greed

The War Machine

Concepts that are ultimately meaningful are always at odds with powers that would control them.

Those powers will want only profitable, easy to digest ideas that dull the senses and limit the intellect. Such powers are not interested in ideas that are intellectual or actually socially progressive. The ideas that lead to exploration and question the goodness of profitable, easy to digest ideas demand more than empty rhetoric from smiling faces.

Courtesy, privacy, responsibility, and justice do not pay. Division, data, unaccountability, and easy answers often do pay at least in the short term and for the few. But it is in the small battles that we fight against the war machine and those who support it, that the war is wone.

The war machine is subtle. With ease comes comfort. With comfort comes apathy. And with apathy comes defeat. Those that value worthwhile ideas and meaningful activities and are willing to fight, will fight lonely battles in the night, if only for themselves, for ideas that are greater than all of us.

But in the darkness of greed, intrusion, control, injustice and apathy they are the pinpricks of light in an otherwise dark tunnel.

Twilight

The twilight of our civilization is in the shiny screens we spend our days staring at. We slowly leak out the only good we’ve ever had into the abyss of 1’s and 0’s. We pride ourselves on the achievements of others, others who are blinded by their own genius and justify their chores by dismissing the truth.

They understand so Much and so little. And the money-crunchers look to god in thanks as they destroy his creation. And a pitiful life is lived for a pittance. And the only thing that is valued is passed around like a cheap whore. And we live the lie of independence and truth. And we sell our children for the pleasure of one more minute, just one more second of self-congratulatory destruction.

All because we have bought a lie and do not care.

The Corporaty

The continued corporatization of communication is the continued degradation of language. Corporate lingoism is a lie that as corporations become more formidable, becomes more accepted and normalized.

“Sharing” is distributing memos. And people that we work with are not necessarily “family”. Simply because something is “above [your] pay grade” does not mean that it is not your responsibility. We make goals, not “action items”. 

And we do not work in terms of “bandwidth”. We are too busy or not interested. We do not have “brain dumps” but we can be creative. The only silos that need “breaking down” are agricultural, not corporate. People cannot be guaged based on “core competencies”. Consequences, outcomes, quality of work are matter and are usually a product of an individual or group of individuals that have worked together.

Corporate language turns to corporate communities of lingoism and lies. Corporations are organizations created to make money, and nothing else. Most of the time they do so by breaking or bending rules. To allow the corparaty to reign is to lose the ability to communicate in any real manner.

Truth is Like Poetry 10

Problem: Poverty           

There have always been the poor and most likely there will always be impoverished people.  Poverty has been an excuse, a plague, a problem, and a scapegoat throughout history.  In other words, the problem of poverty seems to be a natural consequence of civilization.  The solution for this general poverty would be the allocation of funds, goods, and services to people across the planet, but this takes money, planning, and a political desire.  These are in actuality the problems of poverty.

Income disparities are often the consequences of politics and greed, corporate greed in particular.  Corporate greed alone probably accounts for a great percentage of global poverty, which is to say that most poverty is human-born.  Even if corporations (which hold the vast majority of the wealth on the planet, not including governments*) were to find the motivation to try to solve general poverty, planning such an endeavor would prove unlikely given the history of governments across the planet.  Furthermore, most governments are at least in part controlled by large sums of corporate monies.

Lastly, the political desire to eradicate global poverty would be necessary.  This alone is enough to make this endeavor impossible.  Human beings are tribal and primarily understand their immediate surroundings.  An endeavor to end world poverty is beyond the scope of human empathy not to mention political will.  There might be a way to conjure political will to eradicate poverty, but it would most likely be limited at best.

Solution: John Rawls “invisible curtain”

            John Rawls, an ethical philosopher, wrote The Theory of Justice which introduced a philosophical theory of justice based upon two principles which are important.  They are:

First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;

Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

  1. They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;
  2. They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle) (JF, 42–43).

These two principles play a part when citizens (individuals within a given society) are put behind what he calls the “invisible curtain”.  In short, all theories of justice in that given society are to be made by everyone within that society.  However, no individual actually knows their particular place in that society.  In this way, everyone has ‘skin in the game’ so to speak.

With Rawls’ hypothetical ‘curtain’ in place, the likelihood of anyone allowing for extreme poverty would at least be lowered.

A Little Soap Box

If we are to progress in any meaningful way as a species we must overcome the particular fears and beliefs that have defined us throughout history and continue to define us today. This idea is not new. The idea to overcome humanity’s shortcomings by changing not only the way we think, but our actions and the reasons that we act is one that has been presented by great thinkers throughout the history of our species. We simply must learn to listen to them.

There are three frailties of humanity that stand in the way of progress. Make no mistake, these frailties do not stop progress completely, but only slow it down. The first is tribalism in all its forms. There can be no “us” versus “them”. Where there is patriotism there is nationalism, and where there is nationalism there is war. We have come to the point in our history where we cannot afford war.

The second shortcoming that will define humanity’s future for better or worse is ideological belief whether it is in a religious form or a political one. Ideology is a certitude that leads to tribalism, to the death of curiosity and to confusion. Our ideologies, if they define us, take over us and create a concrete bunker in which intellect dies. Our ideologies are born out of fear and arrogance. Not knowing an answer is always better than creating one out of thin air.

The third is as old as the gods and is known by many names: selfishness, avarice, greed. To have enough is something that does not come naturally to most of us and to have too much is something that is not often enough recognized. We have many excuses for our greed ranging from family to individual rights. Greed is too many times measured economically, but its seed is psychological.

The question must become what kind of society do we want to live in? The question will become what will we have to do in order to achieve this society. The question is simply when will we have to decide these things and how.