We Are Given The Choice Between Genocide And Genocide

 

We built a compromise world by negotiating an agreement with the corporations. We permitted them to keep the power in return for some concessions. We gave them our support to do what they wanted abroad if they treated us decently here in the heart of empire. They gave us a certain degree of choice in who and what we might vote for, along with the illusion that by voting we might make things better and better with time. We didn’t know the other side was biding its time, until any opposition governments around the world fell. Until they no longer had to make capitalism look pretty. Until the populace gradually lost any memory of morality and virtues that weren’t rooted in selfishness and obedience and apathy. We let them keep the power and in turn they gave us all kinds of toys to play with to keep us amused, to keep us distracted, to keep us as children.

And all this time we imagined the future was going to keep getting better. That we were progressing somewhere that we might want to go. Even when things started getting worse, we imagined such problems were just bumps along the road of progress. Even when we voted in the party we thought best represented our ideals and things still got worse, we thought we could fix our party, that our party cared for us. Even when our party and the other party started taking hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations, we still thought they cared for us, shared our values on the sacredness of democracy. Even when the corporations started writing the bills our representatives then signed into law, we just thought if we voted harder we could set things right. If we just hated and blamed the other side enough, we could have a country based upon human values and not corporate values.

And now the choice our corporate government gives us is that we can vote for genocide or genocide. That we can vote for war or war. That we can vote for censorship or censorship. That all housing will soon be owned by Blackrock. That the entirety of the internet will soon be in the hands of a few billionaires, and what is not outright owned by them will be controlled and censored by them. We thought the internet was going to save us, would permit us to share information and ideas across the world. We thought technology would bring us freedom. And community. But now we are screaming for big tech to censor us. Well, not us, exactly, just those we disagree with.

Our last rationalizations for supporting the system we have permitted are wearing out, but there’s a new Deadpool movie that will soon drop. And there’s a new Call Of Duty that will be out just in time for us to celebrate the birth of the Prince Of Peace. And in it you can save the world from Nazis by killing whatever people anonymous authority tells you to kill. Because killing is wrong unless some voice in your ear tells you to. Just do what the voices tell you to do and you will never have to worry about anything. You will never have to make a difficult moral decision. You will never have to hold your own government to account. You will never be alone no matter how lonely you feel. And the magic of the market will guarantee that whatever you spend your money on will be good for the environment. And will make you a better human being. Because the TV said so. Because the economic professors said so. Because I’m pretty sure The Bible and Declaration Of Independence say so.

Once our grandparents fought fascism. And oligarchy. And corporate capitalism. They spilt their blood on foreign shores and in front of padlocked factory gates. They walked across Pettus Bridge, rode buses across the South, provided mutual aide in Oakland’s slums. But they only managed to fight it to a standstill. But the forces that wanted to control and exploit us were never going to be satisfied with sharing power. That’s not what fascism is about. They plotted, and waited, and positioned their pieces on the chessboard. And they lulled us to sleep. But we’re having dreams that we are awake. And fighting for freedom on the beaches of Normandy, fighting for the environment on Pandora, fighting empire with light sabers. In our sleep we claim that we are woke. In our sleep, we are screaming “Wake up, sheeple” to people conjured by our sleeping minds. In our sleep, we are arguing with AI, repeating all the wisdom that has been pumped into us by the corporate media.

Even at our desks at work, performing mindless and unrewarding tasks, we secretly know we are Neo, fighting the matrix.

Pig Ethics

People today claim that we are now a nation without morals. A nation not only without morals but utterly lacking in ethics, principles, pride, shame, or standards. That is not true. We are not lacking in any of those, we have merely replaced the ones we once had with new ones. In place of communal values, in place of religious values, those sort of values passed down to us from generation to generation, we now have capitalist values. They are what Jack London referred to as pig-ethics, an ethical code that dictates that whatever pig can eat the most from the trough is the winner.

Let’s strip it of all makeup and finery, let’s remove the lipstick from the pig. Pure and simple, they are the ethics of the capitalists. It is the ethics of profit über alles. It justifies everything in the name of making money, opposes all values that stand in the way of profit. There is no human interaction they do not wish to make a financial transaction where someone can profit. Letting you hold your child after he or she is delivered? There’s a charge for that.

