Projection

This... is full of shit.

She's faced political as well as physical challenges. Nyad is determined to swim from Cuba -- a communist country that doesn't allow Americans to visit -- to Florida. Getting permission from both sides took several months. At several points along the way, bureaucratic snags threatened to tank the whole operation.

Emphasis mine.

Hmm. I could fume over this, but I prefer to fight media with media.

CBS, do my dirty work.

The United States was the eighth-biggest source of travelers despite Washington's decades-old ban on American tourism to the island. About 63,000 Americans visited last year, compared with 52,000 in 2009.

Cuba!! How long will their embargo be allowed to stand?

Civilization and Its Contents

It is not my interest to defend the state, or civilization, or society, or however you choose to label or reify what is, and what suppresses, rules, or claims authorship. We may describe it, theorize as to the whys behind its whats and hows, and so on, but it needs no defense. After all, what is the State? The word is simple. It is what stands; it is what is.

But let us deconstruct what the State is, because it is also an arrangement, a mass of living beings who, were they to do something else, would form another state of being. The entire world could change in a day were we ourselves to change first. It is a fascinating thing and a source of hope to realize that we are not dealing with History or God or Truth or Destiny but people. Not even The People. We are dealing with people, who are frustrating and difficult and stupid and cruel but also kind and giving and curious and strong.

I do not defend the State by citing what it gives. I know that what it offers it takes away. But how should I consider those who do defend the state? How should I consider those who accept the power around them?

In looking at these people--our impulse may be to say "those people"--how easily we may lapse into bestial imagery. Hogs at the trough. Sucklings at the teat. Cowards. Parasites. Fools! Oh, how fools and dupes and imbeciles dance through anarchist and libertarian literature! People, we lament, are stupid. Too stupid, by far, to liberate themselves as we claim to have done. Or too lazy. Or too fearful. Or too complacent. Or too-- or too-- or not enough-- or not this, or not that...

And yet you need only work or live among people in great number to see what is borne by them, like a gang of mules. They may grumble or they may not, but they pay, as by far the billions pay... And you can tell in their faces that while most people are at least a little lazy, at least a little pathetic, at least a little pitiful, at least a little culpable for what has befallen them, there is something more as well. And sometimes you can screw up really badly by expecting a fool to remain foolish.

I don't defend a system that batters millions, that colludes and interlocks with others to keep billions battered and suppressed. But I do give benefit of doubt to those who hold up its pillars, at least for now. It is of grave importance that I understand why they do what they do.

Because they do not owe me any faith in the liberation I may theorize. They do not owe me even the opportunity to hear from them what better system they might devise on their own. I don't have the right to say they are wrong and I am right. I can say I disagree. I can say I think there's something better, some tactic they haven't yet employed, or haven't employed in a long while, that will better get them where they want to be.

Because I feel the State is a liquor. It is a drug, it is a vice. But the thing about vices is that they do something very powerful for their indulgents. And you can beat up that drunk, you can ridicule her, you can blame him all you want, and you'll be right to. The truth is that there is something very blameworthy in the choices made by people all around us, and by us as well. But until you acknowledge that the solution has failed, that it was an attempt that has failed to provide what it promised and that it must be set aside in favor of something better--

Until you look for and recognize the wisdom of fools and the courage of cowards, you will find no change.

Two Great Tastes

I have long thought that a true laissez-faire society would need to be socialist. After all, without coercion forcing so many of us to one activity or another, we would know which activities actually mattered. Can you imagine farming and sewage disposal swelling with workers once sheer need actually dictated a rise in wages?* If nobody needed to work, work would need to be something fit for human beings.

Very simple, I suppose, but that's the level at which I'm starting.

*And yes, it smacks of ignorance to talk of wages at all...

Cures

My eye is infected. I don't know why it's just my right eye that's affected. When this happened weeks ago, I was told it was a development of allergies, that I should take allergy medicine daily. I'm prescribed a bottle of drops. They don't work. I'm prescribed an ointment. I'm to apply it on the inside of my eyelid. Six times a day. I do it because I'm tired of this shit. I do it because my own body's regulatory regime doesn't seem to care about conjunctivitis. I envy my son, stupidly, for his body's response to an ear infection.

I'd kill for a fever right now to cook this shit off. But it's not coming, so I buy the ointment, which costs a dollar and a half. I'm thankful for that, but resent the whole process. Resent my dependence on this, resent the itching, resent the fucking hazy vision. But I do it because I don't know what else to do. In the distance, I idly imagine my eye rotting out of my head.

I think about what Karl said. I think about modern America's fears: of death, of aging, of illness, of incapacitation, of maiming, of crippled hands and feet, of missing eyes and teeth. I know the disease that in turn springs from such hopeless fear, the real impotence that results from a life lived in denial of the inevitability of its end.

