The wisdom of Grant McCracken, below. In 46 years I have observed that stupid fads fade, that the easy way out turns out to be a dead end, and that goodness and mercy prevail. Just watch, you’ll see it, too.

Link: This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.

When all those consumers are surveying all those meaning sources, embracing and using them and throwing them off, in all those various ways, we create a net out of which our culture comes. This is what we use instead of the wisdom of elites and the presumption of ideological or religious world views. This is what it is to live in a society of strangers, this is what it is to share a society with strangers. This is what it is for us all to pursue our separate projects and somehow create a single universe. In the great voting procedure that is the consumer society, we all act for ourselves in millions of consumer choices and in the process construct something like a single cultural world. It is of course a world that is multiple, fractious, contested, confusing, conflicted, changing and for all of these and other reasons, dynamic and emergent. And unless I am very much mistaken, that’s the way we like it (uhuh, uhuh).