An Open Letter:

Dear Alanna:

I had to write to you. This letter shall be transcribed from its written form and sent as an e-mail.

A week before last Sunday, I found a new band. They saw me singing at a bar called Pounders.

In a fit of ecstasy, inebriated, I professed my worldly feelings for a friend of mine named Emma.

This was over text. I then instinctively turned off my phone. It has been off since.

I just finished reading East of Eden. Parts of it I’d never gotten to in high school, owing to some complications not excluding my own father’s arrogance and obstinance. I say that boldly now, because I’ve found identity within the novel.

Certain passages I’d left unread now seize my very Soul in such a way that all the vapid social rationalisations cannot touch them or my own convictions.

As a spoiler, for I doubt you’ll find the time for six-hundred pages of Steinbeck’s allegory (though you HAVE read even longer books by Wallace), Cal betrays his father Adam. He is vengeful and envious, consumed by jealousy, so he introduces his favoured brother Aron to a whore: their Mother, Cathy. This shock would ultimately result in Aron’s death in war. The theme of one twin dying in a war is mythologically ubiquitous and should sound eerily familiar.

When Adam rejected Cal’s gift, I was usurped. I felt a pang of envy and jealousy as no work of literature had ever made me feel before. I was in a state of panick. I began to pace my bed-room. As I did so, I would wonder if this room had once before borne witness to the same devouring jealousy. You know that I refer to Sunday Night, more than a year ago.

Of course, it was my very con-science that had sprung me out of bed.

And so all though I instantly, instinctively and immediately recognised that I was not at fault for having harboured such jealousy, and by that I mean that I never DID, I could only rationalise my position with unconvincing defensiveness. Yet after a while the dust settled. I know now that had it been 2013 I would have instantly identified, with clinical precision, the distinction between how I felt on Sunday Night and how I felt upon reading Cal’s story. The clinical name is: ‘Introverted versus Extraverted Feeling.’ In other words, it was my long sought-after answer to this question: How is sympathy distinct from empathy?

Recalling Sunday Night, I note that only once before had I felt in a way akin to how I felt that Night.

Back in 2013, I worked closing shifts at Joann Fabrics. A co-

worker had once noted that I was one of two people who enjoyed my job; the other was my manager, with whom I shared a distaste that I can only hope to have been mutual.

By this point in the year, I’d learned to ‘deal with’ Jean, yet some thing chronically would trouble me during the closing hours. This depression that set in had no definite cause that I could identify at first. Its most troubling symptom was a tendency to cycle through old problems and neuroses that I’d all ready by then resolved. I say now with the usual defensiveness that these were NOT unresolved problems that simply would go on to solve their SELVES. These were but banal questions I all READY knew the answer to, regarding situations that had past out of control and relevance (from my position; I wish not to sound narcissistic, though apologising doesn’t help.). For a shrink to tell me just to change my thinking would have been Absurd; if I could have changed, the thinking would have stopped ENTIRELY. Yet after some time I realised the problem: these feelings were coming FROM OUTSIDE.

My mind, accustomed to a Reason for each Affect, was shuffling through old quandaries in a sort of bureaucratic desperation.

So if the impetus was not internal, a reaction to a personal problem (of mine), where did these feelings EMANATE from, then? It turned out, or so I deduced, that they were all coming FROM JEAN. I’d leave the store those nights drained, though I did not feel depressed but rather VIOLATED. In Jean’s presence, I might feel depression, yet it never FOLLOWED me after I left her, as my own depression could, some times for years after the fact. So it was HERS. The sense of being-violated was because her own depression had IMPOSED ITSELF upon ME.

I was not the one who had felt jealousy that Sunday night. I’d felt it rather in the very walls, not of my Heart but of my bedroom.

It SURROUNDED and ENGULFED me, so much so that my nose started bleeding and my head had started spinning. My own passions I could handle; some one ELSE’S were too much, especially if those very passions were AGGRESSIVE TOWARDS ME.

And this scorn came that night by a passageway that I had been all too familiar with. When negativity came down this aqueduct, it was accompanied in intellectual life by dogma and dismissal, apathy and animosity. It meant that some one knew that by each conceivable measure, formal and informal, agreed upon and not, I was in the right, and yet it would use its autonomy and barbarism to turn righteousness against me as a mark of shame, so I would stand alone in my convictions with ‘only my self to blame’. This was the aqueduct I shared with Kresten Taylor.

I had said in my last texts to him that he had all ways envied me. This thought had not occurred to me before that conversation; how then did I know it?

What he held against me was a childish feud from five years prior, of which I had not even been once aware, for he did not feel obligated to tell me.

He had coveted Alexandra, and my successes with her no more gladdened him than my eventual failures saddened him. Of course, his claims to entitlement are absurdly skewed and countersensical. If four months was too SHORT a time for me to court her, then a month was surely not too LONG a time for me to court YOU, and three paltry DAYS that he took to seduce YOU were of course a scandalous outrage by ANY standard, not just his own. (If three months are much too hasty, WHAT’S THREE DAYS?)