That’s why the common well has been replaced with bottled water. It is why women fifty years ago were urged to use formula rather than breast-feed. It is why marijuana is illegal while pharmaceutical companies rush to make synthetic equivalents.

The idolatry of capitalism—idolatry, it is the most accurate word I can think of to describe our relationship to capitalism—states that anything is justifiable if it was done in the pursuit of profit. Evict an old woman from her home? Hey, she was standing in the way of a business deal. Deprive health care to a child? Look, if we didn’t, the whole system would break down.

We believe that it is only under this ideology that industry can prosper. It is only by this ideology that spirituality can remain unpolluted by do-gooders and well-wishers. Not only do we need to believe in capitalism, we need to believe in it unconditionally. We need to strip from it any other consideration in the same way Hitler wished to strip from the German bloodline any traces of impurity. This will be the surest way of preserving our environment and our natural resources. It is the answer for everything.

Why do we think this way? Because capitalism is not merely an economic system, it is a values system. We cannot be capitalists without accepting the values of capitalism. They seep into our religious ideals, they affect our art, they even affect family life. We live in a society where both parents work away from their children and expect people to raise them for money. We expect commercial television to amuse them but instead it indoctrinates them into being good consumers. We are unable to give them the time and attention we know they need and so instead we buy for them the things television is telling them they need.

Take a look at look at Donald Trump as the perfect example of capitalist principles in their purest form. He is a success because he has money. There is no other reason for calling him a success. Absent money or the ability to create money from business transactions, what does he add to humanity? Does he expand human understanding? Does he do good for the environment or contribute to the arts? There is no other reason why people would invite him to party let alone consider him worthy of the presidency. In every way he personifies the crude values corporate television displays for us. People, especially females, are commoditized, their value measured in the same manner of a cut of meat in the butcher’s window.

Not only does capitalism not factor in human values, it doesn’t even factor in human beings. So long as a person does not have money, he does not exist. Democracy is based on the idea of one vote per person but capitalism states that we vote with our money. And if we have none, well I guess we’re not allowed into the voting booth.

Capital doesn’t mind if a person is replaced by a machine. If the job can be done more cheaply, so much the better. Capital doesn’t care if all people are replaced by machines while billions starve outside the artificial environment of supply and demand. Machines, after all, are much more reliable than people, much more suited to the system capitalism demands. Capital doesn’t care if it is funneled into the hands of a few wealthy individuals, doesn’t care if machines are used or if people are turned into machines. Humans have no more implicit value than animals do in a capitalist system, and a quick glance of a slaughterhouse video on YouTube will give you some indication of how much animals are valued. In fact, people are worth less than animals in a capitalist system because nobody is willing to pay money for chopped up people the way they do ground beef. Only the unborn have value, and that for their stem cells.

The mineral worth of the human body is approximately $1. That, to capitalism, is the value inherent in a human life. Beyond that a person must either have capital or be capable of producing capital for someone else. If one has capital, he is therefore a part of the system even if he does nothing good for anyone else. If one has capital, he is admired, even if his insatiable need for more disproportionately uses and poisons the limited resources of our planet.

Will capitalism and the free market have a part to play in the world to come? That is not the question we should be asking. The question is, if only the values and interests of the free market are given voice and power—and that is increasingly becoming the case—will we even have a future at all? If the health of our economy is measured by how much fuel we burn up and by how much we are able to consume, what kind of future are we headed toward?

Cappy Talist And The Fruit Pickers

The beginning of yet another potential book:

Once upon a time there was a land without laws. And because there were no laws, there was no property, for how can one claim possession is nine-tenths of the law when there is no law? I won’t try to paint the picture as being rosy and perfect, but the situation was how God made it, rather than humans. And there was no doubt that people were both free and as equal as possible given the fact that nature gives to some more than to others.

But because there were no laws, there wasn’t even any law against making laws. Until one day somebody decided he didn’t like things as they were. You see, there was one person who decided that whatever benefits nature had endowed upon him, and let us charitably say that he was already above average, he realized that what he was able to achieve through his own efforts wasn’t enough to satisfy the needs of his ego. Whatever attributes nature had given him, it didn’t give him the ability to realize that he wasn’t the only person that mattered.

