Welcome to Weed Church. All are Welcome.
First, a word:
Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."
-The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 7
And another word from the bowels of cyclical consumerist hell:
People don’t like to hear it, but the only way to get what you want is to have empathy. To truly understand how someone else feels, not just acknowledge that they feel a certain way. To understand the stakes of their life and why they might feel a way that is completely alien to you.
The first reason people don’t like hearing that is straightforward: nobody wants to be told they’re wrong, or that someone else’s feelings matter as much or more than theirs. It sucks. None of us asked to be here, and it can be a real drag when some other person that you also didn’t ask for is saying they want something that sounds completely foreign or impractical to the uninitiated. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find a solution to this problem aside from empathy, so I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on it.
Instead, I like dwelling on the other reason people don’t like hearing it. The more subconscious one. The one that says “getting what you want is selfish,” or the one that tells you that using someone else’s emotions as a way of achieving mutually beneficial means is immoral. Once you get past the first hurdle–understanding that there are indeed real people with real problems who suffer like you, and that the only way to exist with any semblance of fulfillment is to reduce that as much as possible–that second one comes up on you pretty quickly. It’s the one that tells us to feel bad for wanting.
Wanting is unavoidable. We are creatures of instinct; animals crawling around on the skin of a giant living creature hurtling through space. We will want for things or experiences or feelings. One of those things that we have yearned for throughout the history of civilization is a sense of stillness and comfort. We can’t seem to find it, but we keep trying, which creates more chaos, more wanting, more yearning, more suffering.
At the end of the Kutune Shirka, a folk epic that is believed to originate with the Ainu people of Japan, the protagonist has achieved his goals. He has found the golden sea otter rumored to swim off the shores of the village, but its capture has led to jealousy among other tribes. He has dispatched with the evil spirit of the hag who watches as men try to achieve greatness just so they can marry the fairest woman in the land. Despite this, the poem ends quite abruptly, as the narrator remembers earlier in his journey when a woman spoke of terrors in a village that he hadn’t yet encountered. He wonders to himself: if I stop now, won’t the others say that I was afraid?
It’s all I think about anymore.
Do you know what qualitative research is?
Most people do, even if they don’t realize it. When the average Joe pictures research, they’re usually picturing math and statistics, or the charts and polls that show up on the news about what percentage of people said they like a candidate or support an issue. While it’s important to avoid reductionism, I’ve worked in research long enough and have analyzed statistically significant crosstabs enough to confidently say that for the most part, popular understanding of research in America is about numbers and efficiency. When this number changes in a report, what happens in real life?
But that’s only one half of research, and is called quantitative because it’s all about statistical samples and modeled projection. Get enough people to tell you something and, for whatever weird occult numerology related reason, that observation will apply to millions of people. There’s a lot of hemming and hawing about this line of work since 2016 when Nate Silver and the 538 gang had to eat shit after Donald Trump won the presidency despite months of models that gave Hillary Clinton a 99% chance of victory. This very small part of that election ordeal is a net positive for society, because as someone who works in quantitative data for a living, I can say that the biggest advantage a researcher in this industry has is an understanding of quant’s counterpart: qualitative research. As the philosopher Erik Voegelin observed while the fascists used pseudoscience to advance the Nazi agenda in 1930s Austria, life is more than a set of numbers on a page. Life is existential and complicated, and the quantifiable opinions we have about it are shaped by the words and stories we tell each other in real-time. That’s not easy to measure. That’s where qualitative work comes in.
Popular exposure to qualitative research is usually through the dreaded focus group. Shows like Silicon Valley have mocked the ways focus groups are often used as nothing more than a validation exercise for various marketing executives or corporate egos, and there’s plenty of that in market research. It’s not exactly fair to say that focus groups have been misrepresented in American pop culture given how often the group itself is vapid or poorly done, leading to useless findings. But focus groups have existed for a very long time for a good reason: the methodology may not be as sound as is ideal given the sample size (focus groups usually are 10-20 people, whereas a good survey or poll will ask 1,000+ often), but the findings are extremely important for someone who knows what to listen for. The feelings matter. Propaganda, for example, isn’t usually made in Excel.
