A Rich Man's Freedom

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. -Vladimir Lenin

     Freedom for a rich man means something different than it does for the rest of us. Because to the truly wealthy freedom means not having to rely on anyone else for their happiness. This is an enviable kind of freedom to have, one that I’m sure we’d all enjoy if it was available to us. The only problem with that kind of freedom is that it costs a whole lot of money. In fact, if you want to be sure you have enough wealth that you’ll never have to rely on anyone else for your happiness, were talking tens of millions of dollars.

     Nevertheless, it is a freedom that is available to anyone. Potentially, at least. I mean, there is no law stating that certain people are not allowed to acquire that kind of money. Black, brown, white, man or woman, nobody is banned from being in that club once they have acquired the money. And the U.S. does provide the opportunity for advancement for anyone willing to put in the effort, there is no doubt about it. But even the most hard-working and shrewdest of us have little more than a lottery winner’s chance of acquiring the kind of money that would give us that kind of freedom. Realistically, only an elite few of us will ever get to experience that kind of freedom, I’m guessing somewhere near the one percent mark, a cutoff point that has been getting a fair degree of attention lately. And overwhelmingly, the most likely way one will gain that much money is by inheriting it. In that respect we have not moved far from the royalty we rebelled against in 1776.

     What I’m talking about with that kind of freedom—or more importantly, what the one percent are talking about when they talk about freedom—is the opportunity to make enough that you will be able to do whatever you want with your life. You won’t have to worry if there will be Medicare, welfare, or unemployment insurance. You won’t have to rely on scholarships for your children to attend college (though you’ll probably still take advantage of any opportunity to save a few bucks, after all the rich don’t get rich by letting opportunities to reduce costs slip by). You won’t have to worry about any of the social programs that are available to the rest of us. Therefore, you’re not likely to care about maintaining such programs: after all, programs like those cost money and they cost the rich more than they cost the poor.

     Even for those of us who don’t have that kind of money, it is a beautiful thing to dream about as we work hard to get ahead. But the problem is that it IS only a dream for the vast majority of us. And a dream is not freedom, it is not even the potential for freedom, it is a substitute for it. We are all free in our dreams, but we all have to wake up and go to work in the morning.

     Freedom can and does mean a lot of things. You can be free to do something or free from having to do something. You can have your freedom and still you can starve from a lack of food. Nelson Mandela was freer than most of us even when imprisoned because he refused to bow down to the powers that be. Freedom is quite a nebulous concept. But I’m not concerned with defining what freedom actually is or means, I’m only speaking to the rich man’s freedom.

     And when a capitalist—which is what most rich men are—talks about freedom, he means the freedom to make money. That’s what capitalists like to do, make money. That’s what makes them capitalists. So freedom for them is the pursuit of happiness (i.e. money). To them the sound the Liberty Bell makes is cha-ching.

     They want no limitations on what money can do. Kill them all and let the market sort them out is the philosophy. To impose any regulations on the market would be an attack on everything our Founding Fathers fought for. You see, because their one interest in life is money, they suppose that freedom to make money is the only thing worth living for. And because the rich are still prone to seeing things from their own point of view—just like the rest of us, only more so because their wealth validates their opinions—they assume that is what everyone else wants as well. That’s why they are willing to give what they love so much (money) to politicians, in order to preserve the freedom of the rich.

     The politicians who cater to the rich are quite fond of talking about freedom. They are always there to trumpet the value of liberty. Perhaps they were not the ones fighting for it on the battlefield, but they are quite eager to battle for your freedom in Washington D.C., that evil place where the enemy (government) resides.

     When a politician talks about your freedom, what he is really saying is “I’m not responsible for you.” Reagan talked about freedom and then released the mentally ill from the institutions they were housed in, leaving them homeless. He did it in the name of freedom. He gave them the opportunity to become capitalists.

