From one of the blogs at Ad Age, we have some more fashionable celebration of gay marriage from the one of the premiere jewelers in America.

Here’s the ad:

The copy reads:

Will you promise to never stop completing my sentences or singing off-key, which I’m afraid you do often? And will you let today be the first sentence of one long story that never, ever ends?

WILL YOU?

Ogilvy & Mather, the agency responsible, only won the Tiffany’s account this past February.

The Holiday sales results for Tiffany’s this past season were down by 1%, with overall worldwide sales down by 3%. This news coincided with an 11% drop in the stock price.

The blogger at Ad Age was nonplussed:

Yet with Tiffany & Co. already following in the footsteps of brands including Gap, Banana Republic, Cheerios and The Knot, it’s likely that such ads will soon be commonplace, not bad ass at all — which is a good thing.

Is that good for the client, though? Is this good for Tiffany’s, which needs to turn itself around? An 11% dip in the stock price is considerable for a brand that dates back to 1837. Brands that date back to 1837 do not change ad agencies frequently.

If you look at the previous year, before the transition, holiday sales were actually up 4% for 2013 — making the results from the new agency even worse, in comparison to the momentum which was already in place, when the agency that got fired was running the show.

One of David Ogilvy’s most-quoted lines is that a copywriter needs to be both a ‘poet and a killer.’

Meaning that poetry is necessary to make the ad beguiling, but that the ad is a means to an end, and that end is to ensure that Tiffany’s doesn’t have to start firing people and shutting down stores because the ad agency is fucking up their account to agitate for social justice.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Who buys from Tiffany’s? Who are the big customers?

Not gay men. Gay men barely get married, despite all the hooplah over it. There are two major groups of buyers of that little blue box: women and the men who love those women.

Statistically speaking, gay men are non-existent. It’s a total of roughly 9 million, including women. Some polls say 1.8% of men. If they wanted to reach just those men, they could have put the ad in Out or something like that. Instead, they promoted it nationally, to a general audience.

What Tiffany’s has done is to do more to alienate the people who are actually likely to be married, and are actually likely to get married, and are going to buy those little blue boxes as gifts for their beloved every Valentine’s, birthday, and Christmas.

Those people are overwhelmingly white, not transgender, and Christian.

Miley Cyrus praised the ad.

Miley Cyrus is the opposite of the sort of person who is supposed to be associated with Tiffany’s.

The brand identity of Tiffany is most easily phrased as “eternal love, elegant romance and priceless beauty.” Gay men tend to go for 0/3 of those. Unless you count obsessive workouts, meth addictions, and the pursuit of plastic surgery as ‘priceless beauty.’

The character most associated with Tiffany’s is Audrey Hepburn. Not Miley Cyrus.

What corporate America is going to discover as they continue going down the glory hole to social justice is that it does a lot of damage to their ability to sell things to the American core. And not just to the American core. But to the foreign affluent people who don’t believe in multiculturalism or the gay agenda or any of the rest of it.

They don’t care about this stuff in India. They don’t care about it in China. They don’t care about it in any of the Asian Tigers. It’s actually illegal in Russia. There are multiple big stores for Tiffany’s in Moscow alone!

This is a quirk of the Weimerian cities in the Anglo countries and Western Europe.

There are a lot of companies that you can buy high-end jewelry from. The main competitive advantage that this particular company has going for it is the symbolism of the blue box. That symbolism, worth more than $1 billion in sales a year, is now being associated with the thin fiction of eternal-gay-romance, a fiction that even gay men are often uncomfortable with, because it’s not borne out by reality.

The general comfort with the general unraveling in public mores is going to transition to surprise, then horror, as the results prove to diverge from the comforting fantasies of individualism taken to its logical conclusion. The empire, far from being cognizant of diversity, has become solipsistic, obsessed with its own lies of moral self-glorification.

Thinking again to my recent reading of “Breakfast with the Dirt Cult,” it reminded me of the feeling of heartbreak, because it’s one of the novel’s underlying themes: falling in love with the wrong girl, the two fooling themselves that it could work, and then finding themselves broken apart by circumstances and some measure of personal weakness.

The modern experiment has encouraged people to go through rapid cycles of romantic relationships, even at the higher social strata. People are both encouraged to become sentimentally attached to unsuitable partners, and to also drop them when the relationship ceases to be supportable, even when there is a marriage to dissolve.

In statistically noticeable ways, this cultural strain leaves plenty of people alone and unhappy. The opposing argument would be that, before, people were pressured together and had themselves left even more unhappy.