Besides: He’d known, or might have known, or SHOULD have known, that it had been a year all ready since Ally had deliberately decided to estrange him. Yet he STILL felt self-entitled to her, like he ‘knew her first’, and this conviction lasted all of five years, so that where you were CLEARLY my prospective partner, he could feel that no prior feelings mattered, even MINE, for five years prior his had been dismissed.

Some people are so outrageous that you’d rather just have called them crazy earlier and thus been done with them.

It had been *I* that had the nerve to re-unite Kresten with Alexandra. It was I who trusted you and him, inviting both of you to Kettle and then to my house, two places I had come to view as sanctuary.

Kresten did nothing after my break with Ally to restore a spark of passion there. He had five years to do so; she had not been quite as desperate to block him from ‘her life’ as she had been to barricade ME.

Yet instead he chose to spend the years in decadence. I don’t know if I told you:

After Ally split I had no one to go to.

All my favourite teachers were retired, and that bitch with her two sisters seemed to hate to see me haunt their classrooms.

(like: what did those chicks think? That I was up to no good?) My best friends had split. Kresten, who set a record when he called me a ‘fair-weather friend’ within only one year of KNOWING me, seemed never to prove one to set an example of consistency, availability, and loyalty.

It was due cause to be suspicious of him from the very start.

Tony might yet remember when I came up to the two of them as summer of 2010 was waning. K. had heard all ready gossip of my facebook posts, (I’d taken to a style of avant-garde poetry that my peers did not approve of, long before I could call it ‘Joycean’.) and he did not hesitate to tell me that the ‘Nicholsons [did] not want what I [was] selling,’ and they thought I was a ‘crazy person’. Moved by this, though desperate for company rather than retribution, I implored him to listen to me. I made to grab his jacket, and he changed reactively.

He threatened to call the police. I stood there shocked, taken aback, as he and Tony disappeared into his Mother’s Condo shack.

Andrew was not an option. Ally had disliked him, as had her sister Carla, and I felt inclined to blame my break-up partly on my friendship with him, of which no one in their family approved. I have to hand it to them: Ally had been right about Andrew. Sure:

he would go on later to do me the favour of calling her a ‘crazy bitch’ one fateful night at the Rancho Bernardo Denny’s. Yet from that point forth he snappingly refused to speak with me about her, at least in so far as her criticisms of him were concerned. You know: like it was HE whose social life was RUINED by her and her mother and who had to endure years of humiliation and abuse by his own family under the auspices of Claudia’s professional, manipulative opinions on psychiatry, claiming this to be for my OWN good when in fact she simply wanted her daughter to know the joys of life without a man to have to ‘deal’ with*. Andrew had known none of this, except that I’d gone through it. The most that the Nicholsons had ever done to him was to reject him.

The sheer absurdity of Andrew’s response to Ally’s criticisms only serves to under-score those criticisms. Kresten was wrong; Andrew was not ‘biased’. Ally WAS crazy, and her mother was a text-book paranoiac sociopath.

(after whom Ally consciously modeled herself).

Yet they were right that Andrew was immature, self-entitled, and draining, inventing problems just so as to feed off of pity.

I say this because it has not changed.

*Or a WORLD with which that man is pre-OCCUPIED, for that matter, unless we are to presume upon the psychiatric lie that there’s no world beyond the self.

The last friend I had to go to, prior to my hospitalisation and following my break, was Monty Hall.

Yet Monty had his OWN problems. Tiffany Lahe, who had promised to have sex with him, broke up with him, promptly pre-cluding the agreed-upon intimacy. Monty descended into isolation from all friends save for a few. I was not one of them.

So towards the end of that same summer I wound up at a sleepover at the home of a former neighbour named Tyler Hager. Over facebook, I sought shelter in two female voices. The first was Tiffany Lahe. The second was Bianca Vo.

It was well into my mistaken treatment plan that I dared set foot onto R.B.H.S. ground again. There I saw Kresten again for the first time in some months. He’s started dating Tiffany.

She took his virginity.

If all this seems just to be anecdotal trivia by now, you’ve missed my point entirely.

Kresten had spent the five years of our friendship seeking every indulgence that good luck and deviance could afford him. He descended into sex and drugs, and in the process Rock and roll was lost to him. I was content to fade into obscurity, relying on him only when I had some thing to offer: vision. Opportunity. Camaraderie. Respect. So why was *I* not entitled to the love of either brother or woman? Why should *I* be not rewarded for my patience and my trust, but PUNISHED?

When I wanted to talk to Ally about our love, months after our break-up, I approached her Mother’s house one night. I had a shoe-box full of love letters and poems in my hands. My mother later told me that Claudia thought that I might have a gun.

CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE THESE SPICKS??

Ally had said once she loved Cal (from East of Eden; not the University.). It worried me. I might have warned her that I was like Aron. At least ARON would have opened the damn door that night.

He would have seen it as his Christian Duty to treat every neighbour as being innocent until proven guilty. It would not have occurred to me that ANY one would not risk her own life for that ideal, ESPECIALLY Mrs. Love herself.

(Now Mrs. Love-Her-Self.)

The only presumption that I make now is upon my own victimhood.

The dichotomy is simple: Either people love or hate you. You are a witness to their virtue; every action is a measure of how it affects YOU. If my parents knowingly accommodate me by lowering the noise level so I can read with total attention, then they are being moral. If they make noise despite my wishes, then they’ve given into hatred, and I’m faced with the decision to correct this immorality or to diminish my own stature. There are no in-betweens and no excuses.

