Every time I watch a video by Bill Whittle, I am reminded that there are people out there like me who, if things go to shit, I will be perfectly comfortable betting my survival on.
I just finished Five Thrillers, a sci-fi by Robert Reed. It's the serial about a character by the name of Joseph Carroway, a man with two extraordinary talents. He has an innate ability to read people's motivations, size them up, and figure them out. And, he has a sociopathic ability to do whatever it takes to save human lives. The combination make him, ultimately a sort of philosopher king, but he goes through life as an assassin. You've all heard of the moral exercise of 'The Lifeboat'. You're shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean and you have six people but room for only five. Who lives, who dies? Joe Carroway is the one man who can make that decision better than any human, but his logic is extraordinarily precise, and correct. Hearing it out makes you realize that more often than not, we make choices that are comfortably dismissive of the value of human life - that we have ways of thinking that make high minded appeals to sacrifice, when in fact the situation calls for heroism or justice.
To give away some of the ending of 'Five Thrillers', Carroway makes a statement about the necessity for cannibalism in anticipation of an extraordinary global calamity. Cannibalism a year so that one generation can survive to be 10 generations. Brutal selfishness and paranoic distrust for 10 generations so that those generations can survive for 50 generations, until a world is reborn where the possibility of liberty can be actualized. Else, extinction.
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Today Roger Simon pinged the idea that the end of the American Dream is at hand. And I wonder about that. Without having read anything below that soundbite, I figured he was talking about the probability that banks will no longer fund 30 year mortgages for the American middle class and that in some not too distant future, the only Americans who will own property are those who already do. I've long been aware of this paradox when I noted in my bohemian days the sleeping habits of the homeless in NYC. You see NYC being a winter city, banks often enclosed their outdoor ATMs in heated glass enclosures, some the size of a good sized bedroom. You use your ATM card to unlock the security door and use the ATM, unless there was some bum sitting there in a huddle. Why should they be allowed to sleep on bank-owned property, I thought. Well, how many of us do sleep in bank-owned property? You may call yourself a homeowner, but have you had a mortgage burning party lately?
Why not assume the worse? What if America goes feudal, and we're all just peasants who will never get the benefit of a general heartless corporation that offers money at a reasonable percentage so you can pretend to be the king of your own castle for 30 years? Imagine you have to work for a person, not an institution. Imagine you have to be a name and not a number. Imagine that everything had to go through your boss's boss's boss. That there were no credit scores, no SATs, no demographic abstracts about your qualities - that it all hung on the word of that man. Yeah man. The Man. Imagine that there were never any telephone agents or customer service jagoffs for you to complain to - no middle management, no flunkies or flacks. Everything goes to The Man. That's the kind of feudalism I'm talking about. No corporate institutions. No United Nations, no Safeco Field, no Organizations for the Whatever of Whatever. Just The Man whose kingdom extends as far as you've ever walked in your life from the place you were born.
Do you have it within your power today to find such a man? Can you ever imagine such a powerful figure to be just? I can.
That's what I've been thinking about these past few years. If I have the God given right to make life and death decisions, well then I want to be The Man. It is why I read Shakespeare's tragedies. It is why I read Plato. It is why I study politics and culture and philosophy and theology and history. It is why I game. It is why I write. Because I know there's a Man behind all of this, and when the institutions rot to the ground, those men will still be around. And how will you find them? And how will they know you? And what will you do if society's institutions all go bankrupt? Since Enron I've been thinking this. And immediately since learning of Stalin's atrocities, I've been thinking this. Do you know how, do you know why?
Because one day I walked into a bank in Texas and tried to deposit a check for $7500 that I earned and it took me half the damned day to get my cash. I saw the failure of the institution, but I still remember the man named Buck who got me the job that sent me to South Texas that paid me the check from Buck's bank in North Texas. All these peasants were standing between Buck and me. And they called themselves 'working', but they were just sleeping on bank-owned property and getting between me and my money.
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I know what it's like, relatively speaking, to be The Man. And I know what it's like to be despised in that position - to have all of your honor called into question by some bureaucratic formalism. You do too. That's why you hate talking to those drones on the phone all the way over in India who ask you your security question - that is, when their computers are functioning. Because they have no idea of your value as a human being. They have no way of assessing your character, of judging your honor, of knowing what kind of person you are, of sizing you up and putting some understanding into the equation. They just know how to process this corporate transaction. Or this government transaction. Whatever. You're just a number, and they're just doing their job. Surely you must understand, you have that kind of job too, don't you?
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The problem with social collapse is that there are pockets of plenty, of private, well-managed business, that gets drowned with the rising tide of failure. We're all interconnected, after all. That is no longer in question. I don't want to see the end of the American dream. I kinda like the anonymity of being a number. But if we go feudal instead of corporate, I think I'll have some advantage because I was never the one asking my government to do more. I was never the one surprised by institutional corruption and mendacity. I was never the one begging for bureaucracies to expand and deliver more of their transactions to more of the middle class and the deserving poor. I was the one looking for The Man. I was the one trying to be The Man for me and my people.
Individual liberty is not incompatible with feudalism. It depends on the man. Try getting that institution to defend your individual liberty.
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