Back to Twitter for inspiration and despair. Nina writes that toilet cleaners deserve a living wage and the responses reveal just exactly where we are culturally and psychologically, as a people, Rationally, remember that word, great claim of western civilization, rationally, the very necessary work, very necessary, no-one else wants to do should command a higher wage. Um says the capitalist then their cliches lock in.
The only rationale, that word again, behind income inequality should be based on value and it is not. The market rewards the shyster. Always has always and almost every element of our culture absorbs itself in spinning a myth of merit. If you do not see it in every frame of every movie, every second of television, it is probably too late.
The first and obvious is the ownership of property. Whole civilizations have come and gone where property was not owned privately. Those memories have been scrupulously banished.
Slaves were property, now they are employees, “workers,” but the myth of the superior boss/owner remains. Some strange system indeed is called for to convince the toilet cleaner, garbage collector, hotel room cleaner, ditch digger, that they were truly born to do that work at that wage.
I just thought of a joke. Someone will say, well he doesn’t read, that is the distinction, she doesn’t expand her mind! If only… That not leafing through Kierkegaard is a sure sign you belong in the lower orders. Or Shakespeare. Really? So you readers of the canon, do you have any conversation? Can you drive a bus?
This myth one expects in Europe with it’s Feudal past. That some were born to rule, that they deserved the lions share of whatever wealth conquest won. That this has been so, forever. It is little wonder no historian worth his PhD dares venture further back than Solon. An order was imposed upon the human before him, a holy one, with many below and few on top. Then the Greeks…. An acceptance of a proof! A man could show himself! Reveal himself as not ordinary! Above the hoi! There was a hot flash of real merit then the fakery took over. The seeming, seem what you would be, they insisted, until the being but optional. It became the clothes you wear. I do not acknowledge that the flash was golden. It was itself. I see merit every day unfettered, unconnected to motive. Brave men a d women in battle and classroom unconcerned with who is watching. Not thinking of medals. why accept medals or even wear them Pericles says in his Oration. There are odd reasons to admire the Greeks. O you who never stood and pushed in the Phalanx, o you should hush.
A hierarchy. Holy Fathers for Gods sake, always lurking. And the rest so gullible, the story so convincingly writ.
We all know it, the poets came out of the woodwork to glorify Agamemnon and Winston Churchill, convincing the rest of us that without these dudes we’d be toast. A certain braggadocious somebody was supposed to have had a revolution! Blood shed, then we got, like every Animal Farm, a more concentrated version of what was revolted against. Which was obviously not that revolting in that we aped Europe to a tee. All her deadly arrogances, her superstars, and lo, her Nazis.
I don’t say this understanding of US is wrong, it hangs on every lip, but it is definitely wrong for me, across the board it is meaningless to me and meaning is the great stirrer of all pots. It’s defenders lie, claiming it is some kind of irrefutable truth because they are desperate without it’s myths. This is the desperation that Nina Turner provokes, that real progressives tease out, and it is the energy that animates Jordan and Douglas.
They imagine Nina is a mouthpiece for some great communist somewhere because that is how they understand the world, we are only ever mouthpieces for some grey thing, like their hovering cathedrals.
A friend asked me what I thought of these two: Peterson and Murray, and I said, I don’t know them, but I feel sorry for them. Some vital life force is absent in them and they are trying to fill the empty space with medievalism. Their fame and “success” is that they represent millions, bleat for them, who are missing the same energy. It is sad because they are right: their community is indeed so handicapped, and they have made of this hospital ward a universe. They are unimportant on a really vital level, what is important, in my opinion is the groupthink that so impoverished the millions who read them and bay like wolves at fire, the gift they fear. .
I have no difficulty understanding them, they are products of weakness not arrogance. Night does follow day, or enlightenment doth follow darkness. But it is also conditioned by it. If the enlightenment, the legacy that Peterson and Murray are baying for, was free of what came before, we’d be onto something, but it is handicapped by what it came from, by what it is a reaction to and so, ironically has become what it tried to overcome.
It’s very simple. How do I, how do you, see what surrounds you? On whom and what do you depend to get you through your days? Then what part of that imagined structure, “ there is nothing neither good nor bad but that thinking makes it so” sustains your spirit, your morale, your joy in life? Did you grow up thinking that someone was out there to get you? What is your place in the township you inhabit? Are you part of something or a lone wolf? Understood or misunderstood? Fairly compensated by your state or boss, or bossless? When you step out of your car at a rest stop and there is a maintenance worker emptying the overflowing garbage can, do you imagine that person might be your friend? Or are you mixing in circles that would never do that job? The community you are driving to reenter, only temporarily in this borderland of travel. I use this because I travel a lot. And it influences me the further I go, what happens to me in this hinterland between “homes.” This place of foreigners.
