WE Charity, Trudeau, and the Narcissist in the Fun-House Mirror

“We partnered with Dow Chemical to bring some new exciting programs to YOUR SCHOOL!”
~Craig Kielburger, trying to win the “Most Alienating Corporate Slogan” award.

There was a recent episode of The Fifth Estate which was purported to be the ‘smoking gun’ of corruption in Canada’s Trudeau administration. It involved allegations of collusion and graft between the Trudeau family, members of his cabinet, and the WE Charity of Marc and Craig Kielburger. And it was a smoking gun, alright – just not for what people think. People are all worked up because Margaret Trudeau got paid a speaker’s fee, while Justin Trudeau redirected tax dollars to the Kielburgers – as if money is the currency that these people trade in. The real issue goes much deeper than that. The Fifth Estate is missing the forest for the trees.

First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?”
~Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs

Q: What is a corporation?

A: A corporation is a collection of people, organized into interrelated groups, who cooperate to maintain their own existence through the existence of the corporation.

Q: What does a corporation do?

A: It eats money, and shits out consumer products.

Q: What’s the difference between consumer products and traditional goods and services?

A: Consumer products exist primarily to evoke an emotion or sense of identity rather than to fulfill a basic desire or need.

Q: What’s the difference between a corporation and a charity?

A: The sort of tax form they submit.

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WE Charity is an organization founded by human rights advocates[i] Marc and Craig Kielburger brothers in 1995. Formerly known as Free the Children, it focuses on international development. And if you believe that, then go watch a Marvel movie, the following discussion is beyond your maximum depth.

What does WE Charity do? It holds massive, stadium-sized Pep Rallies for High School students, complete with rock n’ roll, custom graphics, and promises that “You can change the world!” all while hobnobbing with the likes of Trudeau and Oprah to excite the crowd. It also arranges tours of its charity projects in Kenya, so that the rich White people who donated can jet-set all across the globe[ii] to experience the self-satisfaction of seeing Kenyans bow and scrape before them, saying “Yes massa, thank you massa, we build a good hospital!”

The latter is the more obvious product: a sense of smug, post-colonial satisfaction. This is a luxury-branded version of “Sponsoring a child for less than a dollar a day!” More obnoxious and more obviously hypocritical, but at the end of the day it’s just your basic charity scam. The Fifth Estate acts like it was a giant scandal when the Kenyan side of the organization rushed to fill its hospital with fake patients to make it look busy for the visiting jet-setters. Nobody cares, The Fifth Estate. If WE Charity was actually trying to help people they wouldn’t have built a “Women’s Empowerment Centre” they would have bought them a tractor. What’s next, are you going to do an episode about how the WWE is fake? Is ballet fake just because it’s well choreographed?

But WE Charity is far more than a basic third-world charity scam. Those Kielburger brothers are smart. In the same way that Tony Soprano’s deli wasn’t really about selling delicious Italian subs, WE Charity isn’t really about selling inverted colonialism. WE Charity is part of the massive new industry that has popped up over the past few years, which few people are able to fully comprehend.

WE Charity is a social media company.

Q: What product does Facebook offer?

A: You. You are the product.

WE Charity operates by having stadiums full of High School students, excited and cheering for the rock music, the celebrities, the custom graphics, and the opportunity to Change the World!™ They are the product – the future consumers of Canada.

Q: What is a Pep Rally?

A: A social tool designed to reduce cynicism.

To understand why High Schools invest in Pep Rallies, let’s consider why sales companies do Pep Rallies. First thing in the morning, the boss gives you an excited speech, gets you all cheering and jumping up and down, and then sends you out into the world so that strangers can tell you how much they hate you, personally, and despise your product. Why does the boss do this? Because insane optimism is the only way you can handle all of the negativity that’ll come along with selling.

So why does a High School do it? Because by pretending that there’s some sort of “School Spirit”, some ill-defined set of moral axioms that the organization stands for (rather than it being merely a citizen processing centre/daycare for locking up teenagers while their parents are at work) so that students will voluntarily follow the rules of their own accord rather than requiring constant enforcement from the over-paid and under-worked teachers. As far as means and ends go in the 21^st Century, both of these cases are quite laudable, compared to most of what is out there.

