From Blue to Blue
There's something strange about air travel, and what it does to a mind. I've never had a more surreal moment than flying to Beijing from Los Angeles one year ago. Twelve hours in a flying bus; crammed like a sardine into a goddamn tin can with jet engines bolted to it, hurtling nearly over the pole at 80% the speed of sound, filled with a whole lot of people who don't look like me, with semi-bi-lingual instructions hectoring over the scratchy intercom. I've never had jet lag like that time; we'd left past midnight, flew 12 hours through incomplete, tortured, and uncomfortable fits of pill-induced sleep, and arrived at 6AM in Beijing. How strange it was; the mind's chronometer so utterly abused, the unwelcome sun peering through the haze and smog of a distant and so very foreign land. The mind fog of that time phased out with some sleep, long, sickly sleep, like the forced rest of flu season--the kind of rest that doesn't rejuvenate, but drains.
So tonight a bit of lag seems bearable, as I adjust to three hours of my day disappearing somewhere over the great and beautiful midwest. I'm going to be here in New York for a few months. Temporarily escaping grad school in LA and being quite the red-stater, somehow the phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fire" plays throughout my subconscious. There's no doubt that NY and LA are aligned on some sort of invisible axis of insane leftism; maybe forced into ridicidulously overpriced housing and dense cities hilights the disparities between people, exacerbates the gulf between those with inherited privilege and those with inherited despondence; between those who can and those who want to harness those who can. Those who see such gulf, from its two promontories, long to bridge it--in their juvenile fancy, without regards to what the gulf means or how it came to be. Somehow they form a fantasy land of hands holding hands, creating a human bridge across the sea of disparaties, until all the tribal instincts of collectivism are fulfilled and the inescapable guilt of conscience is sated by their altruism. By such a gulf is not bridgeable; not unless all the good in the best is destroyed, and all the bad in the worst is overlooked. Alas, this gulf widens as the strong and swift trade as free beings for mutual benefit.
New York is old money, hard-earned in its day, passed to pampered fashionistas and bumbling Trump-style executants. There is some profound danger about wealth that it has taken me years to unravel. It is not the chiding of mothers or fairy tales or movies of self destruction where seeking wealth corrupts souls with boundless selfishness and greed, and it is not the juvenile obsession that leftists of all stripes have with class warfare between the rich and the poor--it is something deeper, more profound, and deeply insidious. It is the danger that inherited wealth poses to those who come to possess it by birthright. For that wealth, which can represent the honest sum of one person's brilliant career or tremendously valuable ideas, becomes a surrogate for the character that a person develops while working hard for oneself. Inheriting wealth frees a man from his obligation to provide for himself; it distorts his perception of its value and the effort required to create it. A man who inherits millions never knew the time before those millions existed, and thus cannot appreciate how the efforts of others have come to be concentrated in his own fortune. He begins to regard that wealth as if it were a natural resource, a fixture of the world, as permanent as a river or a mountain. It is lifeforce seeded to him by the universe--not by the many years of work of others. Such a man's mind is forever deceived about the nature of wealth and its origin, since its creation never concerns him; only its maintanence and its enjoyment. Despite his playing, frolocking, and even work at maintaining and expanding his own wealth, somehow this tremendous good luck bothers him; the disparities he sees in the world seem to him mere chance; after all, he did not earn his own wealth, but benefitted by good birth and lines of inheritance. It nags on his mind; the wealth concentrated in his hands seems stolen, unearned. Perhaps it really belong to everyone, and those who came before gamed and cheated and stole it from the good peoples of the earth. The danger cascades as he begins to regard all concentrations of wealth as suspect. Other wealthy men and women, and large, amorphous entities such as corporations and nations become nefarious, power-hungry, and even murderously devoted to stealing the riches of the world.
Dr Sanity could tell you that soon his own guilt is transferred to these other concentrations of wealth corporations or individuals, regardless of their merits or their morality--they become evil, and they become the source of his rage, and the rotting masses of starving children become heroes, become blameless, become victims....and release....the guilt passes, for he has found the key to his psychic pain and absolving his conscience....and another limosine liberal buds....
