Dear diary,
Let’s say there is a countryside of farmers: many families of farmers living on the land, working the land. Let’s say there are fifty farming families. Each family farms a section of the countryside. And here’s the important fact: This scene takes place before the advent of machines. So all the fifty farming families farm their land by hand, and they all do relatively well: the only time they’re short on necessities is if the weather conditions cause a famine.
Now let’s introduce machines into the picture. After eons of farming by hand and doing fine, here come various machines to help with the labor. The labor, in fact, becomes instantly and totally automated; so all the fifty farming families inherit an abundance of free time; plus enough crops are produced even during spells of bad weather, so there are ups and downs of yield but no more famines. Thus, the advent of machines made farm-life blossom into paradise.
That’s one possible outcome. What really happened, however, is that, after the machines freed up all the farmers’ time, the fifty families were evicted from their land, and the mountains of food produced by the automated processes were stored in silos while the now-landless farmers slip into poverty. And the individual farmers all blame each other for this dire state of affairs – each farmer berates his neighbor for being lazy and foolish. None of the farmers blame the owner of the machines for this tragedy. (There is one owner who lives far away: he does not ever visit the land; and all the food goes to waste.)
Pardon the preachy, hacky, unintentional propaganda. I ask this of myself: pardon thyself. I’m suspicious of morals; I wince at stories that have a design upon their reader; so I feel that, with the above, I’ve committed a sin.
But the age-old “labor versus owners” controversy was on my mind because yesternoon I visited my earthly mother. She gave me a call in the morning and asked if I could help her shape a speech that she’s been asked to give – there’s some sort of graduation ceremony coming up at the school where she teaches. (Tho, officially, she’s retired. Retirement in the U.S. means that you continue working, only with less energy and more fear.) So my sweetheart and I went over to her house, because we wanted to take a walk at one of the nice parks out there anyway. I could recount all the conversation we had, but that would weigh me down too much right now. I’m exasperated about it, still. I’m only interested in recording my general attitude about it. Mostly we clashed around the topic of economics. We used to clash about religion, but, over the years, I’ve come to see that religion is MY zone, my stomping grounds, my haunt, in that it’s a subset of art; so, despite the fact that I consider myself an atheist, in a certain sense I own all religion, thus I can easily evict her from this land; now, feeling so keenly the possession of such power, my confidence skyrockets, which induces my strength to manifest itself as compassion—true strength is always merciful—this channels my power exclusively towards harmony, so the topic of religion therefore remains safe & neutral. But the economic system that torments me afforded my mother a decent life; so THAT subject sparks fires. I’m 100% anti-capitalist, at this point, whereas my mom still believes in every nonsense con of the manager class, for instance that “healthcare as a guaranteed human right” is a scary idea, a very risky notion. She says, “I don’t like the thought of the government making the decisions about our health.” And I say, “Well doesn’t it depend on the type of government? I mean, yeah, nobody wants a totalitarian regime to be in charge of anything, let alone our health; but if we have, say, a direct democracy, then what would be wrong with We the People pooling our own darn resources to help We the People?” And she said, “But governments are corrupt.” And I said, “Yes, and with a transparent democracy, We the People can SEE as well as FIX the corruption.” And she said, “I still just don’t like the idea of the government rationing healthcare.” (Note how she sneaks in that concept of “rationing”!) So I say, “Well then what’s your alternative to a democracy making the decisions about this ‘rationing’—who would you wish to do this ‘rationing’, if not We the People?” And she just stared and had no answer. So I suggested, “Would you prefer that the ‘rationing’ be done by an entity whose machinations are private and profit-driven?” But she would not admit that such corporations are a better alternative. She just froze, and there was silence for a while.
Eventually, however, she broke the silence by saying, “I mean, I personally will have to worry about how I’ll pay for care, if any illness happens to ME!” – This stunned me; I thought to myself, Does she not understand that this outburst actually pinpoints the problem of her beloved Free Market system? So I said: “Yes, under this privatized, profit-driven system, which is what you’re arguing to keep, we all face being bankrupted by common health problems – you’re proving my point.” But I don’t think she grasps that the nightmare of the present system is exactly where her own pro-private-capitalist views have led us.
You see how this goes nowhere? You see why I didn’t want to mention any of the specifics of our conversation? Why are you forcing me to tell you all this stuff!?
Before we changed the subject, just to get the last word in, I said: “I wonder how bad everything will have to get, before you yourself naturally come to hold MY views. How much will this capitalistic system have to harm YOU, before you admit that it’s essentially evil, that it incentivizes behaviors that destroy any potential for The Good Life. For I suspect that you’ll never change your mind about this until you yourself, as an individual, suffer the force of its wrath.”
And we also argued about religion a bit, so if I said above that religion is a calm realm for us now, I was recklessly misspeaking. At some point in our talk, I let resentment get the better of me, and I took a jab at her and my late father’s harebrained parenting – I said: “Dad placed wage-laboring, business, and moneymaking over all other values. That was clear. And I hate all of that. But that was just something to say NO to. So in a sense, it was easy to deal with dad: my stance was simply “Be anti-dad.” But the confusing thing was what YOU, our earthly mother, tried to teach us. You always claimed that God, as represented in the Bible, is life’s center, life’s focus, life’s purpose: the most important direction is God-ward, via the Bible. That’s what you SAID. But what you wanted—which is apparent by the way that you rewarded certain behaviors and lamented others—I say, what you really wanted was not for us to follow God but for us to obtain material success, in the form of decent careers, presentable wardrobes, nice cars, a sizable house – all the things money can buy; the things that “rust and moths doth corrupt”. So you and dad, without ever attempting to coordinate your parenting, after all, ended up branding upon the brains of your children your sole shared value: LUCRE. Yet while dad was too charmingly brutish to coat his money-love in “respectable” terms, you were sophisticated enough to feel guilty about your materialism: you hid it under the pretense of religion. And yet, you never counted on one of your children actually taking a shine to Jesus of Nazareth. So that’s plagued me my whole life: I truly fell in love with the Holy Scriptures, with devious-poetic literature; and I could never figure out why there was such a great gulf fixed between us—you & I; son & mother—until I began to despise money-culture.
& in the course of this conversation with my bio-mom, I said many other things, too, which, if I were to try to note them all down, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. But my hand’s getting tired of holding this quill pen, so I’ll just skip to the part where my mom gave her answer to my above tirade. With a troubled look on her face, she said, “Yes, I admit it: What you say is true. But I wish that it weren’t.”
And I said, “So do I.” Then I cited the paragraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Intellect”, which I’ll copy here again, as it’s been a while since the last time I quoted it in this journal (& it can never be repeated often enough):
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, — you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, each person oscillates.
That’s the setup. Now Emerson deals with the latter group first:
She in whom the love of repose predominates – for instance, Bryan’s MOTHER – will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party she meets, — most likely her ancestors’. She gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but she shuts the door of truth.
Here again I pause, only to stress that, as the above nails my biological forerunners, all that follows concerns ME MYSELF alone because I am superior to my parents, and Emerson loves me far more than he loves them; in fact, he doesn’t love them at all – no, Emerson curses my parents: they are our spiritual enemies. Now here’s the sublime side of the “truth v. repose” dichotomy (again, “he” refers to ME, this weblog’s blogger, Bryan Ray):
He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth (as Bryan’s mother is NOT), and respects the highest law of his being.
Thanks, E. I owe you one.
P.S.
Below is another rap demo that I recorded long ago when I was all alone in my room. For the beat, I looped a sample of music from an old record. Purposely lazy.
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