If all life is centred on the Other, and communication is receiver-based, then I as their Other and Receiver can receive one of two signals: Love or hatred.

Why deny it? Every year I seem to meet people who do. Yet this is all that our relationships boil DOWN to! It’s not even reductionistic; it’s much too SIMPLE to be reductionistic. This is direct objectivity. All gestures are communications with one’s fellows, the primordial, proverbial Thou of Martin Buber’s pheno-menology.

And it is far from any sort of a theoretical ‘Narcissism’, for only one who lives in Constant Consideration of Others would feel the overwhelming Pain of their rejection.

This is not jealousy; this is betrayal. Saints do not aggrandise us in expectation that we may surpass them, nor do we become their equals by foregoing these ‘excessive’ expectations. So what is narcissism? It’s a mask.

Self-interest and whim are all transparent masks to hide one’s TRUE motives: to inflict HARM upon a BETTER and MORE SENSITIVE and NOBLE person!

One can try to IGNORE the pain, yet such IGNORANCE makes one LESS of a person. Only the pure and open of heart are ever victims. This has never changed.

But one character still gives me pause. And that is Abra, a girl described as having been a woman since birth.

“ ‘All right then. It’s hard to say now. I wish I’d said it then. I didn’t love Aron any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve tried to figure it out. When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn’t enough. I had to have something else, because the story wasn’t true any more.

‘[…] Aron didn’t grow up. Maybe he never will. He wanted the story and he wanted it to come out his way. He couldn’t stand to have it come out any other way.’

‘How about you?’

‘I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on.

[…] He was going to have it come out his way if he had to tear the world up by the roots.’”

Keep in mind that this had all ways been a mild boy who had barely any hobbies and who was described as watching ant-hills while his brother would have stomped on them.

Abra, though, manages to rationalise all this away:

“‘When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people?

They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too.’”

The way she speaks you’d figure ARON was the narcissistic, self-involved manipulator. But that claim would be delusional next to Cal.

She concludes:

“‘He couldn’t stand to know about his mother because that’s now how he wanted the story to go – and he wouldn’t have any other story. So he tore up the world. It’s the same way he tore me up – Abra – when he wanted to be a priest.’”

And finishes:

“‘Tell Lee I’ll come. I feel free now. I want to think too. I think that I love you, Cal.’

‘I’m not good.’

‘Because you’re not good.’

Well. You can imagine my immediate response:

What a bitch! What a corrosive, swindling back-stabbing and amoral whore!

I hated her, at that moment, worse than I hated Cathy.

I have felt this hatred haunt me as despair for the past several hours, even as I write this to you at 5:43 am, trying to find meaning in the synchronous digits of the clock.

Her words: I feel FREE now. I want to THINK too.

All of them reminded me of you and Ally. And then finally:

‘Because you’re not good.’

The death note for humanity.

Akin to what you said the night that you met Kresten, as I lumbered in bewilderment behind you:

‘You’re an asshole, but you’re an INTERESTING asshole. And oh yeah. Dmytri is not an ass hole. But he’s still interesting.’

WHAT DID I DO?
How could you let him HEAR that?

What had *I* ever once DONE to HIM?

To YOU?

What was it?

WHY?

Dm.A.A.

Post-Scriptum:

Thankfully: We need not live in Steinbeck’s world.

According to Charles Reich, old America was soaked in selfishness. Our generation will not have to ‘grow up’ into this. Abra is not at fault; she is a victim of her time. In better times she would have HEALED, yet without mercy, but the Sternness of a Mother Goddess.

OUR story is still true. We CAN pull the world up by its roots. We CAN be good, and beautiful, and true.

Because we ARE, each of us, a CENTER of the Universe.

Victimhood need not happen.

And I forgive you, Alanna.

Sincerely and with Love and even gratitude,

(when virtue allows*.)

Dmytri A.A.

*

Let me surrender all the sentimental cynicism for a little bit of RUGGED PUNCTUATION.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asoc61rcz0c

Corroboration:

I found this today: https://www.llewellyn.com/journal/article/1566

This was written a while back, as indicated:

http://phoenixfrankfirst.blogspot.com/2016/04/catsups-illumination-dream.html

Dm.A.A.

"On January 27, 2008, Pluto entered into Capricorn for the start of his long stay in that sign (until January of 2024). In an effort to take a look at what Pluto in Capricorn might mean for both the universe and for you on an individual basis, let’s take a look at just one event that occurred during Pluto’s previous sojourn in Capricorn."

"That would indicate that the Plutonic Age of Capricorn ENDS in 2025."

Close enough, considering that this is an analysis of an unconscious approximation by a rather neurotic fellow. Dm.

The Problem of Equality. (The Modern Slavery.)

The Problem of Equality.

By far one of the most puzzling quandaries of our time is this problem of Equality. The meme of egalitarianism threatens all social institutions that were built to strive towards a higher plane, bringing man as close to God as possible. And whilst some of these institutions were evil, and demanding their destruction was good, to tear them asunder in a way that justifies their destruction, putting in their place a GREATER good, requires a moral discretion that has largely been lost. The same tool that could be used to supplant a tyrant could be used to kill not only a crusader, but all that that crusader has fought for.