Consider a rudimentary example that is typical of a modern market research focus group. Let’s say you work for a television company and you have a new television to sell. The features are great, but the features are the same as every other television on the market, so you won’t sell the television by talking about your 4K picture or your SmartTV software and streaming integrations. You’ll sell it because of how your customer feels about it. But you can’t distill those feelings into a survey, because on paper they all look and sound the same. It doesn’t help to know that 60% of Americans say your television will make them feel “excited” because what the fuck does that mean? You could line up 20 people who say they’re excited and get 20 different definitions of the word “excited” and the reasons for their excitement. So good luck selling someone something when all you know is that they’re excited about it.
In a focus group in this example, that word “excited” takes on a new life of its own. “Excited,” is the starting place (if a participant brings it up) and then a good moderator is going to ask what is exciting. And then the participant is going to use a new word. And the rest of the group is going to react to that word. How did they react? Was it familiar to them in a way that tells you this is cultural shorthand that you weren’t previously aware of? Was there another word that another participant added as color to help flesh out how they feel about the concept that another participant is describing? By the end, this snowball of linguistic kinetic energy has taken on an entirely new mass of words, feelings, thoughts, all of which are now jammed together in a big slush pile, waiting for an observant eye to pluck the right ones out. That’s where the good shit lives. That’s where existence coalesces into a common parlance. Unfortunately, it’s entirely nonsensical as is and requires translation–and translation is something that has caused a lot of problems in the past given how much can get lost as something as complicated as human emotion and motivation is distilled into a coherent sentence.
That’s neither here nor there for the focus group, though. You’re running a television company, not trying to solve the nature of existence, so you’re looking to take this mass of emotions dredged up by televisions–a central feature of modern existence–and turn it into a distilled “need state.” You need to understand what these emotions say the consumer needs from your television, and that need is driven by emotion rather than rationality. If the decision was rational, the customer would pick the least expensive television with the best possible features, given that watching a television is the same no matter how you slice it. There’s a reason Samsung is able to sell $3,000 televisions to people, and it’s not because the people who buy them are keen observers of quality pixel rendering. They are people with money who need something to believe in, otherwise the whole magic trick falls apart. Otherwise, they realize they don’t need any of this stupid shit. Fortunately for the companies trying to maintain a consumption economy, that’s not possible due to the Dunning Kruger effect, wherein people are incapable of realizing they are rubes. The paradox of existence: too stupid to live, too scared to die.
Qualitative research is where the fun stuff happens. Where human esoterica becomes more than the silly stuff that lives in our head, filtered through too many incalculable prisms to trace a root with any real confidence. Yet, in the room, that esoterica becomes unified. People are nodding along to things that sound utterly insane, and you realize it’s because you, too, are nodding along. You understand exactly what they mean because you feel it, not in those potentially insane-sounding words, but in the energy of the room as a group of complete strangers start to describe their experience with the one constant–a product or brand that a plurality of the country has some kind of need for–and end up in harmony. It’s mind-bending to experience live–a culling of the unified consciousness–once you get over the initial kneejerk reaction of laughing at the types of silly stuff people say about gas stations or breakfast cereal. Everyone has those stupid opinions, even the people on the other side of the mirror cracking jokes about the prole getting paid $75 to give their opinions.
There’s an air of elitism to any form of consumer research I’ve experienced because it puts a false distance between the subject and the researcher. After all, before I attended any number of focus groups as an observer or moderator, I stopped at restaurants on the way. I bought specific beverages that appealed to me. Even as I convinced myself–a member of the industry that sells things–that I was able to spot the tricks, it didn’t necessarily stop all the tricks from working. I used to collect sneakers, for Christ’s sake, and still buy the occasional pair of Jordans when my friends release one. This doesn’t nullify the observations made from behind the glass of the focus group, mind you, nor does it invalidate the qualitative research experience. In fact, I would argue it enhances it. It’s almost like an out of body experience, pure id manifest in the thoughts that, if you’re honest, you recognize as your own when you are at a gas station shopping for chips after smoking weed or having a beer, or when you are thinking about buying life insurance in case you die while your kid is on your lap. By understanding one’s biases, it becomes easier to acknowledge the ways that even the most unintelligible psychobabble probably has roots in a shared desire for satisfaction or comfort.