But why does WE Charity have Pep Rallies? The students in attendance aren’t going to be selling anything. And they’re not part of the WE Charity organization. So why the desire to lower the cynicism levels of those attending? If you’re stupid you might think it’s corporate sponsorship (I hear the Marvel Movies are streaming online these days). Certainly, some of the whistle blowers[iii] who were interviewed by The Fifth Estate were upset because one of the rallies was supported by the bad company Dow Chemical. And another time WE Charity accepted money from Boeing! What, you don’t think that Boeing is a bad company? Well, did you know that they work with the US military? Yeah, they do. And we all know that the US military is bad.

It’s not about corporate sponsorship. At least, it’s not merely about corporate sponsorship. That doesn’t explain Trudeau’s involvement (he only got paid peanuts compared to what the Chinese are giving him). It’s about something far more powerful than that. It’s about Branding.

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There’s a weird little idea floating around the Internet right now. It claims that the radical political polarization we’re witnessing is the product of – not a secret cabal of psychotic oligarchs – but an AI marketing algorithm run amuck. This is less crazy than it sounds, but first we’ll have to dig into the history of lifestyle marketing.

The father of modern marketing – a.k.a. propaganda – was Edward Bernays, Freud’s double-nephew. He took his uncle’s theories[iv] and, rather the applying them to the individual, he applied them to the population as a whole. Figure out what the shadow self is; what thing the population is in denial about; and leverage that to manipulate them into doing your bidding. Some poignant historical examples:

1920

He proved his theories by convincing women to smoke. Prior to the suffragette movement, cigarette smoking was almost entirely a male habit. Bernays looked at the suffragettes and saw penis envy. He explained to them that the social norm was a form of oppression. He then convinced them to light up cigarettes at the end of one of their marches, declaring them “Freedom torches!” Shortly thereafter, women began smoking throughout the Western world.

1950:

Post-WWII was an era of newfound convenience. Rather than having to cook everything from scratch, industrialization allowed many foods to come pre-made. This induced a deep sense of guilt amongst stay-at-home mothers, who felt that they weren’t nurturing their children as much as they were supposed to. A Bernays-educated marketing genius noticed this, and figured out a way to assuage this guilt, while selling pancake mix: simply remove the dehydrated egg. By requiring the mothers of the nation to add their own egg, they assuaged their guilt. The resultant meal was identical in nutritional value, but it felt like it was healthier, it felt like they weren’t neglecting their children. Pancake mix w/o eggs is an idiotic staple to this day (either buy it premade or mix it yourself, I don’t care).

1970:

This is when things began to get interesting. The 60s counter-culture had resulted in societal splintering, and marketers developed the term ‘lifestyle choice’ to define their demographics. While the occasional Ferris Bueller might be popular with the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads, for your typical product it was better to pick one ‘lifestyle choice’ and market to that niche, specifically. If necessary, create several different advertising campaigns, one designed for each market niche. Just don’t let them find out about one another.

1990:

Now the technology hit electoral politics. The Clinton campaign applied a Bernaysian analysis of the voting demographics, and discovered one particular lifestyle/interest group which was relatively apolitical, and thus easy to sway, but also large enough to make a difference: mothers concerned with playground safety. Clinton campaigned for playground safety, and thus won the country from George Bush.

Since then it’s been nothing but feedback loops exacerbating the situation.

Earlier I made the Big Brained, 120 IQ claim that a consumer product was distinct from a traditional good or service because its primary target was emotional validation and a sense of identity, rather than serving a discreet end. This is a product of applied Bernaysian marketing theory – its feedback loop. You start out by psychoanalyzing the population, and manipulating their subconscious fears to sell them your product. Then, you categorize them to better sell them a product. Next, you reinforce those categorizations to make them more reliable, more predictable. And what’s one of the best ways of defining a group? By defining it through what it’s opposed to.

For decades we’ve had retail outlets which specialize in subcultures; one store for jocks, another store for goths. 20 years ago they were just subcultures with over-priced branded logos on the mostly-identical clothing. These days I can tell you who the patrons of each establishment vote for. Marketing to goths is good. Marketing to goths who hate jocks is better. Marketing to goths who hate jocks and vote Orange Party is best.

