I
I
y
trom profit The more profit one can wring from a transaction
(in economic terms, maximizing the swindle), the more capital
there is: not to buy the kids shoes or put a new roof on the hut
or help a neighbor whose bam burned down, but to invest in
something, anything, that will turn more profit This is called
making your money work for you and is the demented engine
that drives the global marketplace and the hapless “human and
natural resources” it feeds into the machinery. The engine is
fueled, not by progress, but by naked greed. Theirs and ours.
The most dangerous force in the universe is a bad idea
that makes you feel good. The Dali Lama, who’s driven by
the notion of ending human suffering, believes the purpose of
life is to find happiness. Interesting word, happiness. We’re
trainedas children and brainwashed as adults to be happy only
when we have what we want; which is, in nearly every case,
obscenely more than we need. We’re encouraged to live for
today without being here now and progress as if there were no
tomorrow. At a recent gathering of the pustulous greedhead;
busily nailing down the details of EarthCorp, while mobs of
furious technopeasants clawed at the gates to get at them, a
third world minister asked his first world peer a simple
question: “Are you rich because we are poor?”
The answer can be figured with a dull pencil.
Wealthy nations, and wealthy people, aren’t wealthy because
they’re smarter, or work harder,or are more virtuous. They’re
wealthy because they take more than they give, a trait they
equate with having God on their side. Like most things, it
boils down to priorities. Years ago, someone asked J. Paul
Getty (who, for years, managed nearly a hundred businesses
out of a cardboard box his servants hauled between hotel
suites) why he thought it was, that out of all the humans on
the planet, he was the richest. Without blinking, he answered:
“Because what I care about most is money.” When kidnappers
sent Mr. Getty a ransom note along with his grandson’s left
ear, the richest man in the world stonewalled them. There’s a
secret here, hiding in plain sight.
Much of what our country does these days is
explained, but in no way excused, in terms of pursuing our
“national interests”: a geopolitical version of personal bliss.
Aside from amassing as much as we can at the expense of
anyone stupid enough to get in our way, the meaning of the
term is no longer clear. Or perhaps it’s too clear. The
unenlightened masses in the cheap seats raise their hands. In
what way is allowing Africa to be depopulated by AIDS in
our, or any nation’s, national interest? How do the real costs
of cheap gasoline pencil out? Where have the farmers and the
butterflies gone? Why is mother’s milk toxic? Why do seven
yearoldsin Calcutta polish emeraldchips until they go blind?
Why do seven year olds in Chicago eat Twinkies for breakfast
and cairy handguns? At what price does the stock market
survive? How much is too much and how much isn’t enough?
In any world order worthy of the name, wouldn’t grinding up
the planet andfeedingit to hogs constitute serious bad form?
It certainly sneers in the face of enlightened self-
interest. We know better; and, knowing better, such behavior
should be beneath our contempt. There is a web of life and,
corny as it might sound to those with too much money to
think they need to care, we’reall part of it. All things are, at
bottom, one thing. There is no us and them, no thee and me.
The teacher from Galilee was right: as we do to the least of
life, we do to ourselves. There is no real self-interest involved
by imagining our interests are holy or that any true profit can
result from getting over on someone. Regardless what the
efficiency experts tell us, life’s not a treadmill and we’re not
chosen rodents whose manifest destiny is to run in circles until
we collapse under the weight of our appetites. There’s only
one game in town and its rules disallow the notion of getting
ahead; or, for that matter, of falling behind. Being human
isn’t a business; it’s an art whose profit and loss statement is
written on our soul. We are no more, and no less, than what
we do.
There used to be a gesture, a moral gestalt really. It
was popular in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the
one that’s filling the streets again. The raised fist was a pure
and simple gesture that forged several fronts of righteous fury
into a two-word position statement: No More. I’m a little
out of the loop these days and don’t know if it’s back in play.
It would be good to think so. When it comes to world order,
there are so few sound working principles anymore.
Behind the Times
Michael Burgess
There used to be a phrase, an ethical construct really.
It was called enlightened sell-interest. Basically, it means
knowing which side your bread’s really buttered on. I’m a
little out of the loop these days and don’t know if it’s still in
play. It would be good to think so. When it comes to the art
of being human, there aren’t a lot of sound working principles
around anymore and it would be a shame, not to mention a
foolish whistling for general pain and sadness, if enlightened
self interest was relegated to copy for a personal hygiene
commercial.
We live in interesting days. Much of our energy, and
more of our time, is devoted to getting ahead. If a divided
America has a common goal and mantra, that seems as close
as we get. What unites us in our great melting pot of
lifestyles is greed, disguised as personal and national
fulfillment. The government and its citizens are Siamese
twins joined at the wallet in a relationship that’s more lust
than love. It was not always thus. An old friend down the
coast, who got his sailing dinghy floating again last week,
wrote this to me: “’Foreigners’ who come here now come for
the cash and the lack of rules. They don’t come here to
become Americans. I fear there’s nothing left to become.”