     Most of us living in a capitalist society are no more capitalists than the average citizen of a communist nation was a communist. Most of us have lives beyond the pursuit of money. We don’t have a clearly defined ideology, we’re mostly just looking to get out of work on Friday afternoon. Most of us work to provide for our family and to be able to afford a few of life’s pleasures. Our needs are simple and we consider our lives worthwhile if we have some time off of work to spend with friends and family, to play a round of golf or do some fishing, play cards or go to the bar for a few, do a little travelling or work in the garden. We want to worship in the church of our choice or not at all if that is what we choose. There are a thousand different interests we all want to pursue, a thousand decisions we wish to make for ourselves, and for most of us that is what freedom means. And to achieve that kind of freedom, the kind of freedom that is available to everyone and not just a tiny minority, we have to work together in order to ensure our ability to attain it. Such freedom will not be won for the majority by each of us acquiring our own hoard of treasure, most of us will never be able to amass that much. We instead will have to trust our neighbors and our fellow citizens in order to guarantee the kind of security only society can provide, knowing that the security and hope for a better life of others is in our hands as well as ours is in theirs. We won’t get rich but we won’t end up homeless.

     That is the only kind of freedom that will ever be available to the vast majority of people. And when we look at it, there is ample material wealth to provide such freedom. It will never provide us all with outlandishly oversized toys, but we are adults after all, not children.

     It is a choice we will have to make, freedom for the rich or freedom for the many. The freedom for the many does impinge somewhat on the freedom of the rich, but so too does the freedom of the rich take from the freedom of the many. It is a freedom based on dominance, based on the notion that the only way we can truly be free is to have enough money to distance ourselves from our fellow man through gated communities, security systems, and armed guards. It is the kind of system that requires locks and bars and security codes to protect the free from those who dream of freedom. And that doesn’t sound like the kind of freedom our Founding Fathers would have wanted. 

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 Metric System And American Exceptionalism

     Back when I was in grade school, sometime in the 70’s, they decided it would be a good idea to start to teach children the metric system in anticipation that we would soon be switching over to it. We were taught that it was based on common sense and logic rather than on the lengths of the king’s body parts or the quantity of liquid his bladder could hold.

     For example, the meter was 1/10,000,000^th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Pretty neat, right? There would be no arguments about exactly how long some long-dead king’s foot was when we had a constant scientific measurement that would be for all times provable. And then there is the measurement of area. Rather than the acre, which corresponds to I don’t know what, you have the are, which is simply 100 meters squared. And here’s the beauty of this, not only units of distance and area but also volume and mass and temperature are based on the simple meter. Because a liter is simply ten centimeters cubed. And the gram is the weight of the cube of a hundredth of a meter. And best of all, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. Genius!

     And tens, everything was broken down into tens. Being young, I found it infinitely easier to learn than having sixteen ounces to a pint, two pints to a quart and four quarts to an American and five quarts to an Imperial Gallon. If that’s right: I’m still not sure how the Imperial Gallon worked.

     But beyond the fact that it was easier, it was universal. People all over the world were using it and it only made sense for the good old U.S. of A. to use it as well. Using an antiquated system of measurements that wasn’t even of our own design was an embarrassment. Even our own scientific community had long been using metric since it was practical when comparing studies in the world.

     So it made sense that we were switching over. We were told that there would be a certain amount of resistance from those who had been doing things differently their whole lives, that was understandable. But the change would take place and we’d all be better off because of it.

     The switch was taking place in Canada at about the same time. I remember one year visiting relatives in Canada and the older ones complaining about it. But when I visited them the next year, everybody was already adjusted to it. Suddenly, instead of measuring the speed limit in miles they were now doing it in kilometers and everybody was okay with that. In the course of a year, Canada joined the rest of the world and acquired a vastly superior system of measurements.

     But we here in the U.S. couldn’t do it. We just didn’t have the will it took to accomplish such a basic task.

     Perhaps it was because of the bicentennial. Right about then we started getting downright patriotic again. And looking around us we realized how well we had done as a nation and how we had everything we needed. And being patriotic and contented is only a short step from being arrogant and demanding. Somehow we got the attitude that we didn’t have to change for nobody, and that the rest of the world could just suck it. If they wanted to sell their goods in America (yeah, I know Canada is in America too, but dammit, we’re AMERICANS), then they would have to measure things in ounces and feet. Of course, other countries were glad to be selling their products and were only slightly put out having to convert things to our system of measurements, as long as our currency was profitably converting.

     Another reason, perhaps, that we could not manage to make the change was that we had an instinctive dislike of someone telling us what to do. We were Americans, and we were nothing if not free. How did we know? Because that’s what had been drilled into our skulls every day on television and in cigarette ads. We didn’t mind being told what to do by advertising, but by golly, we weren’t going to have our government doing it. At some point, we got it into our thoughts that any attempt our government made to gravitate us towards something was just a sinister move towards socialism.

