The religion of Black Friday in the age of self-gifting
by Luigino Bruni
Among the many festivals of capitalist religion, black friday is the one that presents a perfect ‘cultic purity’ that allows us to understand dimensions of this new religion that we see less clearly in other now transformed and assimilated festivals, such as the new Christmas or the old Halloween.
First of all, we must bear in mind that the consumer mentality is part of every religious experience. Worship, liturgy, have always also been experiences of satisfying the needs of the body, not just the soul. Just think of a Catholic mass where all the senses are stimulated: hearing (songs), sight (art), smell (incense), taste (bread and wine), touch (statues of saints). In religions, the spiritual dimension is only one among many, and not even the most important one. Our grandparents who filled churches (grandmothers especially) and populated religious festivals were not interested in mysticism or asceticism. They did not seek contemplation of celestial realities. Sunday mass and holy days of obligation were above all the celebration of social bonding, of life, an explosion of bodies, of embraces, of dances, of large collective meals, of excess, of waste, of ‘dépense’ (said Bataille), of transgression, of the need for a different day. Saints and God were the excuse for feasting and processions, but the main protagonists of the feast were others.
If we look at it closely, black friday in fact has all the anthropological and social characteristics of ancient religious cults. The first concerns the essential importance of festivals themselves. Christianity did not become christianitas by the Edict of Milan in 313. Neither did it become christianitas for theology, nor for books and dogmas. The decisive operation was the occupation first of the old Greco-Roman temples and then, above all, the replacement of the old Roman, Celtic, Etruscan, Picenian, Sabine folk festivals… Culture is born from worship, Pavel Florensky reminded us in 1922. And culture means processions with canopies to carry and fires to shoot, objects to touch with the hands, statues to bathe with tears, and their cyclical annual repetition.
Black friday also originated as a festival of processions (in front of shops), the need to touch the object, tears for getting the much desired object, a very crowded folk festival. In recent years, however, important innovations are taking place, which are rapidly changing its nature. First, however, let us dwell on an element that should not be underestimated.
The Catholic world, especially with the Counter-Reformation, has greatly accentuated the dimension of consumption in worship and liturgy – think of the Mass, where the priest alone produces the good (Eucharist) that the people ‘consume’. The so-called ‘culture of shame’, always active and dominant in Latin countries, created an economic environment where people competed mainly through ‘flashy’ consumer goods (clothes, houses, cars…), and not through work as was the case in Protestant countries. All this has created a particular predisposition of the Catholic world for the new religion of capitalism since, in recent decades, this has shifted its focus from labour to consumption.
Hence yet another paradox: the capitalist religion was born in Calvinist countries but is conquering mainly Catholic ones – and increasingly the various communist Souths of the world. We like black friday much more than the Dutch or the Swiss. One understands then where the first decisive problem lies. The church and the Catholic world are culturally the least equipped to recognise the insidiousness of these festivities of the new consumer-based religion that is eliminating the last vestiges of Christianity, of Catholicism in particular – I wonder how many practising Catholics have made ‘conscientious objection’ to this Friday’s ritual? How many social or cooperative economy shops have resisted the seduction of the new cult? The consumerist cult is emptying the soul of Christians much more radically than all the communisms and socialisms in history have done.
Black friday then has its own ticipalities, both old and new. The first is an unprecedented form of polytheism. To understand it, one must be aware that the god-god worshipped is the consumer, not the object being purchased. So the ‘gods’, the sovereign consumers and idols, number in the millions, now billions. This is revealed to us by a founding element of every religion: sacrifice. Black friday discounts are almost always real, not fake. To tell us that the one who sacrifices on this day is not the consumer for the business but the business that makes the offer (note the language) for the benefit of its consumer-god. A controlled, small, homeopathic sacrifice, which, like any homeopathy, is intended to immunise against the disease: a small sacrifice, resembling the gift, so that capitalism can immunise itself against the true gift, which is the virus of which it is terribly afraid.
The second novelty concerns the end of the communitarian dimension of this new religion. Until now, we have only known communitarian religions. But by now we no longer buy the object in crowded shops-temples, in procession, as we did in the beginning; by now it comes to us, docile and fast, at home with a simple click (and a credit card), without meeting any human along the way. With artificial intelligence, this individualism will become total.
Finally, the third novelty. This year, during the novena in the run-up to the feast it was increasingly common to read: ‘Give yourself a black friday present’. Christian festivals used to be centred on gifts to be given to someone and received by someone; today there is the celebration of self-love, which is the very end of the Christian humanism of gift-giving. The self-gift is the apotheosis of the archaic idea of the gift-
regalo (from rex, regis), that is, offerings to be made to the king, with a truly unprecedented element: the only sovereign is the individual who makes offerings to himself, the donor coincides with the donee.
In this erasure of true gifts lies the Achilles’ heel of the religion of consumption: desire. No desire can be satisfied by goods, much less by self-gifts, because the essence of desire is to desire someone who desires us, to desire a desire, which in the Christian faith reaches its apotheosis in a God who desires us. We like goods that become gifts because they are a sacrament of a person who loves us and desires us; and every time we look at that object, we see in it the eyes, the smell and the taste of the one who loved us: in the self-gift we only smell and taste ourselves, infinite sadness.
Thank God, goods have many virtues, but they do not know how to desire. It will be a famine of desires that will prepare, sooner or later, the end of this new global cult. The hope is that in the meantime, somewhere, true communities, non-homeopathic gifts, great desires, God, will have survived.