The individual can make romantic decisions, but the surrounding society, society writ small, society in the form of the family, circles of friends, neighbors, fellow parishioners, also bear many of the consequences of those individually-made decisions. When the individual makes a capricious decision in love, it frequently does damage others, especially when there are children involved.

Even from a J.S. Mill ‘harm principle’ perspective, this gives the group, which may or may not be formal, a stake in the romantic decisions of its members. Instinctively, this is known, because unless someone is friendless, everyone knows that their friends, fellows, and rivals frequently feel the need to interfere in one another’s romantic lives. There are reasons motivating that behavior, even if those reasons aren’t always entirely well-reasoned themselves.

The motivation behind this is because the group has a stake in the success or failure of its members, subjectively determined. The group interests may be an abstraction, but it is a useful abstraction.

The family, taken as an economic unit, can reduce various costs for its members. The family name acts as a common reputation (good or bad) for its members. The family, much like a corporation, contains within itself lore and other forms of knowledge of differing levels of utility to its members. Its members are genetically predisposed to treat one another differently as compared to those outside the family.

The family also reduces the overall costs to the state of law enforcement — at least when those families are well-run, and are capable of exercising authority over its own members. The adage ‘every man’s home is his castle’ — con-notating political subsidiarity — also means that it is the responsibility of every head of household to govern itself according to his best interpretation of the law.

If you were trying to order a civilization, you would look to do that in an efficient way, so that the sovereign only needs to respond to egregious violations of the law, which is all the sovereign is really capable of doing in any case. By breaking apart families, treating them as legally expendable, you are thereby increasing the number of incidences to which the sovereign must respond to at the sovereign’s expense.

Whereas before, even in popular culture, when one boy broke the window of the neighbor boy’s house playing baseball, the two fathers would work it out.

In today’s culture, “broken windows” are instead theoretically the responsibility of the state, and there is even a “broken window theory” stating that when police punish minor infractions against property & aesthetics, more severe crimes are deterred.

Whereas before, the fathers were working for the interests of the state without a stipend, the fathers are no longer fathers as they once were, and the agents of the state must be paid enormous sums of money to provision order.

Whereas the patriarchal household addressed disorders of aesthetics and morality both, providing an order rich in texture and symbolism, the superstate retracts to only enforcing the law when egregious, actionable crimes can be punished.

Coming to agreement about what makes a just order in an enormous country is impossible. Such agreement has never occurred.

What we have seen, previously, in our history, albeit unevenly distributed, was a distributed household system based on privacy and property, in which small uncrowned sovereigns exercised authority in idiosyncratic ways, according to the differing characters of their members, none of them being homogeneous, but still providing unusually high levels of order and social cooperation.

Instead, we encourage the breaking of hearts and the breaking of windows, trusting in the central state to perform an obligation that it is neither suited to nor capable of satisfying.

I throw my hat in with Mark Yuray (and M. Moldbug) in the argument about whether to restore the Great Tradition or to synthesize a religion based on reason.

Go ahead and read Yuray’s essay and the previous one that he references to get caught up.

I don’t really want to get into the details (in part because I go into some of the reasoning in more detail in my forthcoming e-pamphlet), but at least some of the personal influence for me is that I have been a part of various rationalist religion-replacement efforts not related to any Yudkowsky cult earlier in my life.

That experience also lead me to lend some more credence to the history of such rationalist cults going back to the Reformation, but also the various Marxist manifestations of such cults.

I’m just incredibly skeptical of any such efforts for similar reasons as to why I don’t believe in central planning in economics. There is too much hidden knowledge contained within a traditional religion. The trees of an engineered effort are liable to bear mutant fruits.

Because I have been part of such a failed effort up-close, and because it really had destructive consequences for most of the people involved, and because other similar efforts have often had monstrous consequences, I’ve cast my lot with the nostalgic Christians.

I am also contemporary Silicon Valley-ish in that I believe that execution is more important than ideation. The guys spending a lot of time coming up with new ideas will be outperformed by the people who take the field and jerry-rig solutions to problems as they present themselves. Also, building trust tends to be more important than most people operating on their own tend to figure out.

Ensuring that the guy next to you does not stab you in the ass is a hard problem that most people in most places fail to solve. It’s a particular problem for secularists, but less of an issue for more orthodox religions, because of the presence of (wait for it…) hierarchy and structure that limits schismatic behavior.