07
  But to the lyrics of that song, if you really listen to them, we won't go until we get some.
• 14:14
  We won't go until we get some.
• 14:18
  This isn't like a holiday card request, right?
• 14:22
  This is a threat.
• 14:23
  Wassling was basically a group of young working class men getting absolutely hammered, then marching up to the houses of rich people, banging on their door and demanding more
• 14:36
  booze and food.
• 14:38
  And if that owner didn't pay up, they would just trash the place.
• 14:42
  They break windows, they burn effigies.
• 14:45
  It was basically like the Purge, but with snow.
• 14:49
  It was a redistribution of wealth.
• 14:52
  at the point of a pitchfork.
• 14:53
  It was loud, it was public, and it happened in the streets.
• 14:57
  Now, fast forward to the 1800s.
• 15:00
  The Industrial Revolution is kicking into high gear.
• 15:03
  You have factory owners who need a disciplined workforce.
• 15:06
  You can't have your employees showing up to run the textile looms on December 26th if they've been rioting and drinking moonshine for three days.
• 15:15
  The ruling class looked at this Christmas thing and said, this is a liability.
• 15:19
  This is kind of dangerous.
• 15:20
  I think we need to shut it down.
• 15:22
  But you can't just cancel a holiday, right?
• 15:24
  I mean, we've seen what happens when they try.
• 15:27
  People get mad.
• 15:28
  So they did what any smart corporation does.
• 15:32
  They basically rebranded it.
• 15:34
  That's where the Victorians come in, specifically Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, along with the rising middle class of the industrialists.
• 15:42
  So they decided to take this public, rowdy, community-based festival.
• 15:48
  and move it inside.
• 15:50
  They basically privatized the holiday.
• 15:52
  Prince Albert, who was actually German, brought over the the tannenbaum, the Christmas tree, set it up in Windsor Castle.
• 15:59
  They took a picture of the royal family standing around it looking very domestic and sober and and published it in the Illustrated London News in 1848.
• 16:10
  And all of a sudden, every middle-class family in England and America said, oh, that's what we're supposed to do.
• 16:17
  We're supposed to stay inside with our immediate biological family, sister, cousin, whatever, and look at a tree.
• 16:24
  It was a really big shift in social engineering at the time, right?
• 16:28
  It went from community and chaos to privacy and order.
• 16:33
  They replaced that riot with the living room and they had help.
• 16:38
  We do have to talk about Charles Dickens.
• 16:40
  I know, I know, I know, I know.
• 16:42
  You love A Christmas Carol.
• 16:44
  It's a classic, but looking at it through this lens, Dickens was writing at a time of pretty massive wealth inequality.
• 16:54
  Now, the only thing that rivals the wealth inequality of that time is the wealth inequality of our current time.
• 17:01
  The poor were starving.
• 17:03
  The threat of revolution was being discussed.
• 17:08
  whispered about in all corners, a Christmas Carol is basically a scare tactic for the rich.
• 17:15
  The message isn't just be nice.
• 17:17
  The message is, Scrooge, if you don't give Bob Cratchit a turkey and a day off, Bob Cratchit is eventually going to burn your house down.
• 17:25
  Or at the very least, you'll die alone and unloved.
• 17:29
  It was a plea for benevolent capitalism.
• 17:33
  The idea that if
• 17:35
  The rich were just a little bit nicer once a year.
• 17:38
  The system could keep going without a revolution.
• 17:42
  So the Victorians domesticated us.
• 17:45
  They got us off the streets, into our houses, and once we were trapped in our houses, the marketers moved in for the kill.
• 17:54
  It's truly staggering.
• 17:56
  And I mean like mind blowing how many things are considered sacred ancient folklore.
• 18:02
  But really they're just successful ad campaigns from the 20th century.
• 18:07
  So let's go down the list.
• 18:09
  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
• 18:12
  You think that's an old myth?
• 18:13
  A fable passed down by the elders?
• 18:15
  No.