You see, this person decided he was better than the rest. And since he decided he was better than the rest, he figured he was in a position to make the laws. Of course, he didn’t call them laws, he called them rules. He decided to play a game and told everyone else how it was to be played. It was called the ownership game. Everybody would carve up the land, which previously belonged to everybody, and take a little piece for himself.

Now the happy people playing in a land with no real obligations, thought it might be a good idea to play a new game. Also, since there was one among them who had a certain fever, they may have contracted a little bit of it as well. So they all decided to play a game in which they would see who could build the biggest pile of stuff on the biggest piece of land.

Of course, since the first guy, we’ll call him Cappy Talist, made up the game, he was able to make the rules. He decided that since he was standing on a certain piece of ground, that that piece belonged to him. There were others that argued the point, but since it was he who suggested the game, he convinced the group to agree with his assertion. They were all interested in whatever amusement the game might provide and weren’t interested in quibbling over the details. After all, Cappy assured them that the game would be a most enjoyable and rewarding game for all.

The area that Cappy called his own happened to contain a rather lot of fruit trees, something nobody but Cappy had thought much about before agreeing to play the game. So it turned out that very quickly there were very many people who wanted a snack and had nothing available. Cappy was quite accommodating, however. He suggested that others could strike a deal with him. If they were willing to climb the trees and pick the fruit, Mr. Talist (as he insisted they call him) would give them a portion of the fruit.

Seeing no other option, they readily agreed to pick fruit, thinking it was a small thing to do in return for food. And so they climbed the tree, picked the fruit. Except that one of them, while scampering towards the tree to pick his fruit and so fill his belly, happened to trample upon a flower in Mr. Talist’s garden. The man, Manwell, apologized to Mr. Talist, although not with much conviction as the flower he trampled upon was a rose with many thorns and Manwell had no shoes. Nevertheless, Mr. Talist was quite upset that Manwell had deprived him of one of his great joys in life and demanded compensation.

Now none of the other players at this point blamed Manwell for this innocent blunder, but none of them were willing to risk the ire of Cappy. Already, several of the weaker members of the community, seeing where there fruit was, were quite willing to dance to the tune of Mr. Talist, thinking that while they had never amounted to much in the realm of nature, they might advance their lot by throwing their support behind the Fruit Master, as one of them, Ask Isser, called him. So Mr. Talist, by showing some slight advantage, now found himself much stronger than he started because he drew the support of Ask Isser and others like him.

Still, there was more than enough for everyone, so there was little to argue about. As a matter of fact, under the new way that society was arranged, there was more fruit available than ever before. Seeing that they now needed to work harder than ever before in order to gather fruit not only for themselves but for Mr. Talist and his cronies, those who picked the fruit devised improved methods for harvesting so that they were soon picking fruit more quickly with less effort. Mr. Talist, realizing he stood to gain by the increased productivity of the pickers, devised ways of his own to improve the productivity of the pickers. Of course, Mr. Talist had never been very good at picking fruit himself, which was one of the reasons he devised the game in the first place, so his suggestions weren’t always useful. In fact, most of them involved the pickers working harder, which Cappy urged on by what he called “motivational speeches”.

Also, Cappy Talist realized there were some among the pickers who envied Ask Isser and the others who did nothing but eat the fruits that they picked. Some of the pickers thought that they would very much like to be like Mr. Isser, and were willing to do whatever it took to curry the favor of Mr. Talist. These aspiring individuals Mr. Talist was fond of holding up as an example to the other pickers, and Toe Dee became the role model that Mr. Talist held up for the others. As the pickers spent their days in the coconut trees and date trees, the idle likes of Mr. Isser and his chums would stroll along, praising the efforts of Mr. Dee, so much so that the other pickers came to believe themselves that Mr. Dee was the epitome of what a good picker should be, despite the fact that he spent more time polishing apples than actually picking them.

So efficient was this society at harvesting fruit that Mr. Alist found he scarcely had room to walk on his own property due to all the piles of fruit that were all over. In fact, even though Mr. Alist and those who were part of his circle ate like shameless pigs, they could not put a dent in the piles of fruit that lay all over. They soon took to squeezing the juices from the fruits in order that they might not have to eat the lesser parts of the fruit and instead drink the best of what the fruit had to offer. Soon, the ground was filled with the squeezed lemons and limes and what have you, the better part of it going to waste and making the landscape uglier and more filled with vermin. And somehow they did not seem to realize that while they wasted fruit that was a gift from the gods, there were those among the pickers who did not seem to be getting enough. For not every season was bountiful, but Mr. Alist and those who were most useful to him continued to have more than they needed, more than they could ever eat., for even in the lean seasons they demanded their share, even though they could not possibly consume all that they took.