Los Angeles is sparkling new money, collected a few dollars at a time from passers by like a glorified side show of street performing monkeys. They grew up sometimes from small midwestern towns. Musical talent, dumb luck, ambition, and training conspire to make some into mega-stars. In TV, radio, music, motion pictures....fortunes of millions--billions--are amassed in the greatest noise machine ever assembled that caters and cajoles hapless young minds into buying billions of CDs and concert tickets. An entire industry has evolved to allow the great bored masses to get some entertainment. And what happens to the performers and producers and agents and brokers and directors and the whole industry as they discover that simply producing noise in the right forms to fill empty heads is remarkable popular and profitable? Hollywood is the greatest money collection system ever devised; better even, than taxes (at least its mostly voluntary). Some profound shift must have happened in the mindsets of these people; what do they produce that is of lasting value? Deep reflections on the nature of philosophy, science, mathematics, mankind, human nature, the universe? Few at best. Does Hollywood enrich peoples lives? What actual productive value does it have? I think its proportionately little for the revenues. These people are in the money collection business, not the money making business. What does that mean? Instead of contributing to the net output of wealth, they mostly just move it around and reconcentrate it in their own hands. A reflective hollywood insider finally understands this on some level, and they begin to understand, either by deliberate avoidance of pondering the question or by direct epiphany, that they really aren't making money; they might be making music, but the money comes from some large fanbase--out there. Where do they get the money? To carry their logic forward, again, either by deliberate avoidance of the question or by applying their perverse logic, the money is just there. It's finite but big enough not to worry; like water in the ocean. Wealth just moves around from place to place--like energy--neither created nor destroyed. Then the reflective hollywood elitist who thinks she's brilliant extends this idea to the rest of the world; perhaps all the rich people are just like them; they amassed their fortunes illegitimately by exploting their workers. And thus another Hollywood leftist follows the cycle to psychic release through leftist insanity....
The two mentalities have different origins but lead to much the same belief system. They both support a Marxist view of the world where classes of people are at war--a zero-sum game where the rich become richer by stealing more wealth from the poor. Every transaction between private individuals has a victim and an oppressor. Identifying the victim, correcting the injustice, and punishing the oppressor is the role of society.
But here is the real problem with all of that:
Free people will always trade for mutual benefit.
Note the qualification: free people. Denying this important fact is necessary in accepting the conclusions of Marxism; for it is only logical, however irrational and insane, to search for exploitation in order to nullify this simple fact; thus the obsession with oppressors and victims. Establishing one party as a victim nullifies the premise; the result is that the trade is not for mutual benefit--and somehow society must intrude to correct the imbalance. Establishing this archetype is absolutely essential in supporting this irrational view of the world, for the simple logic of that statement undoes all the reasoning of Marx. And the irrationality begs for profound changes to reality to support itself; Marxists must somehow know this principle--which makes it so important that under any Marxist system people must be made unfree--slaves to the collective--in order to prevent them from seeking mutual benefit (of which personal benefit is one half) in their relationships.
When Reagan used his rhetoric of freedom in his speeches combatting the evil of communism; it wasn't just rhetoric, it stripped the discussion down to the basest of all truths and exposed how utterly insane the left's logic was.
We need a leader that can pierce the fog of liberalism as Reagan did; and finally perhaps the left will fall by the wayside.
So tonight a bit of lag seems bearable, as I adjust to three hours of my day disappearing somewhere over the great and beautiful midwest. I'm going to be here in New York for a few months. Temporarily escaping grad school in LA and being quite the red-stater, somehow the phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fire" plays throughout my subconscious. There's no doubt that NY and LA are aligned on some sort of invisible axis of insane leftism; maybe forced into ridicidulously overpriced housing and dense cities hilights the disparities between people, exacerbates the gulf between those with inherited privilege and those with inherited despondence; between those who can and those who want to harness those who can. Those who see such gulf, from its two promontories, long to bridge it--in their juvenile fancy, without regards to what the gulf means or how it came to be. Somehow they form a fantasy land of hands holding hands, creating a human bridge across the sea of disparaties, until all the tribal instincts of collectivism are fulfilled and the inescapable guilt of conscience is sated by their altruism. By such a gulf is not bridgeable; not unless all the good in the best is destroyed, and all the bad in the worst is overlooked. Alas, this gulf widens as the strong and swift trade as free beings for mutual benefit.