Allow us first to examine the fruits of Equality that have not gone rotten.

Born into the world, I am not at fault for the sin of birth. Christian society has tried me for birth as though I were GUILTY of my own conception, yet thankfully existential thought and post-modernity in general have dealt a blow to this attitude. There still are many Christians ensnared in the patriarchal trends of the past, who raise their sons to be possessive by denying them access to the fruits of others’ labours. The effect of this is a redundant pattern: the sons continue to hoard the fruits of their OWN labours, resentful of their fathers but claiming to love them, really hoarding these fruits in SPITE of their fathers, so that should the father go bankrupt one might choose to be either a benevolent or malevolent tyrant towards that patriarchal figure. Either would be a form of vengeance. But supposing that the father never did go bankrupt, for his hoarding of his own wealth rendered him financially secure. (with the aid of course of a state that chose to nurture his patriarchal estate, for its own purposes, since it has use for the producer of hard-working, ungenerous children.) Now the son’s resentment can only find release in the next son. And thus the cycle continues, until broken by a son either so generous that he feeds beggars that would otherwise have become employees (thus robbing the rich of their most precious resource, LABOUR, by the very act of giving to the poor) or so gloriously self-entitled that his refusal to work for his own food leads others astray as well.

Having been both I can say confidently that the latter is the stronger of the two, yet both are stronger than the former, the traditional patriarch.

So Equality is a form of Freedom in such cases as self-entitlement. Yet self-entitlement is only valid insofar as it is towards one’s own needs. All societies that practice yoga preach the renunciation of the fruits of one’s own actions. Once the work is done, the work is the reward. The remaining labour is then to share the fruits of work with all one’s kin. Only thus can one be freed of work, for all work becomes not one’s own struggle against others in a COMPETITIVE WAY (a hallmark of the THIRD CHAKRA) but instead a struggle FOR them in a COOPERATIVE WAY (a hallmark of the FOURTH CHAKRA.) Thus the karma pent up in the last of the three “animal chakras” is released, and one is free to experience the Divine Love and to develop it along noble lines.

This Spiritual Elitism has an equivalent in Western Thought, and that is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As in Hinduism, Maslow’s elitism is based in egalitarianism. All human beings have the same BASIC needs; all that differs is what they do WITH the energy they receive when those basics are met. So Maslow becomes the perfect Marxist. He would have us give from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, and this would be not only ethically imperative but clinically so. Since we all have equal needs, each of us gets an equal cut of the cake. Since we all have different abilities, it is ridiculous to expect that each of us would put an equal part INTO the cake. Yet each contribution, even the most menial, is a contribution, and can only be incentivized by the promise of EQUALITY. There can only be one way to bypass this sort of lure: to promise something greater than Equality, and this would be SUPERIORITY. Yet obviously this cannot be promised with honesty to all. So evil has found a way to SEDUCE people into competition and in effect slavery by promising the INDIVIDUAL, an isolated unit, the right to rule the masses. And this Elitism underlies the Egalitarianism of the American capitalist.

Now we see all ready where Equality has become a devious problem. One view of Equality which is psychologically healthy is based upon the acknowledgement of our independence as individuals as well as our interdependence as people. It is based upon the awareness that we are BASICALLY all the same, though at our FINEST and most REFINED we are totally different. And it is aimed at accommodating all of us according to both that BASIC universality and to nurture thereby that crucial and TRANSCENDENT peculiarity and diversity. We are all plants in one pot of soil, if we are to agree with Maslow’s model, and frankly this writer has not seen any evidence against him, only dogmatic complaints without warrant.

But there is an other and more prevalent view of Equality in the United States, and this is a corrupted form that a corrupt oligarchy has circulated by way of cultural warfare. And this is the notion NOT of equal pay to all, regardless of unequal work, but an attitude of SELF-ENTITLEMENT according to which “equal work creates equal pay”. Of course this is but Fascism in a thin veil. For who is to be appointed to judge work to be EQUAL? The only measurement for such an Equality [even M.S. Word rebels against me, underlining my words “an Equality” in green to tentatively suggest a grammatical error, as we speak.] would be by TIME. And hence we get the corporate slave state, with its insistence of claiming ownership of a good third of your life, and half of your waking life. (Presuming that you choose to sleep according to a clinically healthy standard. This is all so presuming that one works seven out of seven days, eight hours each, which while it may be more than the conventional formality of forty hours a week it is not uncommon for people short on money, and where this is not the case weekends are still spent predominantly in sleep or laziness, owing to exhaustion, so they may be dismissed from the denominator of the fraction.)

It would be IDEAL that one could show up to work at a retail store, get all the necessary work done at one’s own pace, neither having to strain to catch up with the rest nor to suffer the even less bearable burden of BOREDOM in waiting for others to catch up. It would be HUMANE to have such an arrangement, for the worker could then spend one’s post as an old soldier would, reading and writing or playing cards until the next customer. And according to this model all of the NECESSARY WORK would get done, even if some do more of it. They can be a shining model for the slower and lazier workers, who admire them and reward them with gratitude and praise.

