What Kind Of Diamonds Are For Chumps?
Further commentary on Atlantic Magazine’s Diamond article by Marc Choyt, Publisher, fairjewelry.org
In light of our current economic turmoil, it is interesting to read this article by Edward J. Epstein was published in the Atlantic Magazine as a cover story in 1982. The article is subtitled off their home page, “A Diamond Is For… Chumps.”
Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond – 1982, Atlantic Monthly Magazine
It traces, from a historical point of view, how diamond marketing manipulated cultural beliefs relating to engagements and marriage. The piece also discusses how De Beers’ strategy to control the diamond cracked during an “investment” craze,” which lead to a banking crisis in Israel and a crash in diamond prices in the early eighties.
The sap of the tree growing this fruit are the merchants such as Graff and Leviev and all of those that continue to purchase from them, asleep in their onerous consensus trance.
This article provides excellent fodder for the ethically oriented consumer to shop their values. At least in the American and EU market, the time when the marketing of diamonds completely divorced from their economic and social consequences is surely coming to an end. The future demographic, the young people who represent the next decades of economy for the jewelry sector, are wired into the truth that the world is a small place and that social and environmental issues around the globe matter.
For ethical sourcing, time is on our side.
If there is to be any kind of redemption in the diamond story, it will be through the positive impact of beneficiation and fair trade. A diamond that is sourced, polished and sold from a small scale community project comprised of artisan miners creates a massive wealth transfer to the people many of whom once lived on the land where the diamonds as found in highly developed, tribal cultures.
Now that the steamroller of commoditization (aka money economy) has destroyed their social fabric, ethical sourcing becomes like a tiny drop of good karma. This drop rings a clear bell that signals is the too slow reversal of what has often been a despicable path.
The sound enables us to step through a window that, though only a cubic millimeter in size, opens up into a new world—and I am not afraid to say it because it must be named—a world which is grounded in the fundamental truth which is the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. This is the world which we must envision and manifest if our species is to survive and prosper of the next seven generations. It is for these future generations that I do my work in a sector which before 1995 I had little connection to.
For the customers who continue to purchase a diamond without this ethical consideration, the diamond is still for chumps. They believe they are obtaining an object of rare beauty worthy of their greatest sentiments, while in fact they are supporting some collective heart of darkness– a supply chain that comes out of a neo-colonial paradigm—based on businesses entering countries and exploiting resources to export wealth while leaving the local economy, environment and social structure in havoc.
The flowering of their dark hearts was the blood diamond tragedy, which resulted in the deaths of 3.7 million Africans and for which not one person in the diamond sector has ever been held accountable. Unfortunately, this ancient tree still, the very opposite of the tree of life, still grows STRANGE FRUIT.
The sap of this tree growing this fruit are the merchants such as Graff NEW POST THAT IS BEFORE THIS and Leviev and all of those that continue to purchase from them, asleep in their onerous consensus trance. They find protesters on their doorsteps. Money has become their God. We can only have pity for their vast and infinite reservoir of the inner suffering that results when one’s action deny all the core universal humanitarian values.
Though they are viewed as icons among many in the diamond sector, who prop up these false idols with their continued dollars, the rest of us in the ethical sourcing community see the emperors with no clothes for what they are: hungry ghosts who wonder through the world with a giant stomach and a tiny mouth that can never get enough.
For the rest of us, those on the forefront of ethical sourcing, perfection should not be the enemy of the good. The supply chain is not entirely there for everything we may want to do, but we still can make solid choices and be honest and open about them. For it is only when a diamond is ethically sourced, when we know its journey from the mine through the cutting, to the retailer creates benefit for all, is it worthy of its talismanic value.
Marc Choyt