New York is old money, hard-earned in its day, passed to pampered fashionistas and bumbling Trump-style executants. There is some profound danger about wealth that it has taken me years to unravel. It is not the chiding of mothers or fairy tales or movies of self destruction where seeking wealth corrupts souls with boundless selfishness and greed, and it is not the juvenile obsession that leftists of all stripes have with class warfare between the rich and the poor--it is something deeper, more profound, and deeply insidious. It is the danger that inherited wealth poses to those who come to possess it by birthright. For that wealth, which can represent the honest sum of one person's brilliant career or tremendously valuable ideas, becomes a surrogate for the character that a person develops while working hard for oneself. Inheriting wealth frees a man from his obligation to provide for himself; it distorts his perception of its value and the effort required to create it. A man who inherits millions never knew the time before those millions existed, and thus cannot appreciate how the efforts of others have come to be concentrated in his own fortune. He begins to regard that wealth as if it were a natural resource, a fixture of the world, as permanent as a river or a mountain. It is lifeforce seeded to him by the universe--not by the many years of work of others. Such a man's mind is forever deceived about the nature of wealth and its origin, since its creation never concerns him; only its maintanence and its enjoyment. Despite his playing, frolocking, and even work at maintaining and expanding his own wealth, somehow this tremendous good luck bothers him; the disparities he sees in the world seem to him mere chance; after all, he did not earn his own wealth, but benefitted by good birth and lines of inheritance. It nags on his mind; the wealth concentrated in his hands seems stolen, unearned. Perhaps it really belong to everyone, and those who came before gamed and cheated and stole it from the good peoples of the earth. The danger cascades as he begins to regard all concentrations of wealth as suspect. Other wealthy men and women, and large, amorphous entities such as corporations and nations become nefarious, power-hungry, and even murderously devoted to stealing the riches of the world.
Dr Sanity could tell you that soon his own guilt is transferred to these other concentrations of wealth corporations or individuals, regardless of their merits or their morality--they become evil, and they become the source of his rage, and the rotting masses of starving children become heroes, become blameless, become victims....and release....the guilt passes, for he has found the key to his psychic pain and absolving his conscience....and another limosine liberal buds....
Los Angeles is sparkling new money, collected a few dollars at a time from passers by like a glorified side show of street performing monkeys. They grew up sometimes from small midwestern towns. Musical talent, dumb luck, ambition, and training conspire to make some into mega-stars. In TV, radio, music, motion pictures....fortunes of millions--billions--are amassed in the greatest noise machine ever assembled that caters and cajoles hapless young minds into buying billions of CDs and concert tickets. An entire industry has evolved to allow the great bored masses to get some entertainment. And what happens to the performers and producers and agents and brokers and directors and the whole industry as they discover that simply producing noise in the right forms to fill empty heads is remarkable popular and profitable? Hollywood is the greatest money collection system ever devised; better even, than taxes (at least its mostly voluntary). Some profound shift must have happened in the mindsets of these people; what do they produce that is of lasting value? Deep reflections on the nature of philosophy, science, mathematics, mankind, human nature, the universe? Few at best. Does Hollywood enrich peoples lives? What actual productive value does it have? I think its proportionately little for the revenues. These people are in the money collection business, not the money making business. What does that mean? Instead of contributing to the net output of wealth, they mostly just move it around and reconcentrate it in their own hands. A reflective hollywood insider finally understands this on some level, and they begin to understand, either by deliberate avoidance of pondering the question or by direct epiphany, that they really aren't making money; they might be making music, but the money comes from some large fanbase--out there. Where do they get the money? To carry their logic forward, again, either by deliberate avoidance of the question or by applying their perverse logic, the money is just there. It's finite but big enough not to worry; like water in the ocean. Wealth just moves around from place to place--like energy--neither created nor destroyed. Then the reflective hollywood elitist who thinks she's brilliant extends this idea to the rest of the world; perhaps all the rich people are just like them; they amassed their fortunes illegitimately by exploting their workers. And thus another Hollywood leftist follows the cycle to psychic release through leftist insanity....
The two mentalities have different origins but lead to much the same belief system. They both support a Marxist view of the world where classes of people are at war--a zero-sum game where the rich become richer by stealing more wealth from the poor. Every transaction between private individuals has a victim and an oppressor. Identifying the victim, correcting the injustice, and punishing the oppressor is the role of society.
But here is the real problem with all of that:
Free people will always trade for mutual benefit.
Note the qualification: free people. Denying this important fact is necessary in accepting the conclusions of Marxism; for it is only logical, however irrational and insane, to search for exploitation in order to nullify this simple fact; thus the obsession with oppressors and victims. Establishing one party as a victim nullifies the premise; the result is that the trade is not for mutual benefit--and somehow society must intrude to correct the imbalance. Establishing this archetype is absolutely essential in supporting this irrational view of the world, for the simple logic of that statement undoes all the reasoning of Marx. And the irrationality begs for profound changes to reality to support itself; Marxists must somehow know this principle--which makes it so important that under any Marxist system people must be made unfree--slaves to the collective--in order to prevent them from seeking mutual benefit (of which personal benefit is one half) in their relationships.
When Reagan used his rhetoric of freedom in his speeches combatting the evil of communism; it wasn't just rhetoric, it stripped the discussion down to the basest of all truths and exposed how utterly insane the left's logic was.
We need a leader that can pierce the fog of liberalism as Reagan did; and finally perhaps the left will fall by the wayside.
posted by D. Vision at
8:39 PM
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