Want of control

Dear diary,

To be a good writer, all one must do is please the reader. Or else challenge the reader. Or annoy the reader. No; forget everything I just said – I’ll now go ask my yoga coach to reveal the secret of writing like a pro.

OK I’ve been told there’s no single “way” to be a good writer. You just write, and people either like or dislike what you wrote. All you can do is try your very best.

But I wish there were a “way”, because then I could learn it. I could command the power of good·writing·ness, like a proper control-freak.

*

I’ve been intensely angry recently: shouting wrathful diatribes about our financial system, probably causing our neighbors to feel concern about whatever’s going on next door; because this business of home-selling-&-buying is stressing me out. I want to plan my moves, my decisions about where and how to live, so as to gain some measure of control over situations. But planning is almost useless, in a casino environment. How does one plan to win at roulette? You just place your fortune on red or black, and let the wheel spin. The little silver ball is like planet Earth: it boings around while the Archons of Spacetime jostle it, until the Universal Freeze Death occurs, then it lands in a slot: green double zero.

ROULETTE is a French word meaning little wheel. In the game, players choose to place bets on either a single number, various groupings of numbers, the colors red or black, whether the number is odd or even, high or low. To determine the winning blend, a croupier spins a wheel in one direction; then a ball is propelled in the opposite direction around a titled circular track spanning the edge. This ball, representing one’s home planet, eventually loses momentum, passes through an area of deflectors, and falls to its fate. Each slot or pocket on the wheel is called a “fate”. European style roulette contains thirty-seven such pockets, labeled by sequential integers in alternating colors: odds red, evens black; and the fate numbered zero is green. American roulette vaunts a second green fate marked double zero (“00”).

So I’m saying that, in the U.S., you can’t just plan to buy a house wisely: no. Or, rather, you can indeed strategize, but whatever you do will prove useless, as the system is constructed in a way that serves only the house. And by this last instance of the term I do not mean the house that you are looking to inhabit; I mean the bosses—the casino’s owners, all the banksters & their underlings. Go ahead: just try to plan your purchase – that concerned look on your face will amuse the bigwigs.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision. (Psalm 2:4)

Wise planning is not an option: chance will land you where it will. This is what tasks me and heaps me—this is what goads me to rant ineffectually, day after day, like a puppy in a kennel: barking yipping & nipping at my plastic encasement. I should remember that the game is fixed, so there’s no use fighting; I’m only wasting my energy. I should use this knowledge of doom to foster indifference.

But I hate to curb my passions because of the moneyfolk. It reminds me of the taming of wild horses. It’s sad to see giants in chains.

And another problem is that we individuals awaken only when we’re personally undergoing the process of translocation; then, when we find our new house or apartment, we go back to sleep. So the challenge, like all the atrocities of our economic system, is to find a way to wake everybody at once. Or to keep each player awake past the duration of their turn. Yet only a grand, shared misfortune would accomplish this; and nobody wants THAT.

So I guess I’ll keep looking for rentals. Spin the wheel, throw the ball. I definitely don’t want to buy anything in this market, which is in its boom stage: it’s another bubble. It seems better to throw coins away on rent until the market crashes, and only then begin to shop for a house. Buy low, sell high. That’s capitalism’s entire book of proverbs: one sentence; four words. That’s practically the entire Moneybible.

I heard a rich guy giving a speech on the Internet yesterday. He called himself exactly that: “a rich guy”. His lecture was about the dangers of our financial system, which is presently some variation of capitalism. I tuned in hoping he’d share some perspective that’d seem alien to me; but I was disappointed to learn the same old lesson I always learn from the affluent; for his concept of where the economy’s at, and where it’s headed, was undeveloped and outdated.

This lazy, incomplete, barely adequate understanding of history (etc.) is, I’m starting to think, the very reason that the rich become so rich. I once heard that brain-damaged people make the best stockbrokers. Empathy is an obstruction to profit-snatching. Intelligence, wisdom, aesthetic sensibility – these things bar you from becoming mega-wealthy; for, possessing spiritual aptitude, in the world of finance, is like racing in weighted boots. So the monied entrepreneur who was delivering the aforesaid lecture benefitted greatly from his lack of historical knowledge, from his lack of economic knowledge, from his lackluster creativity, and from his dour personality.

I only brought up this guy so that I could controvert one of his statements, but now I forgot the point I wanted to make. I allowed my bitterness to get the better of me; I lost myself in the pleasure of stringing out insults, above. Anyway, he said something like:

Fellow billionaires, beware: if we continue in the direction we’ve been traveling, with this world’s economy favoring US as it does, then we’re going to reap what we’ve sown—that is, we’re going to anger humankind and provoke them to attack us. Therefore we should modify our financial rules very slightly to favor the masses temporarily (and by masses I mean the 99.9% – that is: everyone other than us), and appease them just enough so that they do not rise up and slay us. Again, if we allow our lucre addiction to lockstep further down the present path, we may end up in feudalism!

Now I adorned that final word of our rich man’s lecture with an exclamation point, because he gave it emphasis when he pronounced it. Apparently he thought he had broached a spine-chilling factor. But it made me think: What does this guy presume feudalism consisted of, that makes him shelve it next to incest and cannibalism, on the pronunciation spectrum?

And I also thought it was funny that he sees our situation as possibly ending in feudalism. I say we’re far beyond feudalism. By which I mean we’re deep in it. Yet I assume that our use of that label here connotes the bad aspects alone; because obviously only feudalism was feudalism; and if we declare that system over, then it’s over, by definition; and our current system is different because we say it is – yet, when speaking figuratively, we can say that we’ve long been sunken deeper into undesirable repercussions than feudalism itself ever was:

We imagine a tower partially projecting from a pit of horrors. We name that tower “Feudalism”. Now we erect our current system’s building nearby—let’s make it a high-rise. Then we imagine Adam Smith’s invisible hand reaching down from the seventh heaven and pushing OUR structure, the one we christened “Neo Babel”, fathoms deep into the pit, further than Feudalism, till no part of our building protrudes: even the antenna on its roof is submerged in the muck.

If we don’t place a limit on both poverty AND wealth, wealth will limit everything other than itself, skyrocketing impoverishment. So an unchecked system will tend toward a spike at each end: the very tiptop and the bottom, thus hollowing out all the middle percentiles. Our goal is to build a Mediocre Mountain.