• 18:16
  Rudolph was created in 1939 by a copywriter named Robert L.
• 18:21
  May.
• 18:22
  He worked for Montgomery Ward.
• 18:24
  For those of you who are not old, Montgomery Ward was a department store.
• 18:31
  The store used to buy
• 18:32
  coloring books to give away to kids, to get parents to come into the store.
• 18:37
  They basically decided that buying those coloring books was too expensive and said, hey, Robert, write us a story so we can print it cheaply in-house.
• 18:48
  Bob wrote Rudolph.
• 18:50
  Rudolph is not folklore.
• 18:52
  Rudolph is a freelance marketing asset created to reduce overhead and boost Q4 retail foot traffic.
• 19:00
  He is a cost-saving measure with antlers.
• 19:04
  Santa Claus.
• 19:06
  Now look, Saint Nick's been around for a while, But the visual, right?
• 19:11
  The fat guy who's always happy, wearing a red suit.
• 19:15
  That became the global standard largely because of Coke.
• 19:20
  Coca-Cola, not the nose candy.
• 19:22
  In the 1930s, Coca-Cola basically needed people to drink soda in the winter because they weren't drinking it.
• 19:30
  Specifically soda was kind of like a summer drink, right?
• 19:33
  So they they hired They hired an artist named Haddon Sundblom to paint Santa drinking a coke.
• 19:42
  They also tried other things There were weird recipes from around that time like like hot dr.
• 19:46
  Pepper and these strange mulled wine like wine with coke Hot beverages that they were we're trying to to put out there to encourage people to drink coke during the winter, but
• 19:58
  they're
• 19:59
  farthest effective campaign was painting Santa drinking a Coke.
• 20:04
  He made Santa softer, rounder, friendlier.
• 20:09
  He basically made him the grandpa you wanted to buy products from.
• 20:14
  We have effectively taken the mascot for a sugar beverage, right?
• 20:18
  Just sugary liquid and elevated him to the status of a demigod.
• 20:24
  And this brings us to the mechanism
• 20:26
  of it all.
• 20:27
  Why do we keep doing this?
• 20:30
  It's because the system loves the inefficiency.
• 20:35
  There's a concept in economics called the deadweight loss of Christmas.
• 20:40
  It was popularized by an economist named Joel Waldfogel and his theory was pretty simple.
• 20:48
  Basically, gift-giving is bad economics.
• 20:51
  If I have hundred dollars, I know exactly what I want.
• 20:54
  I can buy a hundred dollars worth of utility for myself.
• 20:57
  But if I buy you a gift, I have to guess.
• 21:02
  So I buy you a fancy espresso machine for a hundred bucks, but you don't drink coffee or you drink drip coffee.
• 21:10
  To you, that machine is basically just useless.
• 21:13
  Maybe you'd pay 20 bucks for it, you know, at a garage sale or at a secondhand store.
• 21:18
  So I spent a hundred dollars to give you $20 of value.
• 21:24
  So basically the economy just set $80 on fire.
• 21:28
  Wal Fogel estimated that billions of dollars of value are destroyed every year because of this simple social obligation of gifts.
• 21:38
  But the system doesn't really care about your value, right?
• 21:44
  It cares about the transaction.
• 21:46
  The holidays act as an obligation engine, like I said earlier, it creates a manufactured emergency.
• 21:53
  It's December 20th.
• 21:55
  If you do not spend $500 by December 25th, you have failed as a mother, father, friend, whatever.
• 22:02
  It forces liquidity into the market and it keeps the factories running.
• 22:08
  It keeps the shipping containers moving.
• 22:10
  And to enforce this, we have the ultimate surveillance tool.
• 22:15
  Elf on the Shelf.
• 22:16
  Or just the concept of a naughty or nice list.
• 22:19
  That's how it started, right?
• 22:21
  Think about what we tell the children.
• 22:25
  He sees you when you're sleeping.
• 22:27
  He knows when you're awake.