Yet our society does not like idealists any more. Nowadays, if you apply for a job, you are selling a third of your soul, and half of your waking soul, for minimum wage. This means that the moment that you sign up you know that eight hours of each day will belong to the company you serve. You will have no downtime except for the fifteen minute breaks and half hour lunch breaks that the Unions have won for you. And that is all ways determined by your managers. They cannot choose to DENY you these breaks. In FACT, YOU cannot choose to deny you these breaks! For fifteen minutes you are not allowed to help ANY customers or to solve ANY problems, for theoretically if you did then you could turn towards vengeance and sue the company. And of course who could be a more pitiable victim than an enormous corporation that grosses millions of dollars, not only from sales but from deals and investments? And when you DO get your break, it is at a time that YOU YOURSELF DO NOT GET TO CHOOSE. So you are free to be a human being only OUTSIDE of the confines of the store. You own no part of the store unless you are a stockholder, and in that case you own no physical STORE but rather a minute fraction of a large [again M.S. Word gets on my case.] revenue that could disappear in one fell* economic swoop. And besides that, you are free only at a time that your BOSSES assign. Is some one outside injured? TOO BAD. YOU have to accommodate a line of bitter consumers buying ribbons or some thing. These may be the sort of people who are so complacent and jaded that THEY would not help the injured person, even though they are not EVEN ON THE CLOCK. But you owe the customer your allegiance, for You ARE on the clock, and you risk termination otherwise. I cannot even elaborate on the idiom “on the clock”, for those people who do not know its meaning, without all so seeming to rationalize what is to an innocent mind a totally barbaric and dystopian turn of events.

*M.S. Word does not even recognise “fell”! (nor does it recognize “recognise”.) It would sooner have me write “feel economic swoop”!

The store is a slave state. Whether you divide your forty hours into one occupation or multiple makes no ultimate difference. You still lose a third of your humanity, time that could have been spent adapting to life AS IT HAPPENS. Your company does not care about the woes of the common man. It barely even cares about its CUSTOMERS. One young woman I knew worked at an “amusement park”, and one of her clients was injured on a ride. She was forbidden to even try to HELP this client, having to wait passively until a more formal source of aid arrived.

I do not know how many of my readers are or have been in the military. But have you ever HEARD of such $#!+?

An other time I can speak for from even more primary anecdotal experience: A woman had left her purse somewhere, and she wanted to check the store to see if it was there. This was a middle aged woman, so for those of you who do not know from experience, the purse meant a lot. It probably carried her economic means, as well as her legal means and several physical means. Well: it was after closing time, by about a few minutes, and the doors had been locked at precisely nine o’clock. We were BARRED from our enemies, who were apparently the very customers that we had had to handle (with such painstaking and subservient care) earlier in the day. And as night was fallen I heard a frantic knock upon the glass door. I heard this desperate woman asking for admittance, insisting that her purse was lost, imploring with some sense of entitlement towards decency that she be let in, if only for a moment and under supervision.

Well: I fetched my manager to unbolt the door. And there I stood, watching my Napoleonic psychopath of a boss tell this other woman to come back tomorrow when we opened. You should have seen the look on the customer’s face. I don’t suppose that she was a customer again after that. I hear many ill reports to this day about that place. Yet the store still runs, for the corporation, like any other hegemonic entity, can spare the occasional disgruntled deviant.

Between the endless stream of busy work and this general ineptness at not merely customer service but all so human consideration, one would have to conclude, if one has worked for one, and one has worked conscientiously and consciously, that a corporation is the most inefficient machine on the planet. It is never self-content; it all ways has more needs to be met. It is perpetually understaffed yet constantly hiring. In service to it one learns isolation and unlearns solidarity. One learns compulsion and unlearns patience. One learns discretion, but only arbitrary discretion that is at the expense of one’s noble Zen detachment, a nobility that all of us are given by birth. The corporation does not even WANT to hire more people, but it must for them to survive, for its presence is so overbearing that few alternate forms of survival remain alternative to the lifestyle of part-time producer and part-time consumer, earning money at the expense of one’s humanity to spend in a feeble attempt to buy it back, only to find survival and diversion.

So why do corporations persist?

We have seen them fail time and time again. Where they fail, people die young. A brief fluke in the National Gambling System, the Stock Market, left many jobless Americans to die without a unifying entity to turn their labour into meals and shelter. Based upon the indulgences of a wealthy class, which many middle-class people aspired towards with naiive abandon in the all-too-Roaring Twenties, the one thread holding our interdependent ecosystem, the economy, together was broken. That thread was money, the root of all evil. (I am told that it is the LOVE of money that is the root of all evil. But would hatred of it not remedy this love? Is it so wrong to blame it?)

Corporations are not driven by concern for their people. They exploit people for labour. The slavery of the nineteenth century was peculiar to one ethnic class. History has since then yielded to the progeny of that class, inventing a name for that period: Slavery, and a psychoanalytic label for its instigators and proponents: “racism”. By so doing they accomplished this much: first, slavery is a thing of the past, or if it exists now it only does as it did then, with one CLASS of people being oppressed by an other. Secondly: “racism”, a word more nebulous and equivocal than “bipolar” or “schizophrenic”, was the cause then. If it does not exist now, then neither does the effect. If the effect does exist, then the cause MUST be the same. And so in no case do we admit that the MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN POPULATION ARE ENSLAVED.