I think about human experimentation and drug trials. I think about Jack Crow and biological warfare tested in our own backyards. I think about millions of aching backs, millions lost to office obesity, millions of drug addicts legal and otherwise. I know about what society promises in terms of health and pleasure. I know how it delivers--no, fosters--plague, dysfunction, and pain.

And I think about the technocratic paradise that IOZ well eviscerates. I remember arguments with liberal friends who insist that all technology trickles down. I know that many of us have become accustomed to pleasures whose payment we are becoming less and less able to afford. I know that things are going to change, and that will bring disappointment as surely as opportunity. Many of us still live in a world that is fast being revealed to be false--and what is not false is flimsy.

And I remember Orwell's statement, in discussing Mein Kampf, that Hitler succeeds on the failure of Western capitalism--and most forms of socialism--to acknowledge that man does not merely desire idleness and pleasure--or, at least, not all the time. There is part of us that desires and should at least accept some hardship, some travail, some labor as essential to life, as inescapable and yet not necessarily evil or wrong. Some hardship is ennobling, and a life out of the cage would bring some amount of just that kind of hardship.

And yet...

I feel we must acknowledge what states and authority and society do provide, not because we seek to defend all of the above but because we should think about what, in their hypothetical absence, many will still seek. Humanity has paid a high cost for civilization, usually unwillingly. And yet many would return to its greatest crimes, if only to obtain some of its benefits.

Can we fault the individual who would choose health in slavery over disease in freedom? It is a false choice, surely, for civilization impoverishes billions so that millions may enjoy marginal corrections, and yet this is the choice that people will face unless we can address their fears. People in anarchy will still desire antibiotics. People in anarchy will desire lenses ground so they can see, corrective surgery so they shall not limp, cancer treatments, braces.... And if the list of demands becomes ridiculous when we extend it to iPhones and Precious Moments figurines, the fact is that people have a right to demand them. Maybe liberty will make us less desirous of folly. Anarchists should choose well how they respond to the folly remains, and to the more deserving desires as well.

Archaeology even shows us that the first generations of city-dwellers dwindled in size. Hunter-gatherers were fitter and taller, if shorter-lived. We may wonder who was happier; there is no way to know. In any case, it is only with the rise of industry that humans began to get larger (in both positive and negative meanings of the word). One can marvel at the height of Japanese men and women today, compared only to their grandparents.

If there is much that is sick and perverse about civilization, and there is much about which to be discontent, we must still think about what anarchism will provide, and what will be sacrificed. Any model that relies on a precipitous drop in population is going to be a failure with those of us who do not want to be one of the billions judged to be excessive. Any model that tells us to shrug and accept death that has recently become avoidable will be dismissed for similar reasons. I'm not saying we don't have to prepare for changes, even painful changes--especially if we live above certain income brackets where our comfort is necessarily predicated on the suffering of others. At the same time, we should acknowledge why so many of us stay in our cages if we ever want to lure ourselves into an outside about which we are ignorant and fearful.

The Truth

Thus Spake IOZ:

The problem is in fact not that people need jobs but that people need money, and hobbling them to a desk or factory floor is the only moral and legitimate means of funneling currency into their empty jugs. We need to have fuller employment so that more people are getting paid so that the consumer economy expands ad inf. and repeat as necessary. There are, if you consider it even briefly, a half million or so unexamined assumptions underlying all of this.

I'm a recovering meritocrat, and one thing I need to get over is worship of those with talent. I found comfort in writing while IOZ was gone, and clarity like this is the reason why. I have always admired those who can clearly say what may sound simple and yet evades so many of us.

We live in a sham, and millions know this instinctively while only a few can say it, let alone say it well.

What Feels like Freedom

As I said yesterday, tokens of privilege granted by superior powers can often feel like freedom. Having a "better" job, having money, having prestige and title. Having a certain range of action with relative impunity compared to those who, were they to do same, would not be tolerated. All these might be said to be more like freedom than other positions and levels of privilege. We can debate whether or not they are freedom itself, based on whether freedom is an absolute for us or if we see it as a range or spectrum.

All that is to say that feeling free can be illusory, and we should simply be careful here. Freedom is used to sell everything from handguns to cigarettes to alcoholism, and while I believe in freedom to partake of weaponry and intoxicants alike, I would not say that either necessarily guarantee freedom.

So I don't say I'm free in an absolute sense. I acknowledge my privilege, acknowledge that it is unearned, acknowledge that it is granted by society and the state. I try to distinguish that from my real, individual powers, because I want to accept but combat the former while building on the latter. After all, personal power is the wellspring from which all good things must flow.

I try not to beat myself up for not raising my own livestock or, at present, growing my own produce. I know and admit that by buying food at a supermarket or even most farmer's markets, I am participating in a large enterprise maintained by iniquity and coercion. (My mind flashes back to seeds dipped in pink fertilizer bought from a country store for the farm we kept when I was a child. Even then, I marveled at the depth of the artificial around me.) And yet, at this point in my development, I try to take what power I can. I do as much of the work as I can to feed my family. I season, I cook, I mix, I stew, I take bad cuts of meat and find a way to make them as good as they can be. I may not have cut out the machines of the plantation--not yet, anyway--but I can try not to endorse wage slavery at any number of eateries.