• 22:29
  We are training children from birth to accept the idea of a benevolent panopticon.
• 22:37
  We're normalizing the surveillance state, right?
• 22:39
  We teach them that a judgment is coming and that judgment is based on what?
• 22:45
  Behavior?
• 22:46
  Sometimes.
• 22:48
  But mostly on whether or not you deserve things.
• 22:52
  We've confused moral goodness with consumer goods.
• 22:57
  If you're good, you get an Xbox.
• 22:58
  If you're bad, you get coal, which honestly in this economy is actually still a valuable commodity.
• 23:07
  anyway, so you look at the modern holiday, right?
• 23:11
  You aren't seeing a mystical tradition.
• 23:13
  You're seeing a Victorian containment strategy wrapped in a Coke campaign.
• 23:18
  powered by Montgomery Ward mascot, designed to force you to vaporize every dollar of your disposable income, if you even have any right now, to basically prove that you're just a
• 23:30
  functioning member of society.
• 23:33
  It is a PSIOP, and it's so far a pretty good one.
• 23:38
  But here's the catch.
• 23:39
  The system knows that this level of consumption makes us feel empty.
• 23:43
  It knows that buying plastic junk doesn't actually fill the void in our souls.
• 23:49
  And it knows that while we're opening presents, there are people outside starving.
• 23:56
  The system knows the inequality is disgusting.
• 24:01
  So it has to offer us a solution.
• 24:05
  It has to give us a way to wash our hands of guilt.
• 24:09
  And that brings up the next part of the machine, the actual
• 24:13
  pressure valve.
• 24:15
  I'm sorry to do it, but we need to talk about charity.
• 24:19
  We need to talk about why despite all of this giving, nothing ever seems to change.
• 24:25
  If you're still listening to this, congratulations.
• 24:27
  You have survived the part where I ruined Santa and the part where I told you that Rudolph is a corporate chill.
• 24:32
  You're doing great.
• 24:34
  But now we kind of have to pivot because the first half of the show was kind of about this whole consumerism industrial complex.
• 24:43
  But the second half is kind of the guilt mitigation industrial complex.
• 24:49
  I can hear you getting ready to tweet me or whatever already, but
• 24:54
  I hear you say, Joshua, you just attacked Christmas traditions.
• 24:57
  You called Santa a surveillance asset for the NSA and now you're coming after charity?
• 25:02
  You're coming after the simple act of being nice to people who hurt you?
• 25:06
  Was it the Grinch?
• 25:07
  Did he steal your presents?
• 25:08
  Look, I get it.
• 25:10
  This is the third rail.
• 25:12
  In a world that feels increasingly cruel, where the headlines are a constant stream of disaster, the idea of holiday giving feels like the last pure, honest
• 25:24
  thing that we have left.
• 25:26
  It feels like the one time of year where humanity actually tries.
• 25:30
  It brings to mind that song uh and a lot of the reason behind this podcast today was talking with my wife about the song Don't Save It All for Christmas Day, which I heard at
• 25:41
  a concert that we went to and it's been on my head and on my heart lately.
• 25:47
  Yeah, I need you to kind of suspend your knee-jerk reaction to all of this for a second.
• 25:53
  I want you to put down the defense mechanism and look at the mechanics of what we're actually doing, okay?
• 26:00
  So let's talk about the pressure valve idea that I'm talking about.
• 26:05
  There's a famous essay by Oscar Wilde, yeah, that guy, the one who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest.
• 26:13
  He also wrote another piece called The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
• 26:18
  So in this, I guess it's an essay, he makes the argument that enrages really wealthy philanthropists even to this day.
• 26:28
  He basically says that charity is not a cure for poverty.
• 26:33
  He says that charity is the thing that makes sure poverty continues.
• 26:38
  Here's the quote, and I typed it up because I'm
• 26:41
  I wanted to get it right.
• 26:42
  It starts as such.
• 26:43
  Just as the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by
• 27:00
  those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things, the people who do most harm
• 27:08
  are the people who try to do most good.