The slavery of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not one of a minority class but of a collective class. Its evil is in its subtlety. We are raised as children to believe that slavery is dead. Then we learn that racism still lives, yet this only would inspire us towards competition. Liberals compete with conservatives for the ethical ground, politicians compete with each other and with legislators and lawyers, who all so compete amidst themselves, all for the minority vote. Each group is a minority. The minorities of the American poor all compete between one an other. According to rather arbitrary ethnic distinctions, “white” people compete with “black” people, and so on and so forth.

All the while our only comfort is in this: that we are pursuing equality. And we only feel this when we are at work, selling our souls for whatever wage. We maintain the naiivete of children even in the cynicism of adulthood. We do not want to beat the system, but to refine it to our liking. And this is in fact no different than the complacency that created the Great Depression, for it is a desire to assert our own vision for what should be the paradigm, rather than living without a paradigm at all. The motive, be it equality or money, is all ways the same. TRUE equality would exist outside the system its self. The slavery of the past, up through the first half of the twentieth century, was one of realism. We could not unify as people against the corporations because too many of us wanted to feel Superior, rather than Equal. The slavery of the present hits the mark even less, for even more people are robbed of a conscience, by constant submission to the tyranny of corporations. We are further from “equality” now than we were when only a MINORITY of us were enslaved, for to be enslaved is just as much a sin as to be a slaveholder. To be enslaved is to refuse to rebel, and it is all ways a choice. If all of us are enslaved, rather than only some, then all of us are guilty, rather than a minority. Speak not of the guilt of the masters of old, as well as those who were part of the master class but had no part in emancipation. The victim may very well be the villain if he does not take responsibility for his own rebellion. Only by acknowledging this is a rebellion possible now, for only so can we acknowledge that the time we sold to our jobs was time when we were GUILTY FOR PERPETUATING SLAVERY.

So the slavery of the past was an attempt to choose superiority over equality. The slavery of the PRESENT is an attempt to choose equality over freedom. For we consider one an other equal only to the degree that we are, to use a Wattsism (an aphorism by the Zen master Alan Watts) “equally inferior”. True equality could ONLY exist outside of this economic system, for to be truly equal is and has all ways been to tend to the NEEDS of PEOPLE. Yet so far as we are stuck in this SYSTEM we REFUSE to aid PEOPLE. We can only visit it as employees. We do not feel that we belong to it or that it belongs to us, or if we do it is only a matter of time before reality falls upon us like a brick upon a head. And not unlike that brick, it falls from the crumbling edifice of a precarious and poorly constructed institution.

So “equality” now is the great danger, where before it was the greatest of aims. If the slavery of the past was one of realism, the slavery of the present is one of idealism. Before we blatantly chose superiority over equality, and we were fooled by the fact that only a few could get in on it. Now we choose equality over freedom, and we are fooled by the fact that there can BE no equality WITHOUT freedom, nor vice versa. Our equality has been sold to us, and it has been sold to us with only the intent of slaveholders: to maximize profit, perpetuate privilege, maintain power, divide the population against one an other, and to steal hours of labour. It matters not if you work for three different companies. They all answer to the same corporate oligarchy, whose competition is all so an arrangement, as is the case with all competition. All competition is secretly cooperation, but we shall never win OUR competition with our BOSSES unless we realize that even in competing amidst ourselves we are cooperating. By refusing to see such conflict as Absolute, we can liberate ourselves from our petty squabbles and use our collectivity to challenge the Powers That Be. Yet few now glimpse this possibility, and when they do it is through psychedelic drugs. The experience is in many cases so extreme that they even begin to see how the plight of the worker against the controlling oligarchy is but an other form of arcane cooperation. And so they forget to carry out this fight to its natural fulfillment, pretending that this human hell is in fact all ready heaven, and that the next life will absolve all sins. Yet not one of us can permanently live in such a drug induced nirvana, and a more permanent state of Nirvana, if it is possible, can only be found through rigorous resistance to the temptations of the corporate game.

Soren Kierkegaard, the Dane, wrote of the problems with Equality as early on as in the nineteenth century. Whilst the desire for superiority could have been said to govern the American psyche at that time, the Danish psyche was one of radical leveling, as would continue in Europe for many generations of socialism, Marxism, and Fascism. Some of these economic systems had a considerable success, yet the attitude of EQUALITY was no less of a danger. Even back then, Kierkegaard intuited that it was a pretense, and thereby he acts as a perfect prophet of the contemporary day and age, the future. To honor his simplicity of vision, I shall elaborate no more upon the thought that equality could have been a good goal back then but a quest haunted by hypocrites. It is sufficient to say that such is the case right now. All that I shall say to accommodate equality in respect to Kierkegaard is what he himself said: that the Age of Levelling could have as its only benefit the development of a radically Individual relation towards the Greater Good. In other words: if all men are equal, all have an equal shot at unriddling the mysteries of God’s Moral Universe, and they ought to do so in isolation as well as in solidarity, and may ultimately have to choose solidarity with God over solidarity with others in finding their own way. Thus Equality serves Individuality, and the two together produce a new Morality. Beyond that aim, however, the failings of the degenerate cannot be justified by Equality, and nor can the complacency of the enslaved.

