Amerika

“Behind this sign, you will conquer…” but what about ring-around-the-collar?

In the 1980s, a major brand launched a new advertising campaign for their washing machine detergent. It ended a previously unarticulated problem, ring-around-the-collar, which apparently involves soap and dirt deposits ending up in the necks of shirts.

Not only is that unsightly, but it conveys incompetence. Competent laundries like professional laundries somehow beat the ring-around-the-collar problem, but the poor suburban Maytag hackers could not… at least unless they got this product.

These days, we do not hear much about ring-around-the-collar. Maybe washing machines are better, or shirts designed not to have this problem. Or the most likely outcome: this was a symbol and not reality.

Ring-around-the-collar symbolized a transition to more intense industrial detergents for use in the home, and the way they sold it to us was with a signal that combined all of our frustrations with the washing process into one simple image: a neck ringed in dirt.

Was it true? It never matters. The fact is that it sold America on moving to more aggressive detergents, and soon shirts and washing machines changed to reflect this fact. We were no longer cleaning with soaps, but detergents, and synthentic fabrics worked best.

In the same way, Arabic mystics created a religion where our focus would not be on whether actions turned out well in reality or not, but where they fit on an imaginary scale between “good” and “evil.” Good simply meant that which complied with the religion.

To realistic thinkers, our goal has always been to have quality of thought and action, so our friend is wisdom or knowledge of the workings of the world, and our enemy is insanity, which probably includes stupidity, despite it being the common state of humankind.

Stupidity is insane simply because it is incompetent. “Insane” refers to an inability to perceive the world or hallucinations of some other world (Kant’s “hypothetical” imperatives). Anything stupid cannot perceive and react to the world, so behaves like the insane.

Do we still have ring-around-the-collar? Maybe we never did. Perhaps it was too much to simply say “upgrade to industrial detergents from soaps,” and the symbol did the trick, but it also led people away from a focus on what is real, with consequences today.

For example, are the useless “EnergyStar” appliances the direct descendants of ring-around-the-collar, itself a descendant of “In Hoc Signo Vinces”? The symbolism itself — a method — is the problem, because methods alone replace our sense of a holistic or transcendent goal.

And symbolism has other issues, too, namely that it is the root of any scam. When you go to buy a new dishwasher, the salesman wants to talk only about the water capacity, not reliability and maintenance in addition to water capacity.

Every third world dupe and carnie (shorthand: dishonest poors) starts their scam with the same thing, namely distraction from what is going on so you focus on one visual item instead of the whole process. While you are looking for the ball, he is removing your wallet!

The West has conned itself, inspired by diversity, with symbolism. Our ancestors looked at the whole of a situation and compared potential results, but we are obsessed with “good” and “evil,” popularity, profit numbers, and trends. This explains much of our decline.

Tags: arabic religions, insanity, stupidity, symbolism