• 27:12
  That hit me hard.
• 27:13
  How does it feel for you?
• 27:15
  Old Oscar's basically saying that charity remedies, the symptoms, just enough to keep the disease alive.
• 27:25
  Think about the holiday season through this lens, right?
• 27:27
  It functions as a massive societal relief valve.
• 27:32
  We spend 11 months of the year operating a machine, let's call it late stage capitalism, because that's what it is, that systematically crushes the working poor.
• 27:43
  It suppresses wages, it spikes rent, it denies healthcare, it under-funds schools and tries to privatize them.
• 27:52
  It builds up an incredible amount of pressure.
• 27:56
  in a rational world, or at least in a world where cause and effect were allowed to actually play out, that pressure would eventually explode into political action like it's
• 28:07
  done in the UK and France.
• 28:09
  It would lead to strikes.
• 28:13
  It would lead to riots or, Thor forbid, it would lead people to actually vote for structural redistribution of wealth.
• 28:23
  But then December hits.
• 28:26
  That pressure valve opens.
• 28:28
  We have food drives.
• 28:30
  have toy runs.
• 28:31
  have celebrities on TV asking you to text a code to donate $10.
• 28:35
  We drop our spare change in the red swinging buckets outside of the supermarket.
• 28:44
  We see a family in crisis.
• 28:46
  We give them a turkey.
• 28:48
  We see a struggling waitress, we give her a bigger tip, then what happens?
• 28:55
  The pressure goes down.
• 28:56
  The family doesn't starve this week.
• 28:59
  The kid gets a plastic truck this year.
• 29:02
  The immediate visible crisis is averted.
• 29:06
  And crucially, and this is the most important part, you feel better.
• 29:11
  The giver is absolved of all prior sin.
• 29:16
  or at least feels that way.
• 29:18
  This is performative altruism as a carbon offset for your soul.
• 29:25
  I should turn that one into a book.
• 29:27
  Performative altruism as a carbon offset for the chicken soup soul?
• 29:32
  I don't know.
• 29:34
  We treat holiday charity like an indulgence, right, in the history of the medieval church.
• 29:41
  I donated a bag of canned yams to the food pantry, so I don't have to think about why the minimum wage in this country is still stuck at 2009 levels, right?
• 29:50
  The act of charity buys us the emotional right to ignore the rest of the injustices in our country for another year.
• 29:58
  It privatizes the solution to a public problem.
• 30:03
  And let's be honest, it's pretty inefficient.
• 30:07
  Let's talk about the canned food drive, right?
• 30:09
  The canned food drive is the perfect example of how our brains are broken by this system.
• 30:16
  If you talk to anyone who runs a food bank, and I have, they will tell you quietly that they hate your canned goods.
• 30:24
  They hate your cream corn, they hate your pumpkin pie mix from three years ago that you found in the back of your pantry.
• 30:29
  Why?
• 30:30
  Because logistically, it's a nightmare.
• 30:33
  They have to sort it, they have to check the dates, they have to store it.
• 30:36
  But more importantly, a food bank can buy food at wholesale prices.
• 30:41
  They can take $1 and turn it into five meals.
• 30:45
  When you spend $1 on a can of beans at a retail price and give it to them, you're giving them 20 cents of value and a storage problem.
• 30:54
  So why do we do it?
• 30:56
  Why do we insist on giving stuff instead of money?
• 31:00
  Because we don't trust the poor.
• 31:02
  Deep down in the American psyche, we believe that if we give a poor person cash, they'll use it wrong.
• 31:11
  They might buy beer.
• 31:12
  That's what I remember hearing as a kid.
• 31:14
  They might buy cigarettes.
• 31:16
  That's what I remember hearing as a kid.
• 31:18
  They might actually buy something that gives them a moment of joy that we didn't authorize.
• 31:25
  So we give them a can of beans because the can of beans comes with moral control.