Levelling is in most cases an attack upon the morality of the individual. It is a cession of responsibility. It may be easy for either an American redneck or an American Marxist to deplore all elitism and condescension, parading a conformist’s view of what “equality” should be. Yet the Right simply argues for equal pay for equal work, according to the Bible and the business interests, and denying that there is a “wage gap”. The Left simply wants to reform the system to resolve this “wage gap”, and they too espouse equal pay for equal work (two sides but one coin). The wage gap is a statistical myth. It has absolutely no significance except in the mindset of American Pride. Both forms of equality are attitudes of gross self-entitlement. The former denies the existence of a slave class, forgetting that it is its self a slave like most others. The latter strives so hard to AVOID slavery that it becomes a master. And all that they spend time debating is a set of numbers published by some mysterious and nebulous organisation that never seems to publish the METHODS FOR ARRIVING at those numbers.

So what we are really working with here is a universal American detest towards Authority. We PRESUME that to condescend is a right so long as it is to maintain competitive equity. Beyond that, condescension is a sin worse than murder, and a perversion more disgusting than pedophilia. To “talk down” to any one can only be a sign of sexual frustration. So it is no surprise that we come to this conclusion: that the egalitarian is the responsible one, and not the elitist. (forgetting all so that that assertion is its self a form of blatant one-upmanship, vengeful of the more blunt yet less vulgar* elitist who at least has no PRETENSE towards equality with others.)

Yet why is the elitist unresponsible? An aristocrat might subject himself and others to incredible extremes of deception, and a bourgeois person might suffer delusions of grandeur. Yet both can at least work VERY HARD to maintain this lifestyle; even if they are not slaves, it would be too great a concession to their RUSE to say that they do not suffer. The myth that the rich suffer less than the poor is used to serve the delusions of the rich, who would love to BELIEVE that they do in fact suffer less, and that for some reason or an other they deserve it.

Of course, the MINUTE class of oligarchs that run every thing might be exempt from all sufferings but the judgment of God. Yet I am speaking now of the AVERAGE millionaire, just so as to draw an example for the responsibilities of the elite. Their only irresponsibility is in ignorance of the equal suffering of the poor. Whether they delude themselves that they suffer more or that they suffer less, the rich elitists are guilty often of this ignorant illusion. And in EITHER case, to claim that the rich suffer less accomplishes nothing. The rich do not care for insult, if they are proud of their suffering. They only care for flattery. If it would not be FLATTERING to a rich person that he should suffer less, he will ignore the insult; if it WOULD be flattering, he would accept the compliment in his stride. The same selectivity applies if he is accused of suffering more. If to suffer is embarrassing, he will ignore the insult. If it is Noble, he will accept the compliment. In neither case does any thing change. It is all but the Resentiment of which Nietzsche spoke, and the complacency that Marx pointed out.

*“Vulgar” traditionally means “public”.

So we see that to be an elitist is not necessarily to be irresponsible. Yet to be an egalitarian is a separate tale. For supposing that I am a victim of an abuse. If I retaliate, I am now the equal of the abuser, and he feels justified. If I withdraw, I might seek refuge with an other. Yet suppose that I am every bit as persistent as my initial abuser in seeking refuge with this other friend. If my “friend” rejects me, now I am imagined to be the peer of my abuser, for based upon this rejection I feel isolated. I am left only to the company of my self. And if I find pride in my own persistence before my friend’s apathy, I might think that I owe my abuser the same credit: that he too was simply persistent before MY apathy. If I find fault with my friend for her apathy, I might have to SHARE in that fault WITH her, even as she excludes me from her life in all but this most abstract of forms of solidarity, which is of course but a delusional daydream on my part.

All delusional daydreaming is a kind of Foucaultian madness: a stringing together of largely unrelated ideas according, on the one hand, to the Absolute that all ideas are related, and on the other to the Relative similarity that similar concepts are used to SIGNIFY these entirely disparate situations. Any two situations can be equated according to an Absurd reduction; all that is required is that all differences be IGNORED. So this form of equality is a form of ignorance. And it is not NATURAL for the mind to entertain such delusions. It is in no way convenient or effective. It serves no purpose. One only does so because an EXTERNAL AGENT at one point thought to dismiss all personal plight as simply manifestations of a common, collective Sin for which we are all Equally responsible, and so no one person can solve this problem because to assert such Authority is to rise above the problem and cease to be an equal.

