Andy and The Emptiness of Social Justice, Part II: Soft Slavery

     After all his thought, Andy has come upon a stunning realization about ownership and the widespread lack thereof.  There are some basic points which sum up Andy's incapacity to make the difference he thought he could.

1. He is completely dependent on others for everything.

The clear and simple truth about needs is this:  No matter how much money one has, he still gets what he needs from someone else.  Money does not equate to wealth.  Production equates to wealth:  If one has the ability to produce what he needs, it does not matter whether he has money or not, and so long as he can produce what people need, people will give him money for it.  If Andy gives money to the poor and needy, their problems might subside for a little while, but because they are unable to produce anything at all, they will continue to be needy, if not for food, shelter, and clothing then for money to buy food, shelter, and clothing.  What follows from this is that the vast majority of people are needy.  They need someone to give them what they need and they have nothing to trade for it except labor.  A few lucky people might be able to make money without working (just like Andy could by investing his new fortune) but he knows very well that not everyone can do this.  Most people have to work because things need to be produced (and because workers need money), but most people do not produce anything.  "How can this be?" he wonders.  Why is it that most people work but those same people are dependent on others for everything they have, especially the things they need, like food, shelter, and clothing?

2. Others will give him what he needs only out of kindness or obligation.

Everything Andy owns has either come to him as a gift or as an exchange for something else.  He knows that people will be needy so long as they depend on the kindness of others (which usually does not go far).  If he or anyone else is to have any degree of economic security, they cannot simply be charity recipients. Yet the only other way he can get anything at all is by convincing someone that he owes him.  Andy could do this by giving someone money, which is agreed to be worth so much of whatever he wants in return.  Andy has a lot of money currently, but the money he has will be used on consumable things, which means that he will eventually run out of money.  And how does he get more money?  He gets more money by working... for someone else.  The fact about trading is that not only does he get everything he needs from someone else, he even gets his money from someone else.  Before he can trade money for things, he must trade work for money.  This means that before Andy can even think about receiving the things that he wants, he has to find someone to work for.

3. The only thing he can trade is labor.

It is quite obvious that the only thing of value which Andy has to trade is his labor, though his labor has absolutely no value on its own.  In order for his work to be valuable, someone else must decide how he should work, when he should work, and where he should work.  Andy does not really own his own labor:  Before he is hired anywhere, it is understood that whatever his work accomplishes does not belong to him at all.  He has absolutely no say in what to do with his own labor, let alone what to do with the results of his labor.  In exchange for labor, Andy will be paid in money, but he will probably have no say whatsoever in how much money his labor is worth.  If, for example, Andy gets a job making baseball bats, he will not decide what time of day to make bats; he will not decide what shape to make each bat or what color to paint it; he will not decide how much time to spend on each bat; he will not own any of the bats he makes; he will not decide how much each bat is worth; and he will not be paid based on how many bats he makes or how well he makes them, but on how much his manager thinks he should be paid.

4. He does not really own anything.

The fact that Andy does not even own his own labor makes his fifty million dollars seem like an odd puzzle.  Does he not own fifty million dollars?  Well, if by "own" we really mean "can use it however he wants," then no.  If by "own" we mean "nobody can take it away," then no.  If by "own" we mean "can hold it in his hands for a while" then yes, he owns fifty million dollars.  This is how people "own" things.  If Andy buys a beach house and a Lamborghini on credit, then the banks really own those things until he pays them off.  Andy has enough money to buy those things with cash, but even if they are bought and paid for in full, he must still pay to "own" them.  He will still have to pay taxes in proportion to the value of his property.  If he does not pay these taxes, those things will be taken away from him.  Also, depending on the state or town his lives in, there will be many restrictions on how he uses his property, from zoning laws which restrict what the property can be used for to local ordinances which could prohibit anything from cutting down trees to raising livestock.  Thus, not only must he pay to keep his property, he can only use his property in ways others allow him to.

5. It is impossible for him to own anything.

Andy would like to give the poor and needy the ability to be producers, to make what they need and keep it, to acquire basic necessities and to avoid having these things squandered or taken from them.  The hard but simple truth, however, is that not even Andy can have this.  There is no way, not even with fifty million dollars, that he can permanently set himself up with food, shelter, clothing, or any other needs or wants; not because those things get used up, but because he has no way of securing those things for himself.  If he bought a plot of land, built a house, planted a farm, and sewed himself new pants every year, he would still lack two major elements needed for a decent life; security and community.

He would lack security because his land and his house is ultimately State domain:  If he does not continue to pay money to the State for the use of his own "property," the State will reclaim his property. If he uses his property in a way not approved by the State, the state will punish him accordingly.  He would neither be assured to keep his property nor would he have free reign over it.  In short, the only thing "property" is sure to mean is that somewhere there is a piece of paper that associates his name with it.

He would lack community because he could not effectively feed or house or clothe himself without the help of others.  It would be easy to get help if others were trying to do the same thing as him (that is, to really own something) but food and housing and clothing are generally only available from people who want money.  It might be possible for Andy to grow everything he needs to eat and to maintain a house by himself, but that would leave him at a severe disadvantage in the quality of his life, which would easily be remedied if he focused on producing perhaps one or two things he needs instead of everything:  After all, being completely self-sufficient would likely be a hard and lonely life.  Even a self-sufficient man needs community.

If he became a producer of something he could enter the market as a real owner and be able to trade something valuable in place of servile labor.  But community implies a spirit of solidarity in which each member aims to protect the interests of every other member; not out of kindness or obligation, but out of mutual respect.  This community is generally lacking among the few people who actually own things.  In fact, the market is not a community at all, but an arena, a place of fierce competition where the success of one producer is precariously balanced with the potential failure of another.  Andy might be able to become a formidable competitor with a fifty million dollar business, but his goal is not to compete and to win, but to enter into a community and reduce need out of mere appreciation for men.  But because community is almost non-existent, the more people Andy makes producers the less they will be able to compete.