So efficient were his workers that Cappy had more of them than he needed. Now he could have simply told the bunch of them to stop working so hard, but that was not the kind of thinking that had gotten him to his successful station in life. And so instead he decided that he had too many workers and the solution to that would be to tell a few of them their effort was no longer required. The pickers felt that this went against the agreement they had initially struck, but many of the other workers were simply glad they still had the opportunity to pick fruit for Mr. Alist. All in all, it was still an okay deal. And it could be worse, it could be them who were told their labor was no longer needed. Such might be the situation if they protested too loudly.

Now those who still were actively picking took care of their brethren who were no longer permitted near the trees that were owned by Mr. Alist. Although they were working harder than ever before, they still understood that the ones who were no longer picking still needed to eat. And although they assumed Mr. Alist would throw a few bananas in the pot in order to make sure everyone had enough to eat, they soon learned that Mr. Alist had different ideas. It was not that he was indifferent to the plight of those who now had no access to the fruit of the island, it was a matter of philosophy that made him refuse to participate in the charity and sense of brotherhood that the others believed in. You see, Mr. Alist, believing himself to be the example of the ideal man, understood that those without labor should invent their own games should they wish to have a full belly. In short, they should be more like him. Mr. Alist was an idea man, on a mission to make the world a better place. Well, mostly he wanted more for himself, but somewhere in his own self-interest was a most noble and selfless philosophy.

Philosophy was a big word, bigger than any the simple fruit-picking islanders had heard before. And the way that Mr. Alist used it so freely and so confidently gave the pickers the impression that Mr. Alist had a wisdom that surpassed that of others. In fact, so wise did Mr. Alist appear that they could not even see what he was talking about. It must be beyond the minds of simple fruit-pickers, they thought. “That is what makes Mr. Alist such a great man”, said Toe Dee, Ask Isser, and others who approved of him. “He can see things that others do not.”

“For you see,” said Mr. Alist, “the system I have created is a wonderful system. It has created a wealth undreamed of before I came along.” And the pickers couldn’t help but agree that the amount of fruit being picked was now greater than before the time that Mr. Alist instituted his system. And yet they couldn’t help thinking that they had enough to eat before, and didn’t work so hard. And some part of them seemed to be nostalgic for the world as it was before progress became their standard rather than happiness. But of course, progress was so much easier to keep tabs on than happiness. One only had to look down from the trees in which they spent more and more of their time to see all the coconut shells to be able to verify their progress.

The amount of rotting fruit that now lay on the ground DID take away from the beauty that once existed on the island. Also, there were those individuals who were now no longer permitted to pick fruit who were worse off than before. But Mr. Alist was quite confident, and they were, after all, simple pickers. Who were they to argue with Cappy when he was so certain and so successful?

Now Mr. Alist, while not being overly intelligent, was nonetheless in possession of a good deal of shrewdness. He realized that by letting some of his fruit pickers go that he created a degree of uncertainty in the others. The result was that those who still worked worked harder still, afraid that they could be the next to lose their fruit-picking positions. Soon there was even more fruit piled upon the property of Mr. Alist than ever before.

This should have been a good thing, but in fact it made Mr. Alist’s problem even worse. He could only eat so much fruit. And he had far more fruit than he could eat in a lifetime. It was such a big problem that it began to affect his appetite, which made matters even worse. There was no way to consume all the fruit the pickers had given to him as his payment. He tried letting go of even more workers but was afraid that too many people with empty stomachs and idle hands might interrupt the game he had established. And while he now faced a problem, he had no desire to go back to the days when he actually had to work for his living. It wasn’t so much the work itself that he worried about: he had always been a bit of a shirker, and if the truth were known had never really earned his living. No, it was being the man who controlled things that appealed to him. He would never go back to being just one of the people again, not after tasting the power and the prestige he had acquired.

