Griftworld
Everything is a grift now.
Your job is a grift. Your side-job is a grift. All business in general is a grift, especially that conducted over the internet.
Successful politicians are grifters, and the unsuccessful ones even more so. The Left is a grift. The Right is a grift.
All institutions are grifts. School is a grift — the university system is a grift perpetuated by grifters to keep their own grift open only to other grifters who have submitted themselves to the grift — in other words, racketeering.
Those who would’ve once been considered outstanding citizens have become the worst grifters of all, doctors, teachers, “community leaders” — all insist on their value to the victims which feed into their racket — patients, students, community members — all potential grifters themselves.
Schemes and scams have become the stock and trade of everyone. The legality of any business venture is a skeptical proposition. The IRS is a grift which keeps knowledge of the tax system esoteric in order to make any American susceptible to state blackmail by threat of prison time. Money laundering has become something everyone who knows anything about money more or less knows how to do.
But if everyone is a grifter, does the word retain any meaning at all? The word "grifter" once meant a con man. Now it seems to have colloquially shifted to mean anyone interested in making money, perhaps because there is less faith in the social character of money making than ever. All money making now appears as mutual scamming, the game being to scalp a margin of capital off the top of an available pool which seems less and less available every day.
Meanwhile, real grifters — criminals— become nearly heroic in a totalizing world which seems to actually rely on markets outside the atrophied “legal” market in order to keep a sufficient amount of capital floating around for speculation. But crime is the capitalism of the weak.
What happened to real business sense? Business as a creative enterprise, which did not have the goal of engaging in the economy of “pulling one over on another,” but dealmaking which created the greatest benefit possible for all parties involved.
The goal wouldn't be to sustain this economy of scams — but to recover a business acumen which tries to achieve the best deal for both parties. Not because it's the right thing to do, but because it will ultimately produce the most wealth for all involved.
Statements such as these are at risk of being met by accusations of naïve utopianism — but why? Have we really become so adjusted to mutual mistrust as to lose faith in the possibility to run an honest business which seeks to do right by itself by doing right by its clients, partners and customers?
Business has become synonymous with hustling, the desperate side effect of poverty, mere survival. Even those “at the top” seem to be most concerned either with making a dollar as quick as possible, or altogether unconcerned with profit, buttressing a delusion that entropy shall keep their enterprises afloat with Democratic Party ideology. Total administration and the actual closed character of the economy have caused real entrepreneurship and business acumen to fall apart. Education in business has become denigrated to the street education of the hustler. Who reads Adam Smith anymore?
Business has become a game of making others lose rather than oneself win — it has become a game of losers. Profiteering has taken priority over entrepreneurship. This has been true for a while, at least since bourgeois social relations were outstripped by the industrial revolution in the 19th century, but the countervailing impulse of entrepreneurship is contained within our own subjectivity, a subjectivity which is still bourgeois — a subjectivity which centers labor, society, and the universal.
Reckless profiteering is older than entrepreneurialism. The former was the inchoate impulse of the ancient world which differed little from blind domination. The latter, while still containing aspects of the former, went above and beyond it. It was founded upon an impulse which saw productivity as an end-in-itself, the betterment of one’s own enterprise containing the secret for the betterment of society at large.
Many now write this off as delusion, mistake or lie, but they do so on the basis of the spirit of bourgeois subjectivity itself — if our society has become dominated by mere profiteering, mere grifting, then this society is not living up to its own standards.
We should not feel compelled to cast off our own subjectivity as delusion to better adjust ourselves to the disappointing world we live in. Those who would write off our society’s aspirations and highest ideals in order to affirm what merely is are themselves grifters of the lowest order, who have in fact become beneficiaries of our bad reality.
Instead, it should be asked if there is still space to make our subjectivity felt in the world through our action within it. Can there be real entrepreneurship anymore?
In Juzo Itami’s “Supermarket Woman,” the eponymous hero is asked by the owner of a supermarket to help him in his failing enterprise, which is in the dregs of being forced out of the market by a rival. The rival — which intends to gouge prices once all competition has been run out of town — is quickly identified by the hero to be cutting corners, following the entropy of the market and “the way we’ve always done it.”
Rather than stoop to their rival’s level, she reorients the store to deliver the best food for the best price for their customer base, using the part time women working at the store as her yardstick. As they know the way the sausage is made, none of them had ever shopped at the store for their families. At the moment this changes, and the women begin to actually shop at the supermarket, the protagonist knows she’s succeeded. At the end, we see a much awaited new years’ sale, where the grocery store sees more success than it ever has while their rival store’s aisles are left totally barren of customers.
This is an objectification of our imagination as bourgeois individuals, albeit it is a very modest imagination. It is nothing but the image of our already existing ideals being fulfilled: that hard work and creativity will be rewarded, that those who cut corners will be trounced, that those who attempt to do right by others will win out, that the customer is always right.
But again, this is really very modest stuff, it is not an image of the world being overturned. But can we live up to even our own most modest imaginations anymore? Where are the real money makers? The real bandstackers? The real rack builders? Not schemers, scammers, robbers and thieves — grifters — but those who would try by their own ingenuity to create an enterprise which really could last, which really inspires trust, which is really committed to being the best?