Produce To Be Good

“Mommy what is capitalism?”
“ Oh, just another ism, like communism or despotism, only it’s the ism we’re living in. It’s a little complicated. You see the little fish gets eaten by a bigger fish who gets eaten by an even bigger fish who gets eaten by the biggest fish of all... We have to produce a lot of junk, like toys that break after you play with them once, clothes that rip after you wash them twice, and cars that fall apart after you pull out of the dealership. The best thing is for them to be produced in a U.S. territory, not the actual United States you see, but an island somewhere that no one has noticed or cares about. Then you can work foreigners to the bone and refuse them bathroom breaks and pay them pennies and still slap a tag that says “Made In America” onto your product. That’s how you make a profit. If Xu Lin doesn’t want to make the big bucks selling her body to support her family she gets a job in a factory making designer brand hand bags. Let’s say she makes 10 cents an hour and finishes 10 purses in one hour, how much did it cost to make one handbag? One cent. That’s right, although you also had to pay for materials so lets say that it costs you 4 cents per bag. Consequently you pay out a total of five cents. Then you sell the bag for $105. You earn a profit of $104.95. That’s capitalism. You could keep a factory here in the continental United States, but then you’d have to pay your workers at least minimum wage and you’ll probably have to offer them health insurance of some kind and that’ll cost you something too, so you’d end up earning a profit of only $95 dollars per bag. Clearly, you will make more money if you build your factory and hire somewhere over seas or just across the border in Mexico and take advantage of some truly impoverished peoples. You’re allowed to do that if you are a Capitalist, because capitalist are free. The other great thing about being a producer in a capitalist society is that you can form a corporation that will protect you from the consequences of your irresponsibility. For example, if I start pouring poisonous waste into our neighbor’s well to dispose of it cheaply and they get sick and die, I’ll have to go to jail. However, if my corporation pours water into my neighbor’s well and they get sick and die, the worst that can happen is that the corporation will get fined, but I won’t have to go to jail. That’s capitalism. In a capitalistic society you have the right to form a sociopathic entity to do all of your dirty work for you and you can sit back and reap the rewards. The other important part of capitalism is consuming. You need to buy a lot of things to be a good member of a capitalistic society. The more you buy the more money another capitalist makes. And the best part is that nobody tells us what to think. For example we can pray in whatever church we want to, or buy anything we want, or watch as much television as we want. Some of the other isms can’t do that because they are afraid if they watch certain shows or read certain books or pray to certain Gods or buy whatever they want then they’ll become capitalists too. And they’re probably right. Who wouldn’t want to be a capitalist? It’s the best ism of all!”

Moths And Hobos

My experience with hobos and moths has taught me that it is a mistake to be attracted to warmth and light; these are the real death traps. These are the places where there are walls that hold the warmth and light together in stagnant pools allowing virulent strains of consciousness to engage in a frenzied process of growth and replication. In the cold, endless, dark, night where there are no walls, your own radiance is all that you have, all that is required if you prefer freedom to entrapment. You may shiver and come to know death’s pale face in the wide endless wood, but you will have lived unfettered. Uncontaminated.
The life in the light is like no life at all. It is the life of chimps in dresses and lions behind bars and baby elephants in clown paint. It is no life at all. Where everything is chained in certainty, in safety, in comfort and doused in fluorescent splendor and halogen homeliness; on the inside.
It can be so tempting as you flit by in the night, a solitary lone entity, a one that has no other, no assurances, no desires to lead you from one unsatisfactory chamber within the labyrinthine city walls to the next and the next, sampling the buffet offering of colored lights; trying the red light, the blue light, the green light, the yellow light, the orange light, the violet light and even the white. It can be so tempting, the promise of something to warm your cold skin, the promise that death will no longer be able to look in on you and leer at you so.
You can leave her behind, outside the walls. You can be warm and full of the same stuffing the rest of the may hens and Christmas geese of civilization have been stuffed with. You too could be filled with the disease, the warm disease. No longer alone. No longer unique. No longer alive. One of an assorted variety of creatures fastened by steely pins to a white back drop, carefully labeled, preserved beneath the glass, made brilliant under the light.
It is so tempting. I know. I know.
We shiver and run barefoot through the blackness and ascend invisible mountains and tumble from great heights never knowing what we are doing, or where we are going, only doing it with style, somersaulting on wings the color of soiled doilies or whirring by in a drafty box car over the clickity, clack, clikcity, clack, or strolling by the glittering glass display windows without peering inside. It is so tempting because death has gone all mad, or always was and always will be and whispers all sorts of things through her broken teeth and the gaping black holes where they used to be.
She is always out here with us, hanging on our arms, or walking five paces behind, and sometimes she’s a gay old time, but sometimes she makes you shiver, or rather something in you switches around and makes you shiver, because people are hot and cold like that. Sometimes we are repelled by the real deal and sometimes we accept it, all depending on which of our masks is doing the driving just then. And when you are one of those “I's” that can’t stand her rancid breath and wailing cackle anymore, then you might start looking for the nearest well lit window, looking for a crack to slip in.
But then you might remember, Rome always falls, and when it does she will be waiting and feeling scorned, and you might even think for a moment how lonely she would be if you weren’t out here turning summersaults down her black cape. And you might remember that moths get trapped in brightly-lit kitchens and die under lampshades and behind curtains, having battered themselves to death against the confines of the oppressive walls of the labyrinthine city. You might think, as I sometimes do, that hobos are wiser than the moths, trying to get outside instead of in, and you might take a step backward, away from the open window or door, away from the light and the warmth and sickness of the living dead and not enter Rome with its comfort and delights.
Those things, they come with a price, so you see, you can sell yourself to Rome or give yourself to the wild, and one you do to escape the pain of living and the other you do for love, because mad as she is, death is your companion, your immortal beloved, and maybe you can help her to carry the burden of eternity and give her a shoulder to lean on in the wilderness.