Darwin, Capitalism, and the Rise of the Economic Stinkbug

Here you see a man with enough money to hunt endangered animals on other continents. This man assuredly views himself as a lion in the economic sphere, which only goes to show what a perversion of nature our economy has become. If this is what we regard as an example of human nature at its peak, then humanity shall swiftly pass from the face of the earth, and justly so. Evolution will not long permit such an aberration.

The laws of the market determine different winners than the laws of nature. And what happens when a man lives according to laws contrary to nature’s laws? He becomes unnatural. Inferior men are thrust into positions of power they themselves know they do not deserve. Unlike a natural man, an unnatural man senses he is a fraud and feels always on the brink of being discovered. Like a wounded animal hiding its defect, he becomes defensive, more prone to lash out lest anyone discover the hidden flaw. He acquires more and more as a way to convince himself and others that he is as great as he feels he needs to be. He becomes cruel, indifferent to the pain of others. The natural man will kill in order to sustain himself and his family. The unnatural man kills because he comes to enjoy it, or because he no longer accepts that he himself has any role to play in the death of others. He has re-written the natural rules, the universe is his to define. It is the law of the market that speaks, and morality has no part in it. The market dictates that you take whatever you can, whether you need it or not.

A lot of people say that capitalism is simply taking the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, and applying it to the world of finance. That is not true. Capitalism uses one principal of the jungle, yes, the ruthlessness, but it removes tooth and claw and brute strength from the equation. It substitutes instead the attributes of the worm and the mole, the gnat and the mosquito.

Jonathon Swift once said: “If you ever find an intelligent good looking aristocrat it’s probably the coachman’s son.” The best offspring of the capitalist class are spawned in torrid affairs but it is not the bastard offspring that get the benefit of the wealth but the lesser ones that are hatched in a financially constructed household. To them are the nests feathered with hundred dollar bills while the hardiest of the breed are lucky to get a college education. Thus the wealth of a capitalist society, like that of the royalty of days past, is inevitably concentrated in the hands of the mediocre inbreds.

But money does a good job disguising bad genes. Acne medicines, plastic surgery, liposuction, well-tailored suits all go towards making an inferior product look appetizing, like a well-waxed apple. And a Harvard degree, made possible only because your father went there and could afford to send you, is more important than intelligence. Just look how smart the Scarecrow seemed once he got his diploma.

What physical strength is necessary for the capitalist? None. Intelligence? Only a rudimentary amount. Too much is counter-productive. A mind interested in maximizing profit should work only on the economic level. To them existence is only comprehended in the economic sphere. All of mankind’s great ideas are lost to the man of money.

His eyesight need only be good enough to see the bottom line, his hearing need only be able to hear the cash register ring.

His attributes are no doubt refined, but like the whippet or the aardvark, are useful only in limited applications. The intelligence of the capitalist can best be witnessed in the likes of Donald Trump, an idiot-savant who nonetheless is able to succeed extraordinarily well with what few talents he possesses. You only need enough intelligence to learn a sucker’s game, like three card monty, and then play it over and over again. Too much intelligence and you would soon be bored with the game.

Most of all, learn to serve your master, whether he be your boss, you prospective client, the masses, whoever has cash they’re willing to part with. Identify the teat with the most milk and do what ever it takes to get it flowing.

The traits of the capitalist are these:

Monomania

Sociopathy

Ability to hide your sociopathic traits

To a lesser degree, work ethic

And there you have it, the traits of the 1/10 of 1% These are not traits of a lion, but those of an ant or chihuahua. Persistence wins over strength, intelligence, or worth to one’s fellow creatures. To pass on these genes is to pass on traits unhelpful to the species as a whole, not to mention the planet. Too much a love of money in ones genetics is as harmful to oneself as a predisposition for alcohol, and much more harmful to others. The worst harm a drunk has ever caused that I can think of is the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which while awful, pales next to what the oil industrialists are doing overall.

Think about it. Those who would never waste the time nor money on an art degree are the very same ones who own the world’s greatest art. It hangs on walls of rooms seldom visited. And when looked at, it is not appreciated as art, but is there rather as a trophy, next to the head of a lion they shot while on vacation. This is not natural, it is a perversion of nature that needs to be rectified. 

An Argument On The Free Market and The Function Of Government

I had a little discussion on YouTube and have culled these words from it. It is not especially well said or unique but I think it was worth saying and perhaps worth reading.