Unfortunately, that shared desire is also exploitable. Mad Men does a pretty good job of milking this paradox by using Don Draper as a proxy for the mythos of the American Dream, specifically the Manifest Destiny aspect of it. His entire existence is a lie–literally stolen from someone else who died in Korea–much the same way our creation myth is a comforting lie about religious freedom rather than an acknowledgment of our founding as a commercial playground for human trafficking and agricultural aristocracies. His life is unfulfilling, but he refuses to break from it because of his undying belief that the means he pursues are just. Worst of all, he is a consumer rather than a living being; he infiltrates and smothers the beating heart of culture not through force but by coercion. Everyone needs something to believe in, and Draper sells their anxieties back to them the same way our economy commodifies rather than alleviates.
It’s here where I break a bit and struggle with what anyone does about the repetitive destruction of consumption economies. I recognize it and in some ways am responsible for monitoring how it works in my day job. I can’t do anything to stop it, and as far as I can tell, neither can any of the people who are being sold to. Everyone has to eat. Everyone has to drink. Everyone needs a place to live. All of these things are ethereal here. None of these things seems guaranteed to last beyond the next 5-10 years, though that’s probably been true for so long that I’d rather not think about it. It keeps going because it has to. Maybe it always will. Is that what God is?
The Great Prophet Baháʼu'lláh observed the throughline of religious thought and theological development. Perhaps because I took such a detour into political analysis, I sometimes think of the Prophet as a sort of Marx of faith — a unifier who sought to synthesize theology as a culling of human consciousness in the way Marx saw history as an ever — evolving narrative of human cooperation and labor. Marx’s work has always felt like the equivalent of quant theory to me; sterile but unavoidably accurate. Where his work always fails is in its atheism, something that has never and will never succeed because of what the Prophet observed and I think is best understood in the West as a Noosphere. Alongside the onward march of time is an evolving sense of consciousness and responsibility to one another. We are mere specks on the carpet of human thought, and even the evolution of thought over a period of 100 years is nothing compared to 100,000+ years of human consciousness. The Catholics were debating whether indigenous people had souls in what we now think of as South America 700 years ago. That sounds like a long time, but again: 100,000 years of human consciousness. Seven centuries is the flick of a lightswitch, relatively speaking.
The Buddha had that figured out right around 2,000 years prior, but the Catholics don’t like to acknowledge much religion east of Jerusalem because once you do, the Great Prophet’s observation becomes a bit jarring. If all of theological and religious consciousness is a constant thruline, or a culling of the shared mind of those that survive for generations, it becomes unavoidably true that everything from Europe and westward is on a far more regressive timeline, God-wise. Western Christianity is a faith of self-actualization; a theology based upon a specific interpretation of the Christ myth that is focused on punishment and judgment from the human perspective. Christ is punished and resurrected countless times, and we are made in His image, meant to carry the burden of the cross as He did. And we are to do so without fear, because that is the source of our divine spark.
We need to catch our golden sea otter under great burden, and even when we’ve slain the evil spirits that haunt us, we must move onward to liberate all we can. The Ainu figured that out 20,000 years ago, Pope Primitive. The Christian frameworks are old and outdated; the theologies redundant to myths that other cultures have already internalized and abandoned for more complex frameworks that satisfy an ever expanding consciousness with the steady onward march of time. Other theologies already moved past self-actualization once it became clear that our individual desires have consequences for the whole, even the folk religions that were sneered at and handwaved by the Christian missionaries who encountered them. That’s why most smart Christians end up in a place of endless questioning once they reach the age of soft tissue development: the rule of 3s is how babies understand stuff. Catholics trick themselves into thinking they have esoterica because of the saints, but at the end of the day, they’d turn to mush at the first sign of a bleeding palm, just like any other rube. One must internalize the irrelevance of their individual desires to find God, something the Catholic Church has never been very good at.