Free your mind of the idea of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.
Now, it's long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others, or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and, by now, that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.
You've lived too long in New York, I told her. There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible, honorable, sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less "successful" in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.
The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. (Prescience? Perhaps.)
"Which means exactly what?" (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.)
I tried to explain, but didn't do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. This is what I wrote:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.
ECUAGRINGOS
He leído en una revista guayaquileña, la más popular del Ecuador, que en todas las crónicas y reportajes que se escriben sobre nosotros, los ecuatorianos que vivimos en el Norte, nos llaman los "ecuagringos". ¡Qué miserables e indolentes! ¿Por qué bautizarnos con un calificativo tan denigrante y perverso? Es como condenarnos para siempre al destierro, es como decirnos: ustedes son otra cosa, son otra categoría de ecuatorianos, o mejor: ustedes ya dejaron de ser ecuatorianos. Ustedes no son ni gringos ni ecuatorianos, son esa cosa amorfa, anormal, esa nueva categoría maldita: los "ecuagringos". Por eso a mis hijos les he dicho esta mañana: "Esto se acabó carajo, mañana mismo aplico mi solicitud de naturalización, nos hacemos canadienses mierda y nos olvidamos de esa tierra que habiéndonos visto nacer nos desprecia". Mis hijos han llorado conmigo porque no sabe usted cuánto me ha costado inclucarles el amor a nuestra tierra. ¡Cuánto mi señor!
APELLIDOS
Mi apellido es Chiluisa, a mucha honra mi señor, es un apellido indígena, uno de los pocos que puede decirse propio de nuestro país, sin embargo suena en los oídos de muchos imbéciles como un apellido extranjero o, al menos, exótico cuando no despreciable. Figúrese usted, a esos mismos tontos no les parecen extraños aquellos apellidos que tienen significado semántico de obstáculo, trampa, cárcel: los Paredes, Pozos, Fierros. Los Buenos que son Malos, o los Peñas que son Arroyos, o los Lasos que son Correas. Los que tienen nombres de ciudades españolas: los Sevillas, Madrides, Córdovas. Los que tienen apellidos con apodos de torero: los Cordovez. Los que significan nombres de animales feroces: los Leones, Pumas; o de animales con cuernos: los Vacas, Toros, Corderos. Los que significan colores: los Rosados, Morenos, Blancos. Los que significan partes del cuerpo humano: los Cabezas, Barrigas, casi digo Vergaras. Los que significan pelo rizado: Crespos, o casa con muros: Castillos; y peor los que significan Guerra o Paz o Piedra. Los apellidos extranjeros les suenan como miel en los oídos, mejor si son anglosajones o francófonos; aceptan felices a los árabes (ya mismo tenemos un presidente de ese origen) o judíos, polacos o checos, pero cuando oyen un Toapanta, un Chicaiza, un Morocho, un Michui, se ponen en guardia, alzan las narices, dicen: tatay. Y cuidado una hija o un hijo vayan a mezclarse con un hombre o mujer de esos apellidos, cuidado, alarma general, suicidios. Qué país de retrasados mentales, mi señor, en pleno siglo XXI seguiremos los ecuatorianos preocupados por el apellido y por la raza. Pues somos racistas a más no poder. No solo que despreciamos al indio, sino al negro y al chino y al mestizo y al mulato. Solo los blancos o blanqueados tienen carta de identidad. Las demás razas son mal vistas en público o privado. A un artista tan notable como Guayasamín le dicen en los pasillos de las casas adineradas: "ese indio e mierda". Y no se diga de un profesor universitario, como yo, a quien le niegan el ingreso hasta en ciertos sectores académicos, donde hay profesores que se dicen de izquierda. Por eso vivo aquí tranquilo, no es que aquí no sean racistas, no; no es que aquí mi apellido no suene extraño, no, pero al menos no es mi país, pues me siento extranjero en el extranjero, pero lo peor es sentirse extranjero en el suelo propio.
Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is—something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
I felt so lucky and privileged not to be out there in the muddy field - to be making music every night for an attentive audience. But the shock of what was going on made it hard to separate what we were doing from the horrible and persistent abuse of money and power and that is at the root of these situations. Profit dictates our decisions on a global scale. Most of us know this should not be happening. And yet the debates we are offered are where we should store our nuclear waste, when we should stop heating the earth's atmosphere, what kind of missiles we would like to have pointed at us from space, and who should benefit from lengthy incarceration and even death at the hands of the state. Rampant poverty and boundless riches co-exist as the norm. How do you protest a system that co-opts and marginalizes almost every unique and original thought that confronts it? And how do you stay silent?
There is no question in my mind that the intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and unrepresented - Robin Hood, some are likely to say. Yet it’s not that simple a role, and therefore cannot be easily dismissed as just so much romantic idealism. At bottom, the intellectual in my sense of the word is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public. This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along. This involves a steady realism and almost athletic rational energy; and a complicated struggle to balance the problem of one’s own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting effort - constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect. Yet its invigorations and complexities are, for me at least, the richer for it, even though it doesn’t make one particularly popular.
La main qui donne est la main qui dirige.
Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!
Forgive everyone everything.
What other people think of you is none of your business.
No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich.
In the age of globalization, your dignity is determined by your passport. If you're American or European, you will get your Emirati visa in the VIP section, and other nationalities will wait on you. In other countries, borders will fall magically at your advent, and visas will be provided on arrival at the airport. Ir you're Indian or Filipino, you will wait endlessly in line and be treated with casual rudeness, along with all the other Unimportant Persons. In the twenty-first century, your humanity is defined by your nationality. And those who have no nationality - the Palestinians, the Rohingya - are fucked. They will wander the earth, powerless.
This is the American exceptionalism: it's a country made up of all other countries. This is why I'm proud to call it my country. It may not be the reason I came, but it is the reason I stay. Today's immigrants might have come as the creditors, but they have become a credit to the country.
The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal - and often vindictive - power of the state.
Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has; yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity.
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.
I would like, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-annhilation.
In this book I have largely avoided making concrete proposals, but let me end with one. It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sort of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
The kind of law that I would enact as proper to follow next after the foregoing would be this: It is, as we assert, necessary in a State which is to avoid that greatest of plagues, which is better termed disruption than dissension (or "class discord"), that none of its citizens should be in a condition of either painful poverty or wealth, since both these conditions produce both these results; consequently the lawgiver must now declare a limit for both these conditions. The limit of poverty shall be the value of the allotment: this must remain fixed, and its diminution in any particular instance no magistrate should overlook, nor any other citizen who aspires to goodness. And having set this as the (inferior) limit, the lawgiver shall allow a man to possess twice this amount, or three times, or four times. Should anyone acquire more than this — whether by discovery or gift or money-making, or through gaining a sum exceeding the due measure by some other such piece of luck, if he makes the surplus over to the State and the gods who keep the State, he shall be well-esteemed and free from penalty. But if anyone disobeys this law, whoso wishes may get half by laying information, and the man that is convicted shall pay out an equal share of his own property, and the half shall go to the gods. All the property of every man over and above his allotment shall be publicly written out and be in the keeping of the magistrates appointed by law, so that legal rights pertaining to all matters of property may be easy to decide and perfectly clear.