• 31:29
  It says, I'm feeding you, but I'm determining what you eat.
• 31:34
  It's not about the recipient's need.
• 31:37
  It's about the giver's ego.
• 31:39
  It's about that warm, fuzzy feeling of handing over a physical object, right?
• 31:45
  And this leads us to the most dystopian part of the season, the heartwarming news story.
• 31:50
  I can taste it.
• 31:51
  You know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 31:52
  You will see it on your local news tonight, wherever you're listening to this, or it will pop up in your Facebook feed for you boomers.
• 32:00
  Local eight year old boy sets up a lemonade stand to pay for his mother kidney transplant or our high school robotics team builds a wheelchair for student because insurance denied
• 32:08
  it or coworkers donate sick days to teach her with cancer so she doesn't lose her health insurance.
• 32:13
  and the news acres.
• 32:14
  I mean, I guess it's not their fault.
• 32:16
  They're just reading teleprompter.
• 32:17
  They'll smile their vapid smile and say, how inspiring.
• 32:20
  What a wonderful community.
• 32:21
  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 32:24
  That's not inspiring.
• 32:25
  That's a horror story.
• 32:27
  That is a systemic failure set to upbeat piano music.
• 32:32
  Yacht rock.
• 32:33
  Every time you see a story like that, you're witnessing a policy failure.
• 32:37
  A child should not have to engage in child labor, selling lemonade.
• 32:42
  to prevent his mother from dying of a treatable condition.
• 32:46
  Why is that hard?
• 32:48
  A teacher should not have to beg for the charity of her colleagues to get chemo.
• 32:53
  These aren't stories of human triumph.
• 32:55
  They're stories of a society that has abdicated its contract with those around them.
• 33:02
  And this charity industrial complex I mentioned earlier of the holidays just kind of helps to hide that, right?
• 33:09
  Every toys for tots bin is a monument to the fact that we have decided child poverty is fine.
• 33:17
  As long as we mitigate it slightly once a year.
• 33:20
  If a society requires a volunteer Marine Corps to collect plastic trinkets so that children don't feel psychologically abandoned in December, that society is not generous.
• 33:33
  Our society is broken.
• 33:36
  When we rely on the precarious generosity of the rich to ensure the survival of the poor, we're not practicing goodwill.
• 33:45
  That's feudalism.
• 33:46
  Like I've talked about it before.
• 33:49
  We are waiting for the Lord of the Manor to toss a few measly scraps from the table so the peasants don't slice their throats.
• 33:58
  So I'm saying, don't give?
• 34:01
  No, I'm not saying that.
• 34:02
  I'm saying, am I saying that you should walk past the red kettle and sneer at it?
• 34:09
  Don't sneer at it.
• 34:10
  You know, don't donate to the Salvation Army.
• 34:12
  They suck.
• 34:13
  We can do a whole episode on it if you want to.
• 34:14
  I don't know.
• 34:15
  Maybe I'll do a mini episode on it.
• 34:17
  Am I saying that people, that we should let people go hungry to, to heighten the contradictions and accelerate the revolution?
• 34:24
  No, that's cruel.
• 34:27
  And to be honest, accelerationism is a privileged position.
• 34:31
  Real people suffer while you're waiting for the revolution.
• 34:34
  And that's the facts, right?
• 34:35
  If you see someone that's hungry, feed them, obviously.
• 34:38
  If you have extra share it, obviously.
• 34:41
  But stop lying to yourself.
• 34:44
  Stop telling yourself that you're fixing anything.
• 34:47
  The red kettle isn't saving the world.
• 34:50
  It's just buying the system a little more time before the engine explodes.
• 34:55
  So.
• 34:57
  Now that I've thoroughly depressed you, now that I've taken your holiday cheer and effectively wet blanketed it, where do we go from here?
• 35:05
  Is there a way to do this without being a hypocrite?
• 35:09
  Is there a way to participate in the season without being a cog in that machine?
• 35:13
  Actually, yes, but it does require us to change our vocabulary.