So Andy seems to be left with two options.  Either he tries to make himself an owner, albeit tentatively, and help the market deprive people of property, or subject himself to a soft slavery, in which he is "free" to offer his labor for an arbitrary price so that he can buy what is put in front of him and use things as he is allowed to.

Basic Weak Atheistic Existential Philosophies

Self-Interest as the Solution to Christianity; an Elliptical Critique

Here I wish to shed some light on a rather common mentality in our time: Self-interest. The self-interested man is one who continues the plight of the animal and forges his will by means of superior intellect to satiate his primal instinct to survive.  He is the Übermensch, the artist, the man who escapes the snares of “mediocrity”, the man freed from master-slave morality, who overthrows the shackles of taboo, who undermines the machinations of Attila and the Witchdoctor, who has buried the fabricated notion of summum bonum and has set himself up as his own god.  He recognizes power for what it is and wields his own.  Scoffing at the funerary culture of Christianity, still grieving its deceased deity, he is free.  All things proceeding from his own will, he is his own prime mover. All things directed by his own desire, he is his own form of good.  All potentiality flees before him as he creates himself through his own act.  He is, to himself, eternal.  He was there at the beginning and will be there at the end.  The world without him is meaningless because the world only exists to him insofar as he exists. He is not a microcosm within the universe:  Everything is as it is to himself:  He is the cosmos.  He lives with one notion ever reverberating through his mind, “I am who I am.”  He claims he is comfortable with this and this is what makes him most ridiculous.

Among all the truths he conjures and inculcates into his infallible worldview, one haunts him like the devil: “I will die.”  It is an ugly fact of which even the lowest animal is somewhat aware.  The primal instinct is to escape death and, for intelligent man, this instinct exudes forth from his brain as an obsession.  The Over-man is still trodden under by death and this is the humor which mingles with Nietzsche’s notion of the “gay science.”  For the egoist, the attempt to apply meaning to life is absurd.  All is futile.  All is vain.  Whatever cause, whatever impetus man finds to occupy himself dies with himself.  Mediocrity is overcome in pursuit of immortality but immortality is merely a sham and the greatest allegation against mankind’s inexorable demise.  We are, each one of us, doomed to die.

What is immortality?  The historically minded person who thinks that immortality subsists in posthumous fame or the continuation of his legacy or geniture need only ask himself if this would give satisfaction to his own will to survive.  It does not.  Alas, the greatest humor of our existence is that mortal man is too smart for his own good.  He transcends himself merely by thinking of the world without him which inevitably will be the case.  For quite some time, the world existed without him and will continue to exist after he is gone.  Mind games aside, he cannot cope with this.  The individual cannot squeeze his mind into the tiny frame of subjectivity and call himself content with his own “eternity”.  He knows that his end is upon him even now: Even now we are wasting away:  Even now our bodies succumb to decay.  Many see their impending death take hold of them slowly, torturously, and so unbearably that they hasten it.  Man becomes so oppressed by his own mortality that he often fails to see the value of life at all.  Old and feeble, mind slipping this way and that, friends and family already gone, he puts a weapon to his head or perhaps takes the rest of his medication all at once.  This, surely, is mediocrity.  Is it better to live on in the face of irresistible failure or to go against one’s primal instinct?  Either way, we are finished.  How depressing life is.  Man craves to exist but sees his very existence slipping like sand out of his mighty hands.

It is apparent that our attitudes are led in any of three directions.  Many choose to believe that “this” life is not our only life:  Immortality is the most common precept among religions and one need not wonder why.  It seems that immortality is somehow inherent to our thinking, as if primal man merely assumed that he would keep living on in some way after death.  The thought of life after death is an inclination so natural to man that we accept it without reserve from early childhood.  We cannot fully grasp the thought of non-existence and so it is no offense to the intellect to believe that we cannot entirely cease to exist.  We are hard pressed to explain how, but it makes sense to us.  It is a mysterious notion, but an easy notion because it is so satisfying.

Many may attest to their belief in the hereafter but nonetheless inadvertently fall into another attitude:  Unsatisfied by the shadowy uncertainty of religion, their craving for immortality turns to distraction. Ravenous consumers, rabid hedonists, and raging addicts of all kinds fill every waking moment with pleasure, noise, and work.  It is most likely the most common attitude of our time.   Look around and bask in wanton distraction.  Death is the last thing we wish to think about and, even when death comes into our home and makes her presence felt in our family, we hide her behind rituals, eulogies, flowers, decoration, formaldehyde, and a lot of makeup.  When one cannot see around death into the afterlife, he closes his eyes and runs from it.

Perhaps to be ever on the run is a pitiful way to go about life but, all existential dilemmas considered, it is a valid alternative to a third and even more pitiful attitude; to look death in the face and accept it.  This is real mediocrity.  This is submission to slavery.  This is direct tyranny without law or arbiter.  The will to survive courses through the marrow of our bones but it is not enough.  Someday, we will not be.  It is our greatest imperative to exist; we must exist, but we are not in control of this.  We can negate ourselves, but we cannot keep ourselves alive.  We have a mind for eternity, but our bodies fail us.  We are each one of us a failure, but to accept this failure and die with it is worse.

Self-interest is supreme stupidity.  To see one’s own failure amounts only to wisdom; to recognize what it is to be human; to be contingent.  But the self-interested man, though he is bound to accept his ultimate failure, refuses to believe. He takes wisdom only part-way and dies with it, too proud to give credence to success.  He cannot, because to admit the possibility of salvation is to admit his own impotency; that his primal instinct can only be sated by someone other than himself.  This is mediocrity.