This doesn't make me better. I know I'm still at a trough, and I know I'm still living in the middle class even as I'm acutely aware of how steadily we're losing money while I wait for new employment to clear some bureaucratic hurdles. I don't really have it rough, and I understand others who may not have the time to work on food as I do presently, just as I understand the urban paupers who cannot take to the field as Karl so admirably has.

But I will say that anyone can take back some amount of power in their lives. I've seen it when people have nothing but themselves and they want to crawl back to the abuse or the bottle or whatever hellhole of pain and punishment that beckons--tyranny always waits, should you be willing to pay its price--and they take the basic power of self-authorship, of telling their own story. That's real power. And it's available to everyone. Of how many things can you say that?

And maybe, as I said yesterday, you find that you go from depending on a power millions of miles away to depending on your neighbors. Maybe you figure, as I did, that you were sick of other people's stories and wanted to tell your own, so you wrote on your own, and that was good, but you also met with friends and told stories together, made stories that were maybe more awkwardly plotted than the precision pieces produced by the well-paid and the audience-tested but that were all the more enriching because they came from your own hearts and experiences and soul.

There is always something more that we can do.* It's not a cudgel to use to beat ourselves or others. It's something that brings me both humility and cheer.

*Of course, this does not apply to all things. And as I have dealt with personal illness and illness of my younger child this past weekend and week to date, it has hardened me to believe that personal authority can't be all of the answer, but it is a damn good bit of it.

Dependence and Expectation

When I determine those things on which I rely, I can make a number of choices. I can choose to refuse these dependencies and go without. I can choose to produce what I need. I can find these things in others. I can use a number of tactics to get these things, or to cope with their absence.

Sometimes we deal with others as equals. Sometimes there are those subordinate to us, and this subordination can come in many forms. Most of us in the world are subordinate in terms of office, rank, and position. All of us are subordinate in some way naturally, but natural hierarchy is mixed, incomplete... Without a social structure that raises up some traits over others, it's hard to say which traits and which combinations are truly "fitter" than any others, and in any case, the history of slave rebellions would tell us that even with a social structure there are few safe bets.

So what about when we find ourselves subordinate to others? We may tell ourselves that we can interact with these forces in a rational manner. Indeed, in the American context, it is a national myth that man is strong and independent. Ask yourself what the respectable, powerful man looks like. Perhaps you'll say "the boss," the CEO, the proprietor, and that is a common ideal, but what is more frequently accepted is the man who works, who is paid. Having a job defines the worthy and the strong in our society. It shows that one has "made it," that one can "stand on their own two feet."

It is very interesting, the conflation that has taken place here, and the avoidance of part of that status. You see, work can indeed be noble. Labor, effort, striving, these can all be quite good. And yet it is not work and accomplishment that define the man with a job. It is his employment, that he has been chosen by those who are more powerful than he is for purposes he may make his own, claim as his own, see as one and the same as his ultimate goals and yet--how can they ever be? What equality in mission is there to be between warlord and soldier?

I'm reminded of Orwell. "The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside." And perhaps it is wrong. Perhaps we do exist as soul and body. I've just seen too much linked between them to think them truly independent. The body cannot go through motions unaccepted by the mind without a great cost.

Even if we take the notion that one can join forces with those stronger and remain separate and sovereign, there remains one more dimension to dependence, and one which we might well think of when we consume, when we toil, when we live by the products and the dictates and the customs of others rather than our own. It is the dependence on things remaining as they are, the dependence on the word of those with whom we contract. This can be mundane or it can be very great. We can be sold happiness or entertainment in a film or an art product or a food and regularly, I would almost say ubiquitously, we can find ourselves cheated. We can work for decades in accordance to what we are told is expected of us and find the goals change not as a result of our actions but choices made many miles and tax brackets away. We can say we know what marriage is and discover that it is invented anew every day with every choice. We can discover that others do not behave as they say they will. We can discover that things may have seemed one way, may have been one way, but they are really another, or fast becoming another. We may find that the future we hoped for will never come, that it is fast vanishing even in our memory, and soon it is no longer even a blueprint or a mocking dream but a featureless feeling of bitterness, denial, and loss.

All can and will change, and we don't know how it all will. We strive for control and it is easy to mock others' desire for control while receding into nihilism, itself a false defense against loss and despair. The fact is that only the Buddhists and the discordant have it right, and all the rest of us, who strive and demand and hope for something or something else to be, who put forth effort to control our little piece... Maybe the answer is getting a little stronger. Maybe the answer is depending on ourselves a little more. And maybe the answer still isn't total independence, but changing who we rely on and changing what we believe and changing what we expect of others. I don't see an end to dependence, but maybe we do better when we rely on those who can rely on us.