Every layer of identity adds marketability. It’s not that the AI feedback algorithm was trying to sell more coffee mugs with “I Drink Purple Party Tears” on the side of it – what happened is that it realized that every product, from t-shirts to breakfast cereal, could potentially be branded as Orange Party or Purple Party, and the greater the ideological rift, the easier these fools would be to market to.

For the sake of branding, we bleached away our culture and learned to hate one another.

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Ask yourself what actual charity looks like. Does it look like stadium full of cheering High School kids getting branded by Dow Chemical[v] and Justin Trudeau? Does it look like a bunch of wealthy Britons spending thousands to fly to a country where the locals live off of $5 a day? Does it look like some 15 year old kid talking about how his ‘big ideas’ are going to change the world, when he hasn’t even studied Calculus?

Or does charity look like something humble and local that doesn’t get the attention of celebrities and narcissists?

The smoking gun is not that Trudeau’s mom got a bit of walking around money. The smoking gun is that the whole thing is nothing but a narcissism make-work project. If you want to see financial graft, look at city politics. The people operating on the national level just use money as a lubricant, for them the real currency is the branding. The affect. The image. Justin Trudeau doesn’t give a damn about the suffering of Africans, or Canadians for that matter. What he cares about is that you think he’s a humanitarian.[vi]

And any of you who participated in this scandal – whether by supporting WE Charity, or by simply watching him speak on stage – are just as bad.

Bernays weaponized Freud’s insights, and now we live in a fictional, polarized world of endless forced-positivity while everybody’s addicted to antidepressants. But instead of unplugging from the fiction, we just try and rewrite it so that we’re the heroes and they’re the villains.

The new moneymaking idea is Social Media – no, I don’t mean technology platforms that people use to communicate online. Most such platforms are not Social Media companies. I mean organizations which exist to create a false media environment to socially capture people. That’s what WE Charity is – that’s what Facebook is – that what Coachella is – that’s what Pink Ribbons Inc. is – and every other stupid, silk-screened, colour-coordinated t-shirt movement, online poll, and Marvel-character-on-an-over-priced-t-shirt-for-adults that’s sold for dollars on the penny.

We live in a fake world, with fake politics, fake charities, fake personalities, fake products – and we are all fake people. This is the world we chose. This is not exclusive to WE Charity and Justin Trudeau – this garbage is everywhere. Every corporation. Every charity. Every ‘community service organization’ and ‘social movement’ which exists, nothing but a bunch of empty black holes with a shell of leathery humanity wrapped over top of them like poorly done taxidermy.

“Welcome to Costco. I love you.”
~Idiocracy

You know, I really hate being compared to Holden Caulfield. The guy’s an assshole. But if it’s a choice between hanging out with him or the alternative – the Ferris Buellers, the Justin Trudeaus, the Oprahs – I’ll pick Holden any day. Better to be an asshole and an idiot than a phony. At least I can admit what I am. You people, you can’t ever stop running from yourselves. The only time you stop is to stare into a fun-house mirror.

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[i] Oh, thank God, for a moment there I was worried it was founded by human rights opponents!

[ii] Because they’re jet-setting for charity, there’s no carbon footprint that needs to be offset.

[iii] What, pray tell, did these over-privileged urbanites think was going on? Where did they think their hefty pay cheques came from? These entitled little shit-stains are upset because somebody who worked for a living was taking advantage of their social media platform to advertise, instead of giving up all their money to “Change the World!™” and employ their dead-weight asses?

[iv] Freud is often remembered for the small number of things he got wrong, rather than the vast swathe of ideas he got right. Don’t allow this pseudo-intellectualism to cause you to throw the baby out with the bath water.

[v] I’ve got nothing against Dow Chemical. And if you’ve got winter tires on your car, you should write them a thank you letter. But since everything is Good Company or Bad Company in the mind of your modern idiot, PR snow jobs like this are a necessary business expense.

[vi] Note: this is not exclusive to Liberal Politicians; when Jason Kenney, leader of the Albertan Conservatives, accepted his victory he did so by rolling up on stage in a Ford F-150 to show off how ‘cowboy’ he was, or something like that.