Beat the drum slowly.
People come to the new world for the same reason
most of us get up in the morning: not to celebrate the rising
of the sun or to wonder at the mystery of being alive or
continue our research into what it means to be human, but to
beat the brush and tear up the floorboards looking for
something that will make us feel better. Or, in current terms,
to actualize ourselves and better our condition. From a nation
based upon personal freedom, we’ve become a country without
personal options. We must, without fail and in ways that
increase our purchasing power, become all that we can be. To
behave otherwise is morally suspect, socially unacceptable and
a bad example for the children who now head most families.
We must get ahead. We must get ahead because, by standing
still, we fall behind; not just in the long run (another sadly
neglected idea) but every minute of every dissatisfied and
unfulfilled day. Simple minds inquire, getting aheadexactly of
what?
I don’t mean to alarm anyone but, in case you’ve
been too busy to notice, the streets and malls of America are
packed to the elbows with human beings behaving as if they
were being run down by something too hideous to be defined.
And they are. The mathematician and philosopher Alfred
North Whitehead, who lived in a time when it was still
fashionable to think about things, called it the “error of
misplaced concreteness”.
It means assigning reality to
something that doesn’t have any. We are, as a soon to be
global culture, being run down and eaten by our collective
operational delusions. We’re assigning reality to an ‘it’ we
can get ahead of if we give it “a hundred and ten percent.”
(Somewhere, Alfredis hooting with laughter.)
It’s an interesting fact, not appreciated nearly enough,
that the notion of “progress” first arose in Western Europe in
the K “1 century. There was no progress before that; if, for no
other reason, because there wasn’t a word for it. People just
did what they did, hoped for the best and, until organized
religion made them stop, worshipped the ground they walked
on. Sometimes things were good, sometimes they weren’t.
Life was just life.
Silly and medieval but there it was, and
so it remaineduntil the machines of the Industrial Revolution
broke the chains of ignorance that bound us to meaningful
labor and replaced it with wages to spend in the company
store. Tw o hundred and fifty years after the machines set us
free, we have company malls, company amusement parks and
company vacation destinations. (Pre-modem humans had no
vacations and generally wintered where they summered.)
Progress this significant comes with a price. Free to
be all we can be, when we fail to meet the personal goals set
by a media whose personal goal is to make us dissatisfied and
frightened enough to buy something or go somewhere dirt
cheap and sunny to forget, we suffer the sort of shame and
ostracism once reserved for lepers and thieves. This is the
taboo called “the error of not measuring up.” It is, when you
think about it, a pretty funny world; one that hasn’t been
funny for some time.
Long before Deep Throat suggested it, we were all
following the money. The sociopathic soul of capitalism lies
in the shotgun marriage of money to progress. Money, lest
we forget, began as a medium of exchange: a reflection of the
value of goods and the human labor that produced them. It
was a way of keeping count. Coupled to progress, it became a
way to keep score. Being modem, we now understand that
money is only partly about trading for what we need; the real
purpose of money is to make more money. In terms of
progress, this was a real breakthrough. The way to “make”
money is to charge more for what make or do than it costs you
to make or do it. Interestingly enough, there was once a sin
called “usury”. One committed it by charging interest on a
loan.
In terms of progress, simple minds must ask: from
what to what? Corporate capitalism believes devoutly that
progress is best served when a few villagers own everything in
the village. If possible, a village you’ve never seen, let alone
visited. When life is a business, progress is indistinguishable
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Bay Café, Key Largo, La Pattlsserle. Lewis A Clark
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College. Mt. Hood CC, Music Millenium, Nature's
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Ashland: Garo's Java House. The Black Sheep.
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Cave Junction: Coffee Heaven A Kerby Community
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Grants Pass: The Book Shop
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Vancouver, W A The Den
Longview, W A The Broadway Gallery
N aselle, WA. Rainy Day Artistry
N ah co tta, WA: Moby Dick Hotel
D uvall, WA. Duvall Books
Bainbridge Island , WA; Eagle Harbor Book Co.
S eattle. WA: Elliot Bay Book Co.. Honey Bear
Bakery, New Orleans Restaurant. Still Life Ln
Fremont, Allegro Coffeehouse, The Last Exit Coffee
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San Francisco, CA: City Lights Bookstore
D enver, Co: Denver Folklore Cente
W ashington, D.C.t Hotel Tabard Inn
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Paris. France: Shakespeare A Cle
B righton. England: The Public House Bookstore
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