Warm Star

It is a lovely warm little star. Not the biggest type of star there is in space, a blue giant, and not the smallest type either, a blue dwarf, but a lovely yellow sun. A unique star in this part of the universe, in that it is steward of a planet that teems with carbon based life forms. A motherly star. A star with a warm heart. This little planet that it has fostered is rare too, at least within this region of infinite space. A sort of museum of varied life forms. In the minds of other planets and other stars within this locality it may well be that this planet and this star are regarded as a pair of deviants, a sort of mutant team hosting a sort of infestation. Or they may not notice at all. One must wonder over the beauty of it, the rarity, the precise positioning that makes this museum of life possible; the star doing its best and the planet offering the elements that make up its composition to spawn and sustain a myriad of creations.
Fantastic.
We humans have put a motherly face on the sun and then a fatherly face on it and a motherly face on the earth, thinking of it as male or female. We suppose that whatever we happen to be down here in the museum sets the standard for the principles of the cosmos. As if the painting dictates the nature of the painter.
We know nothing. Certainly nothing of the love of stars and planets. We see black holes as frightening, the death of a star. What if the black hole is the flowering, the blossoming of the star? Or perhaps what we know of as stars might be like the blooms on a tree, and the black hole resulting from the star’s super nova is the fruit. The fruit of one tree is the beginning of a new tree’s life. That fruit contains and feeds the seed until it is ready to sprout.
We imagine that some being or beings from outside might look upon us humans of earth and be wowed by our capacity to love and be stunned by our ability to hate. It is the equivalent of ants dreaming that their service to the queen will touch the heart of an elephant. An elephant would hardly notice an ant, or even an entire colony of ants, and if it did, intelligent though elephants are, they would not take the ants service to the queen in the same context that the ants themselves do.
We are rare and unusual, but we are not the center of the universe. All things do not correspond to our own evolution, our own processes of insemination and gestation. We are one possible outcome of certain conditions, randomly produced sequences of events. That we are a product of chaos makes us no less beautiful. That we were not planned neither adds to nor diminishes our potential. Our potential to do whatever it is that we can do using the most of our abilities.
Imagine a bucket of multicolored interconnecting blocks. That is the potential. Imagine spilling them out onto the rug and endeavoring to build whatever you can using as many of the blocks as possible. There would be different ways to configure them, many possible variations. It would also be possible to refrain from using all of the blocks, all of the potential, in order to build something that was only blue, or only white.
As far as our potential goes, we are like a child who hasn’t even seen all the blocks because he was so taken with the red ones and particularly the red squares, and is only vaguely aware that there are more blocks on the rug and he could build something other than a high red tower.
We know nothing. We wither as blossoms. The fruit never swells, the seed is never nourished, the gateway to the new tree is never opened.
Still, it is a lovely warm little star, doing the most it can. We are just a side effect of its own self explorations.

Intelligence

It is hysterical to me that conversations about intelligence can be had with a straight face. There is an abyss there, a place that exist beyond our own human-centric notions and needs, and somehow we are completely blind to it. We run around on a plateau with our eyes shut. One day we will drop over the edge and that will be that. That is what comes of running around blindfolded on a plateau, it’s like a game of Russian roulette, you can be okay for a maximum of five rounds before oblivion snakes its hand around your ankles and pulls you into the darkness. We are only just barely beginning to understand the workings of the human mind, and even in these studies, there is little hope of finding an objective truth. The assumptions that are made at the beginning of any undertaking have direct bearing on the results that such an undertaking will yield. The beginning is also the end.
Where we start determines where we will end. And we as human beings begin all undertakings from the point of view of a human being: can we eat it, can we wear it, can we fuck it, will it cause us to experience emotional well being, or a more comfortable material existence? Will it perpetuate the species, or advance our treasured ideals? We are only interested in ourselves. We assume that we are the crown of creation, the best direction that evolution could have taken.
And what if this is not the only world in which life thrives? What if this is just one direction that evolution may take when restrained within a certain set of conditions? Not the best, or the most unique, or the most special, just one of many?
So much of what we think is colored by the idea that there was a supreme maker and that we were the best that he could do. Let’s suppose that we accept that our ideas about a supreme maker are all egotistical fancies, stories that any schizophrenic would tell themselves, or any available listener, to justify that alluring suspicion that they are special. We want to be special. We have created a mythos or two to give credence to our specialness.
Each individual human wants to be the best, the most adored, and these desires that color our most personal impressions of the world around us also worm their way into the expressions of the collective. The village, the state, the nation, the race, the species….mine must be the best. My existence is justified by my righteousness, my righteousness is justified by the existence of a creator whose existence is implied by my own. Everything that I come up with that originates from my humanity ends with my humanity. It is an endless feedback loop.
It is hell.
It is life as a human animal.
We may ask: what is intelligence?
In the case of humans, Intelligence is a process of evaluating information based on currency and relevance to the human intelligence rather than on detail or accuracy. Our intelligence is self centered, self serving. Our intelligence is the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience. We are all about profiting ourselves.
But suppose that we are just one direction that evolution may take under certain conditions. Suppose that different conditions dictate different forms of intelligent life. The values that arise from that other evolutionary process would be different from our own. What is important and useful in material, and intellectual and even emotional terms, to one system is not shared by all systems.
Sometimes the interaction between a pair of intelligent systems is profitable for both systems. Sometimes it can profit only one and not the other, and at other times it may be neither harmful nor beneficial to either system. Not in any obvious way. Given that situation, how then would we measure intelligence? How would we define it?