• 35:19
  know, I know.
• 35:20
  Pronouns are hard.
• 35:23
  It requires us to stop thinking about charity and start thinking about solidarity.
• 35:29
  And trust me, there's a massive, massive difference.
• 35:33
  So here we are in the home stretch.
• 35:35
  If you stuck with me thus far, you're either nodding in agreement, fueling your own sense of righteous indignation, or you're hate-listening while aggressively wrapping a scented
• 35:44
  candle for your coworker, and you barely know them.
• 35:47
  Either way, I guess I appreciate you being here.
• 35:50
  Let's tie this all together before I let you go back into the wild.
• 35:55
  So we've covered a lot of ground today.
• 35:56
  We started by realizing that...
• 35:59
  The tradition we're so stressed about is largely a marketing campaign designed to isolate us.
• 36:04
  We just finished discussing how the charity we use to make ourselves feel better is often just a relief valve that keeps the system from literally exploding.
• 36:14
  And when you combine those two things, the isolation and the pressure valve, you start to see the loop.
• 36:23
  It's the hamster wheel of festivity.
• 36:26
  Think about the cycle.
• 36:28
  Step one, the system extracts value from you.
• 36:34
  It makes you work too hard for wages that are too low, leaving you exhausted and lonely.
• 36:42
  Step two, the system sells you Christmas as a cure for that loneliness.
• 36:48
  Buy this thing to feel connected.
• 36:50
  Stay home to feel safe.
• 36:52
  Step three, you spend money you don't have.
• 36:56
  Funneling profit.
• 36:57
  back to the same corporations that underpaid you in step one.
• 37:01
  Step four, you look around and see people who didn't survive the grinder, the homeless, the hungry, and you feel guilty.
• 37:10
  Step five, you toss a few coins in a red bucket to alleviate that guilt, which cleans up the mess just enough so the machine can keep running for another fiscal year.
• 37:21
  It's a perfect self-sustaining ecosystem of consumption and placation.
• 37:29
  So what do we do?
• 37:30
  This is obviously the part of the podcast where I tell you a solution or you at least expect one.
• 37:37
  Do we cancel December?
• 37:39
  Do we become aesthetics?
• 37:41
  Do we sit in the dark and eat gruel to prove a point about commodity fetishism?
• 37:46
  No, that's miserable.
• 37:48
  Although, you know, some people eat gruel for breakfast.
• 37:51
  Looking at the news this year.
• 37:54
  We're all miserable enough as it is.
• 37:57
  We don't need to add the war on Santa to our resume.
• 38:00
  The left has a branding problem as it is.
• 38:02
  We don't need the people shouting at grandmothers about the geopolitical implications of Tencel.
• 38:09
  The answer is not to stop participating.
• 38:12
  The answer is to change the intent of your participation.
• 38:17
  That's the shift in our mindset from charity to solidarity.
• 38:23
  Now know these words sound like they're the same, but they are antonyms.
• 38:30
  Charity is vertical.
• 38:31
  It's top down.
• 38:33
  It's I have, you have not, here's a crumb, please be grateful.
• 38:38
  It maintains the power dynamic, right?
• 38:40
  It assumes that the rich are the saviors of the poor.
• 38:43
  Solidarity is horizontal.
• 38:45
  Solidarity is looking at your neighbor, whether they are homeless or struggling to pay rent or...
• 38:52
  just exhausted and saying, hey, we're both going through the same shitty broken machine.
• 39:00
  Your struggle is my struggle.
• 39:03
  If you fall, I fall.
• 39:05
  Charity asks us, what can I spare?
• 39:09
  But solidarity asks, what do we need to build so we don't have to beg?
• 39:16
  So this year, by all means, donate the turkey, feed the hungry, but while you're doing it, recognize that the goal isn't just to fill a belly for a day.
• 39:27
  The goal is to build a world where food isn't a privilege.
• 39:33
  Instead of just giving a toy, maybe donate to a strike fund.
