Diamonds Are a God's Best Friend

Diamonds are abundant and not particularly valuable.  This common mineral has become an object of expensive desire through a carefully orchestrated and well funded campaign of deception perpetrated over a span of seven decades.  We have been duped.  We have been fooled into believing wrongly that these stones are rare and precious.  They are not.

Our collective gullibility about diamonds, which has blinded us to the obvious, has lessons far beyond jewelry and overpriced rocks.   The same credulity that enables the diamond myth to persist is the nutrient that feeds our faith in the supernatural.  We should learn from our mistakes. 

To debunk the diamond legend and to deconstruct our willingness to believe the unbelievable, let us first look at some indisputable facts. 

Diamonds are not rare.  Huge diamond fields were discovered in 1870 in South Africa.  Some deposits in Sierra Leone, Congo and Liberia are so massive that diamonds were initially found on the ground scattered about like sesame seeds on a bagel.  Diamonds are so common that the current supply is sufficient to give every American man, woman and child a large handful.  

Diamonds are not valuable.  Carat for carat, rubies have twice the value of diamonds, even considering the inflated value of compressed carbon.  Stratospheric pricing was achieved by creating artificial scarcity.  That was accomplished by De Beers using the simplest of all methods: stockpiling.  The company filled huge, massive warehouses with millions of diamonds, and then controlled how much of that hoarded stock flowed to the open market.

Diamonds are not naturally in demand.  Without blatant manipulation of the market, diamonds would be seen as no more desirable than those bagel-bound sesame seeds.  Having controlled the supply, De Beers went on to create demand through an astonishing public-relations campaign.  The big con began in 1938 when De Beers hired the PR firm N.W. Ayer to convince the public of a bizarre notion: that only diamonds could symbolically express eternal love.  They succeeded simply by creating the association between courtship, diamonds and movie stars, paying actors to display their rocks prominently and planting stories in the media about who gave whom how many carats.

N.W. Ayer was able to convince us that diamonds express love, a ridiculous proposition in the extreme, by trading on our insecurities and our tendency to appeal to authority to validate our ideas.   Instead of evaluating a claim on its own merits, we glance around to see how others are reacting.  We abdicate our responsibility to make our own judgments by transferring that responsibility to authority figures and society’s elite.  We see a movie star extolling the virtues of a worthless clear stone and go out and spend $7000 for a fragment weighing 1/142 of an ounce. Diamonds are not forever; diamonds are pathetic.  We are all marks in a grand grift.

That we can believe something as obviously and verifiably false as a valuable diamond indicates vulnerabilities elsewhere, and the consequences of that gullibility are nothing as innocuous as fools being separated from their money.  The big diamond scam is child’s play compared to the biggest PR success of all time:  religion.  Diamonds prove that we easily believe a ridiculous story, even when opposing evidence proving the story untrue is overwhelming, obvious and incontrovertible.  The truth is clearly before us but we fail to see.  With diamonds the story is rarity and value, with religion the fable is god; both narratives can survive only because we abandon critical thinking.  We accept the official account in the face of contrary reason, appealing to authority to reinforce our belief.  The theologically equivalent roles of De Beers and N.W. Ayers are played by the major denominations and their army of clergymen selling us every Sunday a grand myth unconstrained by reality. 

In the case of De Beers and its successors, we continue to believe even though the truth has been revealed.  The lie is exposed yet we persist in placing value on diamonds, ignoring an obvious reality.  Imagine the difficulty of our task when we are asked to disprove a negative knowing that we are incapable of rejecting even a myth like diamonds so easily disproved with simple facts.

The truth is before us but we fail to see.

Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Jeff Schweitzer

Comments

[elmerfude]

The diamond/religion analogy doesn't work for me but that's horse racing. As much as I dislike institutional religion based on my negative experience with it, I think you go too far by it seems discounting the entire imaginative realm. There after all are great spiritual, moral, aesthetic and social lessons and truths to be found in mythology, literature, poetry, opera, art and other art forms. There are after all a number of types of human intelligence (see Howard Gardner) of which the logical-ma­thematical is only one. I think a world with only logical intelligence would be pretty sterile and probably less humane than the one we have now. I also wonder about the motivation for your zeal to convert believers to atheism. Do you plant to send out missionaries with tracts in hand?

[Jeff Schweitzer - Huffpost Blogger]

I don't discount the important and positive role that poetry, literature and other forms of art play in enriching the human experience. Those are not equivalent to religion. Few wars have been fought over a poem, or tortured somebody because they disliked an aria. Poetry does not incite us to use the earth's resources as our playground.

I have absolutely no interest in converting believers into rationalists. The absence of religion is not religion. This point is so commonly misunderstood. Just because I don't believe there is an invisible pink elephant in the room does not make me a zealot.

