Given the current economic climate, or economic storm, money and its availability in the form of wages, credit or profit, or lack thereof, is once again foremost on everyone’s mind, even the very rich few who without a doubt are currently developing new schemes to profit from the misery of the many (this is usually called seizing opportunities, the way the sick or exhausted African zebra is the seized opportunity of the hyena).

Let’s not be exceedingly fooled by talks of compassion at any societal levels: ours remains mostly a dog eat dog world, and many of the top winners of such a senseless survival contest appear determined to make it ever more unforgiving for the losers.

To the iron-willed conqueror, the weak is a burden…to those who espouse social Darwinism, and they are the majority at the very top, the weak is meant to be exploited, abused, and eradicated whenever deemed necessary and with nature’s blessing, since according to Darwin’s fantasies, the survival of the fittest is nature’s plan … It is incidentally extremely ironic that a culture would be so seemingly eager to submit to an imaginary natural law when in every other respect displaying contempt for nature, and being so antagonistic and hostile to nature as to strive to overcome it and make it obsolete.

Who is weak, and who is the fittest? In business as in life, generosity, trust, innocence, vulnerability, sensitivity, openness, compassion, respect, a spirit of cooperation and sharing and even having a conscience can be somewhat detrimental to wealth accumulation and preservation.

The successful top business model is predatory, more often than not ruthless, exploitative of the ignorance, misfortune, or weaknesses of others … at the highest levels the aim is no longer to compete but to eliminate the competition, as in an all out war.

Big business is indeed war, just as war has always been big business, the collateral damage being the majority of the world population. The fittest is then the successful predator, and the poor, the working class and increasingly the middle class, are its prey.

While most small businesses offer real, valuable, honest services and products, many large businesses and multinational corporations simply feed on the public the way a wood tick feeds on a mammal, or government feeds on the taxpayer. The problem with the law of the jungle, however, is not so much that so few get to exploit so many, this sickness has always been part of the civilized world ever since the Roman Empire, but that the acquisition of wealth and power for their own sake leads to the development of philistine cultures, where the focuses in living are no longer meaning and quality but survival and quantity.

Mostly gone are, for example, reasonable interests in art, poetry, literature, philosophy, unless the popular trash that passes for such leads to marketable formulas and significant corporate profits. The barbarians are no longer at the gate, they are in the temple, and are in a position to dictate, with an implacable logic that is exclusively grounded in the harsh principles of money making, the terms of the world enduring slavery, which is that of barely existing under the burden of society’s ever more oppressive commercialism.

The habit of an obsessive pursuit of money for its own sake appeals to people whose uneducated motivations cause them to be oblivious and impermeable to any kind of refinement, sophistication or higher aspirations, to display a hatred of even the slightest traces of intellectualism, to distrust imaginative, independent, creative, free-thinking individuals, to favor conformity, uniformity, blind group loyalty as in nationalism, and to delight and perhaps even take pride in idiocy, as long as it is group idiocy, as can be seen in the media and mass trends.

Let’s compare objects created in previous centuries, to today’s mass-produced junk: most old objects, antiques, bear the mark of their human makers, a rare and beautiful quality of heart and soul involvement and individuality. Today’s objects only bear the mark of speedy profitability, they are vacant of all humanity, as are becoming our lives: plastic, rushed, impersonal, increasingly insensitive and hollow, and ruled by the crass corporate model of profit at all costs, by the ideas that what is not profitable is irrelevant and what impedes profits is the enemy of human society.

In this regard, the true artist, the true poet, whose main motivations are anything but money, are suspiciously regarded as being almost seditious, adversarial to the norm, while the norm, first defined by the productivity of the assembly line, now causes workers and professionals to compete with an increasingly faster electronic standard of productivity, natural time being perceived to be a great obstacle to monetary gain, which is to say that our very own humanity is currently defined to be an obstruction to profit.

What kind of world is this, then? A world that, for those who reject the social conditioning that encourages relentless competition, the manic pursuit of material rewards and a drive to achieve recognition within the boundaries of limited social frameworks, makes no more sense than a treadmill would make sense to someone who would rather run free in the wild open prairie.

To make sense of a world that keeps people down, immobilized, functioning like robots and barely living, and whose only practical freedom is financial freedom, without which life remains, under any form of government, slavery, one has to become a willing and obedient hostage of conditioning indeed, and follow the vastly unintelligent social script as closely as a prisoner follows incarceration rules.

The prison, the evil here is not money itself, but the utter fantasy that high artificial living standards create happiness and fulfillment while more modest natural living standards cause misery…why then do the richest people on earth are plagued by so many mental illnesses such as depression, bi-polar disorder, etc? Not to romanticize poverty and demonize wealth, but a simpler, calmer, more natural, authentic and cooperative way of life is in my opinion far superior to the mania of pillaging the earth to manufacture ever more toxic products and substances that are ever faster consumed and discarded while entire populations are exploited in every possible manner or even killed to keep this madness going.

What is today called material poverty becomes psychologically unbearable only within an environment that is culturally bare, alienating, and devoid of authentic human fulfillment, a cultural, spiritual and psychological wasteland. Where and when populations have very close family units, meaningful social roles and connections, essential values and a propensity to fulfill real, natural human needs rather than artificial desires and fancy cravings, a humbler lifestyle is not perceived to be anymore humiliating or unfulfilling than not having a 3000 square foot house would have been perceived to be damaging to the self-worth or well-being of a 19th century Inuit, or than not growing up in Beverly Hills and not going to summer vacation in the Hampton is damaging to the average American child’s psyche.

It is time to initiate new social and cultural standards to restore a sense of inner self to the individual, to understand that frantic productivity and consumerism are not conditions fundamental to fulfillment, and a quasi imperial standard of living is not essential to human happiness, so that the earth is no longer trashed and the future generations sacrificed to elevate the low self-esteem and fill the inner void of the neurotic and the spiritually vacant.

Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Published: 13 June 2009