• 39:38
  I know Starbucks is currently striking.
• 39:40
  Don't, you know, donate to help the Starbucks workers who are striking get paid.
• 39:47
  help workers who are fighting for better earnings so that they can buy their own toys next year.
• 39:53
  Instead of just giving money to a soup kitchen, which you should do.
• 39:56
  I'm not saying don't do that, right?
• 39:58
  Don't stop helping.
• 40:01
  but pick up the phone and call your representatives and scream at them.
• 40:06
  about snap benefits, about the way snap benefits were used as a tool by Donald Trump's regime to lure it over the poor's heads.
• 40:16
  Charity is a band-aid and solidarity is surgery.
• 40:21
  We need a whole lot less band-aids and a whole lot more surgery.
• 40:25
  And on a personal level,
• 40:27
  The most radical thing you can do this week is to rebel against the domestic isolation.
• 40:32
  The system wants you inside.
• 40:34
  They want you watching streaming services, buying online, reject that.
• 40:38
  Go to a third place.
• 40:40
  Go to a park, go to a library, go to a fricking dive bar.
• 40:44
  Build a community that exists outside of your nuclear family and outside of a mall.
• 40:52
  People don't go to malls, I don't know what I'm saying.
• 40:55
  Because if you're gonna survive what's coming, the collapse, the changes, the friction we talk about on the show every week, we are not gonna do it as individuals.
• 41:05
  We are going to do it as a community.
• 41:07
  And look, before you go, I want to drop the snark for a minute.
• 41:12
  I'll take off the, the cynical podcaster hat and I want to say thank you.
• 41:19
  We have dragged you through some pretty dark territory this year on the overlap.
• 41:24
  We spent weeks dissecting the pow memo, as the blueprint for class war.
• 41:29
  We stared directly into the abyss of the dark enlightenment and the manuscript.
• 41:33
  We talked.
• 41:34
  Through the history of fascism in Italy and Germany, topic by topic, horror by horror, we ask if our own civilization is collapsing.
• 41:46
  That's not light listening.
• 41:48
  That is not background noise for your commute.
• 41:50
  That is heavy and it sits with you, just like it sits with me.
• 41:55
  So it takes a specific kind of person to willfully engage with that kind of information.
• 42:02
  It takes someone who cares.
• 42:04
  someone who refuses to sleepwalk through history.
• 42:07
  So the fact that you're here listening to this means you are paying attention, at least still.
• 42:12
  In an economy of distraction, paying attention is kind of a revolutionary act too.
• 42:18
  Hopefully we'll be back soon, hopefully be full of stories about his family and maybe a little too cheerful so we can get back to work deconstructing the apocalypse.
• 42:28
  We have a lot to cover in the new year.
• 42:31
  The world isn't getting any simpler.
• 42:33
  But for the next few days, take a break, put your phone down, close the news app.
• 42:39
  We talk a lot about systems on this show, but the only reason that any of this matters, the only reason we fight for a better system is because of the people inside of it.
• 42:49
  The people you're about to see, the friends, the messy families, the chosen families.
• 42:56
  So go be with them, eat the food, drink the wine, hug your uncle.
• 43:01
  even if his political takes make you want to scream into a pillow, find the common ground, enjoy some human connection.
• 43:09
  Because ultimately, that connection is the only thing that
• 43:13
  AI can't take away from us.
• 43:15
  It's the only thing money can't actually buy.
• 43:17
  And it is the fuel that we are going to need for the fights ahead.
• 43:21
  From Will, who is hopefully eating a cookie right now, from myself, and from everyone who makes the overlap happen, thank you for listening.
• 43:30
  Thank you for thinking, and thank you for giving a damn.
• 43:34
  The real gift is class consciousness.
• 43:38
  I'm kidding.
• 43:39
  Sort of.
• 43:41
  Cheers, everyone.
• 43:42
  Have a wonderful holiday.
• 43:44
  Stay safe, and we'll see you in the new year.