[elmerfude]

I am so relieved! I have enough trouble keeping Mormon missionaries and Witnesses off the property! I would add we need to be careful not to throw out some of the great poetry and parables found in religious texts while tossing out the dreadful dogmatic structures of religion itself. A good example is the Song of Songs found in the OT--a love poem right up there with Pablo Neruda. I have never seen a pink elephant in the room myself but I understand that inebriated people sometimes see them. I suppose that religion and alcohol can be equally addictive.

[HUFFNAME]

"Few wars have been fought over a poem," elliptical for ... but many wars have been fought over theological differences.

I think one of two conditions obtains here:

A. You realize as well as any other thinking person that wars fought under the banners of religion are inevitably about food, water, land, fuel or logistical advantage (in short, $) and yet you try to buttress your argument with this hackneyed misconception.

In this case I question your intellectual integrity.

B. You actually believe in fairy tales of the kind represented by: "The US invaded Iraq to remove WMD" and "Europe invaded the Americas--and earlier, the Middle East--with the charitable goal of converting the locals to Christianity;" and "The IRA Provos were bombing Ulster police stations because the pious and devout Provos were terribly concerned about the Protestant constables' positions regarding The Holy Trinity and Salvation Through Works."

In this case I question your intellectual acumen.

The banners under which a war is fought are no indicator, whatsoever, of the forces or events that actual gave rise to that war.

Your specious argument about a causal relationship between religious faith and war has long pedigree among atheist firebrands. It was facile junk when each of them used it and it remains so.

So press your case against religion. You are in some very famous company (see above.) Your case is not strengthened, however, by the thoughtless--not to mention ironic--mouthing of plainly false atheistic dogma.

[MTGradwell]

Abundant? Yes. "Not particularly valuable?" - The price tag says otherwise.

"we glance around to see how others are reacting" - that is how almost all material goods, legal tender and specie are evaluated; not just diamonds. If you think diamond mania is ridiculous, wait till you see how attached people get to rectangular pieces of paper tinged with green ink. At least diamonds have uses, and they survive wetting and other ill-treatment. Just leave the bits of paper in your pocket for one wash and they turn into a soggy mess. And with diamond the supply is at least finite. The green paper is printed by vast incompetent organizations as a way of escaping the consequences of their incompetence; an incompetence which has no known limits.

"fools being separated from their money"

Oh, I see you've heard of the green stuff already.

"with religion the fable is god; both narratives can survive only because we abandon critical thinking".

One workable definition of god is "that which is most important". By this definition, god would be a fable only if nothing is more important than anything else.

Your analogy is perhaps more accurate than you realize, because diamonds ARE a god; and, as the case you put forward so eloquently show us, they are a false god. They are one aspect of the god which the New Testament calls "mammon".

[Jeff Schweitzer - Huffpost Blogger]

Price and value are not equivalent.

"we glance around to see how others are reacting" - that is how almost all material goods, legal tender and specie are evaluated; not just diamonds.

I agree; my point was to generalize from the specifics of diamonds to a broader point, as you properly note here. That need to glance around instead of evaluating something on its own mertis is exactly the vulnerabiliy that allows us to believe the unbelievable.

[PaxMundis]

Actually, diamonds do have practical purposes. As one of the hardest substances on Earth, they make excellent drills and sharp tools. There have been recent studies of using nanodiamonds to treat wounds (they can deliver insulin, which fights infections). It's true that deBeers has made a lot of blood money by playing up their rarity, but that doesn't mean they're worthless, any more than gold (an excellent conductor) is.

But I suspect your real point is about religion, and there, too. I think you're pushing it. I feel the need to bring out the litany of people who have used religion for the good of society, from the monks who preserved knowledge during the middle ages to Martin Luther King and the Liberation Theologians, but I find my words falling on deaf ears here. Sigh.

[Jeff Schweitzer - Huffpost Blogger]

I agree that diamonds have use in industry (see my reply to a comment below), and perhaps in medicine. I did not mean to imply otherwise; my point was that diamonds are not rare or precious, and are greatly inflated in value through market manipulation. Silicon is useful in industry but nobody is wearing silicon earings!

And you are correct, the blog is about religion, not diamonds. The thesis here is that our gullibility as exposed by our belief in the diamond myth has lessons for us in understanding how we can believe the myths of religion. The consequences of that belief are not the focus of the blog, and content for another discussion. I will say this in response to your positive spin on religion; yes, those examples have merit, but do not outweigh the millenia of wars, torture and terrorism perpetrated in the name of god; and we cannot forget the thousands of boys raped by priests.

