Fairtrade chocolate costs an extra dollar over Lindt and Cadbury.
The Fairtrade certification, to my understanding, means that an independent NGO has verified that the chocolate was not produced with the involvement of modern-day slavery.
I also understand that the self-certification of ‘Fairtrade-ness’ by multinational corporations means jack shit. It’s 2020. Pay any PR company, and they’ll relabel your concentration camps as vocational training centres any day.
Yet I debated for a solid two minutes whether do buy Fairtrade chocolate, simply because of the extra dollar.
Did it taste better? Not really. It’s not some mystical medicinal strain of chocolate either. They all taste the same, or close enough to not matter. There’s no discernible material difference between Fairtrade and Lindt.
What does this mean?
It means that, for two minutes, I weighed my support for modern day slavery against a dollar.
Today, Fairtrade won, but tomorrow, when Lindt and Cadbury are yellow-tagged at half-price, I’m going to have to recalibrate this decision: my support for modern day slavery against a dollar fifty.
And there it is. A crystallisation of activism in 2020.
Even when they make it easy for you, when they prepare an entire supply chain of ethical producers, distributors, logistical partners, independent certifiers, and all you need to do is pick a different packet off a shelf and pay an extra dollar, it’s somehow still a struggle.
Pitch this against the sensation that was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge a few years back. Some obscure disease affecting a minimal subset of the population received 115 million in donations, because of a low-effort attention-seeking gimmick.
Apparently only one in six ice-bucketeers ended up donating, but that’s still a much bigger share than the Fairtrade chocolate I have purchased as a percentage of my overall chocolate-buying.
The success of these viral charity extravaganzas is attaching an ever-increasing price tag on our empathy, and turning our moral compass, detrimentally, narcissistic.
I get it, people don’t give a shit about other people’s problems, and will only empathize if an issue affects them on a personal level.
But this is not a trait that requires promotion.
Social media and viral marketing, by their nature, plays on what people want. The flip side of always having your preferences catered to, is that you get used to it.
When everything you interact with – your news, your entertainment, your online purchases – are skewed toward your tastes, it warps the mind.
Like Pavlov’s drooling dog, our brains become trained to see the conveniences of modern society as catering to our needs.
Am I saying that modern corporations, media, and advertisers are turning the world narcissistic?
Yes, yes I am.
On Amazon, everything you see you want to buy; on Netflix, everything you see you want to watch; on Facebook, every post you see conforms to your political view.
In this environment, what happens when you run into a thing you don’t want, in real life?
One, you get a Karen.
Two, you get I-don’t-give-a-fuck.
You either rage about the fact that they aren’t sucking your dick, or you quickly move on because this thing is not sucking your dick.
People love to say, ‘oh yes I loved the ALS Challenge because I wanted to support a good cause.’ What they mean is, ‘I loved it because they made it about me.’
There are millions of fundraisers out there. After the success of ice buckeroos, all of them are competing to come up with the next viral sensation to get money out of your pocket.
Imagine it. Every charity, competing to devise campaigns that rub your ego the best.
What does that do to a person, and their notion of what a charity does?
Now, if a homeless shelter wants your donation, they have to put on a circus.
If frontline healthcare workers want urgent funding for PPE, they have to, for some fucking reason, sing and dance on TikTok.
Was there ever a time that a single paragraph of appeal in a local newspaper would have worked?
Probably not. Historically, people have never given a shit. But this facet of human nature has never been so celebrated as it is now, by this marketing nightmare of personal algorithms.
Compared to these blatant attempts to appeal to your narcissism, what is the worth of a painstakingly maintained global supply chain of ethical chocolate suppliers, who must live by the skin of their teeth between the feet of Lindt and Cadbury, and has worked for decades to put a Fairtrade logo that’s worth something on your chocolate?
Not much, apparently. About the value of a dollar.
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