I had my oil changed the other day, Jiffy lube. I am met by young men who speak Spanish. I have a little Spanish but I find the communication that is not fluent restful. The minimum is done and is enough for the job and that enlivens me, puts me back, on the road, where I can recover from familiarity and its contempts. I do seek that hinterland, as a necessity. And I populate it with friends and comrades, with flirtations and generosity. On the evidence Jordan and Douglas do not like this territory.
There are lots of reasons to dislike, find Yellowstone unwatchable, but I could probably overlook the dialog if it wasn’t oppressed by it’s central obsession: property. I own this. Therefore I am rooted. When I travel I am threatened. Lifted from my source of power, like Theseus. If you need to own your source you are always weak. This may be why Kevins moving on is so confusing to it’s fans. What is a man without his ranch? Well, a man, not a child jealous of his toys.
I know the obsession makes the world turn, queasily, but I do not like it. It’s competitions and enemies and it’s justifiable homicides, wall to wall. My meanings are found in fenlands, or East of Eden.
To the point, our traditions and histories are Feudal, we Europeans. A tradition of Kings, Earls and their ladies. These are our conscious beings, the ones our historians mull over, projecting and speculating some of the really funniest stuff, that Yellowstone like could become satire in an instant if we didn’t need it to be so sadly serious. Yellowstone is medieval, and so fulfills a need as deep as the claims of Arthur, the Once and Future… Nobody remembering these fair and bygone days imagines themselves a serf in them. We will always have to insist that someone be serf in our fantasy. Like children casting a play: “Johnnie you be the serf today! O why me, I did it yesterday? Yes but you were so good at it and the story doesn’t work without the serf, how can I be King without lots of you! I have given you so much to do! Thank me!”
This is the American Economic model, just. That is what Jordan and Douglas hanker for. What Thomas Jefferson did that we let pass because we, at that time, were all him. Not Tecumseh or Red Cloud. So now, if their descendants are not cleaning toilets for a minimum wage, something is rotten in the state of Texas. It is not so much that equality is a liberal invention, it is that we cannot tolerate the notion. We are too insecure. Well we. We few? Or many. O the horror. Jordy and Doug cannot countenance the confident serf arising. The one, the metoo, the BLM. Those people who for generations emptied the garbage cans in foreign languages while we speed past in our escalades desperate to get home to our familiars, our stately homes with the help everywhere in place. At our beck.
One just can’t find good help anymore!
I sense among the attackers of Nina, there are lots of executives, ar worse, executive wannabes. The “executor” is what it means. One who executes. Every man is a King and I am the King around here! And Kings, dears, do not exist without serfs. Poor poor dears, raging at her for stating what is so obvious, blatant in their impotence and it’s primal appeal. Jordy and Doug are merely Viagra.
It is a shame we still only acknowledge symptoms and not the ageless causes of what ails us. Why the Nazis? We have acknowledged nothing that made them so they are still here. In every book banning. In every anti woke utterance. Ordering your universe, yourself on top, hierarchically, where someone must be on top, is a choice, not a fact. It is you that try to make it fact, you strenuous conquistadors, out of something that looks exactly like self hatred.
Probably why Western Philosophy is so desperate, it’s creators so freaked, either running from Yahweh or collapsing back into his arms, sobbing prodigals, while calypso singers laugh at them.
This is an issue that I fail with, because of bafflement. We constantly make up what is of value. Why can't we make up something better, more reasonable? I did ask that question once, out loud. Silly me. When someone did propose such a thing and carry it out, bitcoin, crypto, they made up a system of mining non-tangible money so ridiculous it makes even less sense. And is terribly unstable. My Utopian dream is that the value of currency should be determined by the amount of work and the level of skill brought to that work by anyone. Within healthy limits. Cost of living determined by healthy limits. But I am naive. What makes humans compete for who has most, I don't know. But I do know that by the end of life, most is way too much a burden.
Leadership. It’s myth. Will it wane? Fade? It is possible that no-one here will really get this. It is strange to all of us. Why am I writing? Why are you reading? I am not leading or teaching. I am just mouthing off.