[kwinter]

"I feel the need to bring out the litany of people who have used religion for the good of society"

Please give an example of something done "for the good of society", that could not possibly have been done without the religion.

I know religion can be used as a tool, to make it easier to get people to cooperate, for good AND nefarious purposes.

But name something good that can only be achieved by religion.

[minimalist syntax]

Something good that can be done only by humans who lack faith is equally impossible to find. I would say that is because goodness is inherent to all humans, it doesn't care about a person's explicitly expressed faith or not.

[PaxMundis]

"I feel the need to bring out the litany of people who have used religion for the good of society"

Please give an example of something done "for the good of society", that could not possibly have been done without the religion.

I know religion can be used as a tool, to make it easier to get people to cooperate, for good AND nefarious purposes.

But name something good that can only be achieved by religion."

I didn't say that they could "only" be achieved by religion. That's not the criterion. But I feel the need to trot out Gandhi, MLK, The Catholic Worker Movement, the abolitionist movement - all people and movements which were sustained by their faith.

Actually, Bertrand Russell, no fan of religion in the least, argued that John Woolman, one of the earliest abolitionists, argued that Woolman's ability to persuade other of the evils of slavery stemmed from his religious conviction. And Carl Sagan noted that the nuclear disarmament movement was helped by Pope John Paul's statements.

Even Noam Chomsky, a committed and lifelong atheist, has said that the most honest, forthright and committed people he's ever worked with are Quakers.

[Norge]

Yes, the information about diamonds was also written about in this months' Scientific American mag.
Tragic how we humans are so easly duped by those so willing to exployt others.

It is enjoyable to read articles such as this which go to the core of some serious problems.
I had also years ago been taught in schools that dimonds were extremely rare and highly expensive.

Perhaps schools should check their sources and teachers not just except what is written in issued textbooks as the truth.
The whitemans' history books also had (to say the least) Americas' Manifest Destiny.

[slarabee]

Beyond the simple and obvious facts you have stated here, I have always thought diamonds to be the most boring of the gemstones. To me it has always looked like cut clear glass. People say look at the color and the clarity. I say it looks like cut glass.

Opals are cool looking and so are rubies, emeralds etc... but diamonds look like glass.

However diamonds are of some value in industrial applications, however interestingly enough most of those diamonds are artificially produced and they go to great lengths to make them. Ridiculous huh?

Religion well that is another one that has me baffled. To each his own I guess.

Another great post, thanks Jeff.

[kylennblack]

Thank you!

When you boil it down, there are two reasons why people have gone to war: resources and religion.

It gets tiring seeing a belief in some sky fairy and his la-la land propped up as something not only acceptable but desirable, especially when it is responsible for thousands of years of destructive behavior.

Best wishes, Dr. Schweitzer.

[GodIs]

How do we know that Hell exists?
If the notion that Hell is a place of eternal fiery torment is a doctrine of men, you are certainly entitled to know that. It would be morally wrong to teach the idea of a Lake of Fire just to scare people, but sin's existence proves Hell's existence. God's law would be meaningless if there were no penalty for breaking it.
Sin, the violation of God's law, is an unquestioned reality; therefore, Hell, the penalty for sin, is a reality. The truth is that even Satan is afraid of Hell. It is a place of punishment for him as well as for the unbelievers. Satanists and other socially rebellious people will experience the worse judgment of all. God must punish sin with eternal death, but He takes no delight in suffering of the wicked. It will be Satan and his demons who will torment the damned.
God is love.

[Jeff Schweitzer - Huffpost Blogger]

Your incohrent babbling has absolutely nothing to do with this blog.

[kylennblack]

And if you're a bad little child, Santa Claus will leave a lump of coal in your stocking.

What. Ever.

[amamomofsons]

No he isn't. Mr. Godis

Jeff this was really interesting and I enjoyed it. One of my sons was talking about the value of diamonds and told the story about putting a shiny object in a bottle to catch a monkey. The monkey puts his hand in the bottle to grasp the object and then will not let go because of his greed. He is caught and caged for the rest of his life....al­l for greed. By the way...what ever happened to the man made diamond industry that took hold for a moment a few years ago. I understood that they had created diamonds so flawless that they had to etch them with a laser marking to tell the difference. Did the diamond industry buy up the patten for the process?

[Jeff Schweitzer - Huffpost Blogger]

The synthetic diamond industry is alive and well; the product is used in manufacturing rather than as jewelry, mainly in products like sandpaper and to harden the cutting edge of specialized tooling.

By the way, to all who have commented; thank you. I hope that everybody recognizes that the blog was less about diamonds than about our collective gullibily in believing the unbelievable, and how that relates to religion.

[mcthfg]

Diamonds are only good for playing records. And there aren't too many of those these days...