Everything Nac

Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer

     Have you ever noticed this pattern: Whenever it comes down to money, the people that have it are conspiracy theorists against losing it; whenever it comes down to oppression, the people who don’t have money are the “targets” of not gaining access to earning or making it. The people who have money are always afraid the people who don’t have it are always trying to get theirs. The people who don’t have it are afraid the people who do have it are trying to take the rest of it and keep them too busy to earn it for themselves. The subtle pattern is that everyone is paranoid that everyone else is trying to take what they don’t yet have and that they themselves are only trying to get what they feel they deserve.

     The people at every level can’t understand why anyone else is complaining. Those who have money think the ones who don’t have it only don’t have it because they are lazy and are unwilling to work for it. The ones who don’t have it think the ones who do have it are only loaded because they somehow ripped everyone else off. Paranoia runs the show. The ones who have can never get enough, and the ones who don’t have can never get enough. Costs are always going up, either because of an expectation and therefore a creation of inflation or an increasing perceived need for an ever higher standard of living. Everyone wants to make more and increasingly so, and everyone is afraid that no matter what they get, it will not ever be enough. It’s a pattern.

     We can hear the ones who have it saying that those who don’t have it have not earned it and do not deserve it, but then we can also see the road blocks that those who have it set up to make sure that access is limited. Ideas are stolen, blocked, or bought out under pressure. We’ve got nepotism, bias, prejudice, and territorialism at work. The smallest gains have so many strings attached that an increase in salary often ends up as a net loss for workers, and each step forward seems to contain the seed for 10 steps back. Those who have shift the rules and make the pathway more and more costly and impossible, and yet complain that those who don’t have are not trying hard enough in this Greek myth of the rising wall of access. The ones on the low side, those who don’t have, are easily bought off; they show little real back bone in the face of intimidation and redirecting tactics. They are not at all focused and so are easily distracted, which is simple to do. The bullying and teasing are dishonorable uses of the public media, and yet they do it to each other. It is no wonder that they each see each other as undeserving.

     The race is on then. We have to complain because of the constant threat we feel, and the unfairness of it all. We have to work ever harder and yet we never catch up. Even the ones who are perceived as being lazy and unwilling to work have to shuffle their cards increasingly ever more because of the feeling that they are losing status and ground, even as the homeless or hopeless. There is homeless, and then there is the homeless without shelter programs and volunteer outreach. Increasingly, jail is where the mentally ill or hapless criminal elements end up. We have the largest prisoner base in the world right here in America. If you get outside “the American dream,” you are screwed and we all know it. Those who have would rather pay for jails than to meet the need, that is that the symptom is more in mind than the cure of prevention.

     Not that having it all means that you will continue to have it all. If you are going to make it, you have to fight, work, scramble, plan, risk, and have more than moderate success, otherwise you get taken over in a hostile business climate and end up with a check that has to last you for life or you have to start it all over again and build another business. No one is ultimately safe and the money is built on meringue. It’s all simply a projection of worth in the future; the dollar itself is only worth something because we say it is. If anyone called our bluff, we would all be out on the street. Our cockiness is merely a show of bravado, “Because I said so.”

     What can we do with the knowledge of this pattern? How is it useful? They say that when you find yourself in a hole, one thing to do is to stop digging. If it is really deep and the walls are steep, it will do no good to start digging sideways, because you might inadvertently bury yourself. You have to stand higher in the hole, so you dig a little sideways, pack the dirt under you, and then dig sideways a little higher up in a new location, and so by digging in a spiral, you can dig yourself out of the hole. This is called “compromise.”

     It’s for sure that robbing the rich to give to the poor will only feed the poor as long as the food holds out. If they did not have a poverty mentality, they would not be poor. This is not really even a problem with intellect. Poor people are not stupid, although it is true that generally they do not have the same level of education as the rich. The problem is not with intellect; the problem is with the word “education.” The word “education’ means “to bring out that which is within.” Generally, the people who are successful in life, financially and otherwise, are able to communicate their own inner vision better than anyone else they are competing against. The poor are generally less able to communicate their own vision and may in fact not even have worked on or become aware of their own vision, and so they blame the visionaries for having a vision in the first place, when in fact it is a basic freedom to know your own mind and think your own thoughts. This is what the successful really mean when they say that the poor are lazy. The poor often fail to have the first step towards success, and regardless of why they have it, they have a responsibility to themselves, and the species, to work on that.

     On the other hand, the successful also have a responsibility. As Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben told him, “With great power comes great responsibility.” A race to use up the resources and make everything into an open pit mine is also pretty short-sighted. There is only so much planet, and it is possible in today’s technology to open up the entire planet at one time and not allow it time to heel or recycle itself and then we could run out of everything all at once. This would be very unfortunate for those who live on the edge of success. This would be absolutely devastating to those who depend on there being someone to buy the stuff they make. If the entire world were at 75% unemployment, then we would have a revolution that will take down every government and every corporation. This is the basic warning of Adam Smith: Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, the customer. It was the insight of Marx: The Capitalists will necessarily kill the goose that lays the golden egg because they can’t help thinking that everyone else will give in in fear in this grand macroeconomic game of chicken. Those who ignore Adam Smith are in fact proving Marx to be correct. The joke here is that if you go far enough to the left, you end up on the right, and vice versa.

     What we did not plan on in 1848 was the computer revolution of technology and supersegmentation. We have now so embedded ourselves into the pattern of jealousy and exploitation that we have lost sight of the big picture. No one wants to be called a chicken in today’s economy. We are betting the farm that the other guy will fold first. It’s the battle of the subsidiaries. As we stack up cards and debt, and the expendable people become less capable of paying that debt, the corporations themselves become subsidiary targets. Corporations are people too, remember? Crush!
In the world of Monopoly and Empire, only the strong survive; “Look on ye mighty and despair.” Gold, cash, property, and power: You can’t take it with you. And you may be leaving sooner than you think. And the pattern cycle will start all over again, or not.

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