     Seen through our own paradigm, we are the perfect society, because we use our own gauges in determining exactly what the best society is. Likewise in the Soviet Union the Communist Party saw their society as superior, because they could more or less feed their people and everyone was more or less equal. Our perception of freedom here is the ability to own a Harley Davidson, at least in my neck of the woods. It represents to many the lure of the open road as well as their ability to own something they truly love. But the image is a finely crafted one and the poor saps who own one often work 6-7 days a week at a job they hate in order to have their little chunk of paradise. I think owning stuff is a very good thing, up to a point. But beyond that point it becomes a sort of fetishism, a mass hysteria and a very limited view of what makes life worth living. I see our society as one that is unhealthy and that is hurtling along like a runaway train towards an inevitable crash. We have divorced ourselves from every ethical belief of the past so that now we consider greed to be a good, discipline bad, and caring for others as a weakness. We view age as a sickness rather than a part of the life-cycle, and few of us ever really continue to grow emotionally past the teenage years. Middle-aged men pop Viagra when perhaps they should accept the calming of their urges in order to fulfill the much needed role of guiding figures rather that randy old men. A quarter of our society takes psychotropic drugs in order to cope with their existence rather than take the journey towards making their lives meaningful, Almost everyone is suffering under crippling debt, as is their local, state, and federal government. And if you look at it fairly, you could make a good case that each of these problems has at the root of it our consumer culture to blame. 

I don't believe in a perfect system, just a workable one. A consumer society is one that tells us we shouldn't wait to save money for something we should buy it now. It is a society in which we don't actually ask if we need something, but rather base our purchases on an emotional rather than a rational decision making process. I don't blame the consumers so much as those who propagate such a system, who believe that their sole purpose in life is to make a profit and if we all just do our job of selling and consuming we will achieve the best possible of worlds. We are inundated with countless messages from every source of media, all of them trying to sell us something. Even churches have let in televisions, giving to them an elevated place. Count how many times today you are prompted to buy something, be it from Facebook, television, your phone, radio, or billboards. Then think of how often you are prompted to quiet introspection, work in the garden, or visit an aging relative. I don't think any society in the world has ever been asked to view life on a purely economic level as we are, except perhaps the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union could not dream of the propaganda machine we have created.

I would like to see a workable system that maximizes human happiness. I know happiness is something hard to define, but so is freedom and nobody is afraid to mention that as a necessary goal. I think we can both agree that it is not a fear of starvation that drives a Warren Buffet or a Donald Trump, so why do we think the best way to motivate people is to work or die? Yes, it motivates, but it is the motivation of the stick rather than the carrot. It is the kind of motivation that causes some to become drug dealers or thieves, corporate or otherwise. The market, like fire,is a wonderful invention but we should treat it as a tool to be used rather than a mysterious force too powerful to control. To suggest that the market should be responsible for society is to suggest that we are not active agents in the process, it is a way of surrendering our humanity to outside forces. In primitive cultures, when a man mistreated his worker or his slave he was apt to be kept up all night with the cries of anguish. In other words, employer and employee had a closer association and the actions of either were more closely felt by the other. Nowadays we have distanced owner from employee so that a worker in Thailand can be beaten and worked 12 hours a day without the person who gets the stock dividend even being aware of how they earned their money. We need to maintain our humanity in our business practices rather than seeing humans as merely numbers on a spreadsheet. Man is an inherently tribal and social creature: if we isolate ourselves from one another and from the community we live in, we will become dysfunctional. I'm not saying the solution to our alienation from our own humanness has an easy solution, but if we do not accept the reality of the situation, it will be impossible. We cannot expect what is a simplistic economic theory to solve the complexity that is the human situation. Government is a tool, and in the hands of an educated electorate, a pretty efficient and powerful tool. To simply abandon it would not only mean that we would not benefit from it, it would mean that others would pick it up and use it as they saw fit. 

The Game Of Monopoly

     The reason the game of Monopoly does not permit borrowing is that the game would never end. Not only would it never end, it would soon become intolerable. Those with all the property would only become richer, while those without would only go further into debt. There would be no joy to be derived from the game by the losers and no joy either for the winners unless they had some pathological need to acquire money and property beyond measure. Even so, they would require a little bit of sadism in order to derive any measure of enjoyment from such a game.