We have been convinced by leaders that they are important. It’s not a conspiracy. Only someone angling for a title of leadership will tell you that it’s a conspiracy, “I am not engaging in a conspiracy with you by telling you it is a conspiracy.” Hmmm. They draw you in with a theory they cannot prove, because you want to be drawn in, that depends on your capacity, your trust of other human beings or not. “Trust me” they say. “Not them.” And again, it is not about them, it is about you, and your need. And you have been very well fed on “whose fault it is really” since Eden. Your leader will always turn out to be the one who articulates your grievance and says whose fault it is, and it is never ever your fault.
As the Palestinian journalist said yesterday: the media lies to you. It conspires to lie to you, from journalist to editor, they sit at a table once in a while and decide we will lie. This is not exactly untrue but as Palestine demonstrates exactly: we will buy the truth teller who tells us what we already know, or feel, inside. The facts will in fact fit many truths.
Our leaders are susceptible to the same myth we adhere to that makes us followers. This should be the definition of religion. Myths we believe in are great except when they assign leaders or guardians of the myth. These we call monotheism.
The scholarship and analysis over thousands of years has been that we are the victims of the wrong leaders, we need better ones, and we venerate our democracy because, we have decided, it is the fairest way to choose them and has built in mechanisms to stop them from abusing our trust. It doesn’t at all cast any doubt on our need of them. From priest to President we have made them inevitable. Or….
I can’t very well describe an alternative to our ancient agreements because we will not hear them really. An alternative, not the alternative, there is no such thing as The alternative, an alternative, will look exhausting. There was a moment I think when the ancient Greeks realized this, it might have been their finest hour, I really don’t know, but they spun so quickly between monarch and sortition that it leads to suspicion. Sortition is a system by which officers or representatives are selected by lot. Every body of the body politic is selectable. Your sherd is pulled from the pot and for the next year you will be an assembly person. You will meet with your “people” village, hood, neighborhood, subdivision, at intervals and discuss with them whatever needs discussing and bring the conclusions drawn, demands made and questions asked to the greater state assembly and from here make policy. You are not a leader, you are an articulator and maybe a persuader. After a year the lots are drawn again. And the articulators changed. It is very Greek and probably very everywhere else at that time when “Leadership” was not thought of or confused with the divine. The argument between Agamemnon and Achilles that starts the Iliad is an argument at an assembly. Everybody is there.
It does look exhausting but has it’s rewards. Huge. I think that he greatest part of democracy is not about what decisions are made, what laws passed, but how, and how that process of argument, persuasion and discussion edifies us. Makes adults of us. While the mechanisms of leadership keep us children. Which we, on the evidence, prefer. Until.
This can either seem libertarian or authoritarian but it’s neither. It may look a bit like compulsory military service but it doesn’t involve any war. Unless the big assembly decides war is a good idea. It also is the root of the only good idea in western democracy, term limits. In a sense it is nearer Jury duty.
A really juicy corruption of the present “way” of doing things is that people who want to be or who imagine themselves to be good leadership material are enabled by another maybe bigger demographic who choose to be led. Haha. The very heart of the myth isn’t it? Not everyone is leadership material but lots of us, most of us are led material. Said every King ever. How many? 99%. A familiar looking number.
It might be possible to imagine that the break of Protestantism in the early 16th century, the demand of the lowly, to talk to god without intermediaries followed the stirrings among the eternally “led” peasants of the late 14th century demanding what part of the bible creates a “gentleman” above an everyman. It’s a testament, scuse the pun, to the power of the rulers that this history was buried and muddied till today and even now the “rulers” have concluded that social media is the cause, the conspiracy, that is destroying the fabric of…. The status quo that keeps them in charge. And the accident of education that is massively producing graduates who are qualified to manage, who have been trained to know, with no-one to manage or to teach: no-one to lead.
If for no other reason, this is why leadership is redundant, and a real democracy is on the verge. And the moment really needs celebrating and many a habit, changing.
I remember, constantly, in High School in the early 70s in the US North East, being asked what do you think and who are you. A tiny window of time and place, or maybe it is the question I chose to remember. Not once did I hear “who do you think you are?” as a rebuke. And the question was just put out there. There was no-one I had to answer to.
The big crumbling of the West and it’s “leadership” could be evidence of this verge. The thrashing around and narcissism many of us see as superior civilization is human and understandable but always had a short homicidal shelf life. Its probably going to be a bumpy road shaking off it’s druggy simplicities, and it is fighting back, through proxies, courage was never a characteristic of it’s ethic, but crumbling still.