     And so today we are one of the few countries in the world that has a system of measurements different from the rest of the world. Only Myanmar and Liberia now stand with us.

     I write this not to suggest that it is high time America switches to the metric system, although it is, if only to save money for mechanics who have to buy two sets of wrenches. I mention our failure to convert to the metric system as a symptom of a deeper problem. It seems that Americans today cannot come together on ANY problem, no matter how much of a no-brainer it is. We have lost the ability to unite in any kind of cause at all. During the Second World War, patriotism meant having paper drives, tin drives, and victory gardens. We knew that we as Americans, whatever divided us, were united in many ways. We knew that we had built something pretty good and that we would have to occasionally work together in order to preserve our way of life.

     That’s a long way from where we are today. After September 11, 2001, our president did not ask for us to come together to sacrifice for the common good, but instead implored us to continue our daily routine and go shopping. And in the ensuing years, it has only gotten worse. Today, there is no sense of unity, no sense that sometimes the only solution is to pull together and make the necessary—and often vastly preferable—changes that should be made.

     It’s not just our failure to commit to the metric system, which was and is a no brainer. Add to that our inability to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, from inefficient forms of transportation, from an addiction to foreign produced consumer goods that we simply don’t need, and a mass of other problems we have no heart to tackle. We have become frozen, unable to act to confront the problems that can only be confronted as a group. Not as individual consumers, but as a unified front. We have become like the old world that we once mocked for the way they clung to outmoded ideas.

     When I was young and my dad tried to tell me what to do, I always asserted my burgeoning age by telling him experience was the best teacher. His reply was that experience was not the best teacher but the most expensive one. I hope that we as a nation can learn our lesson before harsh reality hits, but if that’s what it takes, at least we will learn a lesson that will hopefully stick.

Artistic Expression And Charlie Hebdo

Here’s a contrary post because contrary seems to be my middle name. And I’m not even old yet.

Every major news item inevitably carries along in its wake the knee jerk reactions of those who will never follow up on their espoused convictions. Sure, they may go to a candlelight vigil or more likely share something on Facebook, but whatever event triggers their reaction will be quickly forgotten when the next trigger-inducing event occurs.

I’m of course referring to the tragedy of the shooting in Paris yesterday. And I’m of course writing without fully understanding the situation since, while not yet old, I’m beginning to feel that if I wait to know everything I’ll never write anything at all.

But I know people died because of a cartoon that insulted Mohamed. I’ve seen it, it was horrible. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, nowhere near as horrible as killing people because of a cartoon.

It’s not really the events in Paris I wish to talk about, but the reactions that people have had to it. The general consensus is to rally around the artists who are brave enough to go out on a limb and say things at a risk to themselves. I guess that’s a good thing, I guess as an artist I’d like to know I can speak my mind without worrying if I’m putting my life on the line (I have three novels published, so I’m going to go and call myself an artist).

In the end, though, I believe that what an artist wants much more than support is understanding. When I make a statement, when I reach down into the deepest parts of me, I want to believe that what I have to say is universal. Not because I think so much of my abilities or myself, I just want to know that my perception of the world, stripped of as many biases as I can rid myself of, is a fairly accurate one. I want to believe that if I squint really hard I can get a pretty good sense of what it is I’m seeing. And if I can use art to convey accurately what it is I see, and if people respond by saying “yes, I see it too”, then I have performed a useful service.

But the last thing in the world I want is anyone’s support that wasn’t duly earned. I don’t want you to stick up for what I have to say because I am an “artist”. I don’t believe I have some God-given right to say or do whatever the hell I want, rather I have an obligation to say what I believe is true regardless of the price I will pay.

When I saw a Facebook friend share a cartoon of the artist in question, a very horrible picture of the prophet Mohamed, I initially had the urge to share it as a sign that my voice, that the voices of others, would not be silenced by the violent acts of extremists. But then I thought of the many millions of people I would insult, peaceful human beings who have nothing to do with ISIS or acts of terrorism. I can scarcely imagine what many of my Christian friends would say if such a picture of Jesus were shown to them. I can’t say I would ever create something like that, but if I thought it was my best way of expressing truth, I guess I would feel obligated.

So my point is perhaps this: if you wish to support the artists who have died for the expression of their art, then get to know and understand the art they have created. Artists are really no different from soldiers, in that they are willing to spill their blood for their cause. But the ultimate merit of the artist, like the soldier, is what they sacrifice for.