     Now imagine that each time you were to play Monopoly that you carried your previous score with you. And not you only but your score would be passed down to your children and grandchildren so that if you were a loser your children would be forced to move their thimble across a board where all the property is already owned (the winner’s kid would have the racecar, which was bargained away from you when you landed on Boardwalk with a hotel on it).

     Who would call such a game fair? Who would wish to play such a game? And for those in perpetual debt, who would blame them if they overturned the board, scattering houses and hotels everywhere?

     Of course the Chance cards would be rigged too, so that the one in debt would have to shoulder the burden of the taxes. The card would read “Pay $500 in taxes” but it would have an asterisk next to it stating that property owners could deduct $50 for upkeep for each building owned.

     The loser would spend a lot of time in jail. Indeed, that might be a place of safety for him, a place where for a brief span of time they wouldn’t have to worry about racking up further debt. The loser wouldn’t really care about keeping out, wouldn’t worry about landing on the Go Directly To Jail square. Free Parking would be his only hope. The property owner, of course, would never have to worry about spending any real time in jail. Sure, he could get sent there, but he’d always have enough to buy his way out the next roll.

     Every lap around the board, the loser would be reminded of the time when he was just starting out with a little house on Baltic Avenue. Sure, it didn’t seem like much at the time but it was all he really ever needed. Of course, there’s a motel on there now, but it’s not his own, and the price is rather steep. Still, one has to rest somewhere eventually, even if it drives him further in debt.

     Happily, those are not the rules of the game of Monopoly. If they were, nobody would want to play. It would be the dumbest game ever.

Adulthood’s End Part 3 (The Illusion Of Choice)

     If there is one thing capitalism provides it’s choice. Go to your typical supermarket and you’ll find more options for frozen French Fries than is good for you. Seriously, you could waste the better part of an hour making sure you get the best value and the best option available. Same with the soda aisle: the variety screams out to us from the bright colors that decorate every box of cans. True too of bottled water. This is where it gets kinda weird: Why does anybody need 100 different varieties of bottled water? Can anyone tell me the difference? Nevertheless, this is America and you deserve 100 varieties of waters to choose from. Anything less would be socialism.

     But while 100 varieties of bottled water may seem like far more choices than we could possibly want, perhaps it is less than we actually need. Perhaps the mountain of plastic bottles blinds us to the option we’d actually prefer.

     Who having an option between clean, cheap tap water would prefer lugging home cases of the stuff from the supermarket? Who would prefer polluting the environment with plastic when we could totally eliminate the waste, again by providing drinking water through the tap? Who would prefer wasting our precious resources—in this case oil used in the production of plastic—when we could avoid all that? Especially when the Middle East is such a mess, it seems a shame to send our troops over there to fight and die for plastic bottles we really don’t need. Or for the fuel required for the trucks to unnecessarily ship bottles of water across the country.

     So who would come up with such a crazy system? Someone out to make a buck. Nobody’s going to get rich providing cheap tap water, especially when the government tends to stick its nose into such matters and make sure water will be available and affordable to even the poorest of us. So in the long run, those various different bottled water companies are not competing against each other, how can they? How can one of them make the claim that their water is better than the next guy’s? You can only do so much with a picture of a snow-capped mountain. There are only so many buzz words such as “pure”, “natural”, “life”, and “healthful” you can slap on the label and still keep them large enough to attract the eye.

     Of course, some try to argue they use less plastic than the typical bottled water, as if conservation of plastic were an argument they should bring up. Nestle’s Pure Life package proudly states it has an “eco-bottle”. Re-read that sentence just to drive home the idea of how screwed up we as a society are. If you wonder why people can’t think anymore it’s because vapid advertisement has broken our brains. Words don’t mean anything anymore, they’re just supposed to sound nice. And reassuring.

     So whose water you buy doesn’t matter, just so it comes in a bottle. Same with soda. Pepsi doesn’t mind if you buy Coke and Coke doesn’t care if you cheat on it with the occasional Pepsi. The important thing is you consume teeth-rotting diabetes juice because, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. And it works the same way with politics, only in reverse. In politics, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent not to entice you to buy but to turn you off from the entire process. They don’t care if you vote Democrat or Republican, their goal is to make you so disgusted with politics that you don’t vote at all.

     That’s the system we’ve worked out as a society. These are the choices you have. Well, not really, they are the choices that are laid out for you. These are the choices they want you to make, the world they try to fashion for you. But your choices are as vast as you can imagine them to be. You don’t have to buy their vision, you don’t have to fit your mind inside of the box they have prepared for you. It’s a small world offered and in the end we humans deserve better than the world they envision. Next time you are presented with a choice of a bottled of water or a can of soda, remember there’s always beer ;)

The Iron Heel by Jack London

In an earlier blog post I questioned why anyone should want to buy my book on Kindle when there were so many of the great books available for free. I first listed a number of books that I would very much like to see everyone read, then attempted to justify my existence by stating that while my work does not hold a candle to that of the great authors, at least it deals with contemporary issues better than books published over a century ago.

I was wrong.

I’ve recently been perusing The Iron Heel by Jack London and from even a few pages I can grab a blog’s worth of great quotes. And not only of things that were true of London’s time but true of the times we are living in. In fact, Jack London saw the present more clearly than I do, so acute was his mind’s eye. I am in the dirt before him. Everything I’ve attempted to say he’s already said, and better. Having said that, here are some quotes from The Iron Heel.

The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees are always wrong. Therefore, the mind of the man is wrong.

The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.

The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. On can only dimly feel these things. But they are in the air, now, today. One can feel the loom of them—things vast, vague, and terrible. My mind recoils from contemplation of what they may crystallize into.

“Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity,” Ernest continued. “You are sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and your value—to the capitalist class. But should you change your belief to something that menaces the established order, your preaching would be unacceptable to your employers, and you would be discharged.

“Our boasted civilization is based upon blood, soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us can escape the scarlet stain.”

“And not one of them was a free agent,” he said. “They were all tied to the merciless industrial machine. And the pathos of it and the tragedy is that they are tied by their heartstrings. Their children—always the young life that it is their instinct to protect. This instinct is stronger than any ethic they possess.”

“Tell me,” I said, “when one surrenders his personal feelings to his professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of spiritual mayhem?”

I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted, overturning a palm in his flight.

They were the most hopeless of all I had encountered in my quest. They believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no question about it, no discussion. They were convinced that they were the saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for the many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings of the working class were it not for the employment that they, and they alone, by their wisdom, provided for it.

“When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought. No matter what they want to do, the sanction always comes. They even see their way to doing wrong that right may come of it.

“The weakness in their position lies in that they are merely business men. They are not philosophers. They are not biologists nor sociologists. If they were, of course, all would be well. A business man who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in.”

“They too, were bound to the machine, but they were so bound that they sat on top of it.”

“Here life was clean, noble, and alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ’s own Grail, the warm human, long-suffering and maltreated but to be rescued and saved at the last.”

“And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business. I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were alive—with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, practiced and practical materialism.”

“You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you today rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes.”

“No man can be intellectually insulted. Insult, in its very nature, is emotional.”

“Life sums itself up to you in profits. You have a firm and abiding belief that you were created for the sole purpose of making profits.”

“And the absurd thing about it is that you have repeated these phrases so often that you believe them. You want opportunity to plunder your fellow men in your own small way, but you hypnotize yourself into thinking you want freedom. You are piggish and acquisitive, but the magic of your phrases leads you to believe that you are patriotic. Your desire for profits, which is sheer selfishness, you metamorphose into altruistic solicitude for suffering humanity.”

“And why not?” he demanded. “Why can we not return to the ways of our fathers when this republic was founded?”

“I’ll try to tell you why not, though the telling will be rather hard. You see, you fellows have studied business, in a small way, but you have not studied social evolution at all. You are in the midst of a transition stage now in economic evolution, but you do not understand it, and that’s what causes all the confusion. Why cannot you return? Because you can’t. You can no more make water run up hill than can you cause the tide of economic evolution to flow back in its channel along the way it came. Joshua made the sun stand still upon Gibeon, but you would outdo Joshua. You would make the sun go backward in the sky. You would have time retrace its steps from noon to morning.”

The above quotes I have found in a few moments’ perusing of pages. There is so much more to be read within the pages of this classic. If you have a Kindle, you can download it free here: http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Heel-Jack-London-ebook/dp/B00847CZZO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1423453696&sr=1-1&keywords=the+iron+heel+jack

If you don’t have a Kindle, I’m sure you can find it elsewhere.