The external agent never cares about the people in the situation, beyond the degree that they can serve him, either presently or eventually. The external agent has no anecdotal evidence. Even if he is a witness, it is only as a biased and privileged observer, privileged by his own bias. He reports with the intent of propagandizing. He pretends towards ambivalence and mocks fairness by accommodating the prejudices of individuals who would otherwise be left only to confront their own conscience. He is a man who pursues Truth at the expense of Humanity, for the Truth is no reward to him. The pursuit is its own reward. In a twisted way, he is totally autotelic, doing things as an end and in of their selves. Yet he pretends to be practical, as though aimed towards justice, whilst at the same time boasting of his own detached involvement. “Detached involvement” is the defining paradox of the external judge of character. He does not get Involved, but rather Interferes. He only manages to do so in a way as to flatter those whom he WISHES to flatter, granted that they are sufficiently suggestible and of weak will or conscience. There is no dignity left to his autotelic behaviour, for the end-in-and-of-its-self that he pursues is in-its-self corrupt. The motive of any man whose will to Truth precedes his sympathy for Humanity is all ways the subversion of humanity. Yet I do not at all espouse a humanistic attitude. The worst students of the post-structuralists confused them for Humanists. Man is not the measure of all things; such is a conceit that the aforementioned manipulator would love to use to flatter, just as easily as he could flatter a group of Christians with talk of God or a group of environmentalists with corporatized biological statistics. It is all flirtation; it shifts with the whims of the speaker. The post-structuralists knew such men and devised means of deconstructing their apparati. But their students, who had no such anecdotal experience, or did not have the same cleverness to develop their own methods, abused the methods. They turned post-structural thought into its own Humanistic hegemony, unthroning Nature and enthroning the Unnatural Man. And this was precisely what the manipulator wanted. We see this in the character of Wormtongue, servent [this is a sic play on the word “serpent”] of Saruman and vizier of Theoden, in the Lord of the Rings.

My solution is to see the dignity of “humanity” only to the same degree as it SERVES Nature, and that it serves Truth. Without Humanity, people can have access to neither Truth nor Nature, nor God, so any man who seeks a path towards these things other than the Humane path, a Universal*, can be seen to pursue, whether knowingly or unknowingly, power and dominion over humanity instead of that which all ready has power and dominion over us. He does not want to find God; he wants to BE God. And so he judges of others for judging of EACH other, claiming himself to be the most honest of all hypocrites, for he admits to his own hypocrisy. Yet this ruse is maintained only insofar as the presumption that all men ARE hypocrites endures. Thus is the mechanism of moral degeneracy. And how is it perpetuated? Through equality. All of us would love to feel Equal, and some of us would love to have no responsibilities. If all men are equally inferior, there is no reason to improve. One can be degenerate and yet find comfort in the pride of the survivor, forgetting the shame that comes with surviving a battle fought for a greater cause. Without solidarity under a common banner, all men are reduced to egoism. All altruism is reduced to egoism. Such was the product of Behaviourism, which forgot that the same behaviour can be appropriate in one circumstance and inappropriate in an other circumstance. At times, even, it may be appropriate only to one class of people, for they possess that privilege by avenue of a virtue that justifies the act. “When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong ways.” Yet ought one to be fearful thus of tyranny? Not at all, for as Kierkegaard demonstrated this is not the hierarchy of the past. The hierarchy of the present age is Individual. It is sufficient to FEEL a sense of moral superiority to know one’s self to possess it. To try to speak of a transcendent world wherein all men are equal, and men who believe themselves to be superior are but equally deluded, caught in an Absurd conflict of Alpha Male aggression, is a leap into absurdity. It is an escape from the given and imminent facts into a transcendent religious notion. And this is the most degenerate of religious ideas. For in such a way the most well-meaning of heroes may be disarmed and the most vicious of tyrants enthroned. Yet between the extremes there all so rests an inability to FORGIVE the human-all-too-human shortcomings of simple people trying to do the right thing but failing. To ignore the attempt is ungenerous. To ignore the failure is barbaric. Forgiveness can only be ascribed to those who have failed. It is not even necessary for that person to have meant well for his failure to be forgiven. Yet when there is no failure possible, there is no success possible. All conflict is total anarchy and nihilism, and the only solution is hatred. Such an aim was never intrinsic to any religion, nor to any political philosophy that espoused freedom.

So the solution is in FEELING, as stated before. If I FEEL my self to be superior, I KNOW it. If others appear to feel likewise, I can only account for their behaviour. If I feel them to be inferior, let me not escape into a Romantic view wherein they feel themselves to be in the right. Self-righteousness is the only righteousness. Any villain deeply down in his heart knows himself to be a villain. Vainglory is only ever a superficial cover-up. If I forego it, which is to forego the lure of the collective degeneracy that produces it, let me not allow that degeneracy any more room to breathe by insisting that the innermost strength of my Heart is a similar vainglory. That would simply be the private projection or the public propaganda of a class of vainglorious hypocrites bent on the destruction of virtue. It was not foolishly that Nietzsche, who ironically condemned virtue, condemned all so equalists as being of poor breed. What he really condemned was the false virtue of people who wanted to create nihilism to justify their own weaknesses. To preach that we are all equally inferior is to subordinate the Morally Strong to the Resentiment of the Morally Lazy.

I need not rely upon more than that I FEEL my self to be Right. To consider the feelings of others is to estrange them from my own, denying the fact that all ready I have factored their interests into my values. They may not know that I work for them, but if I have picked my Heart apart in solitude I know it. It was by no mistake that the Greeks used the world VULGAR to describe what is PUBLIC. The extravert tries to level with me, for whilst I sought refuge from a cruel world in my own private world of virtue, he dismissed such privacy as delusion and sought solidarity in hatred. Yet he ultimately fails, for the only consistency underlying his own contradictions is his desire to escape into the public. The introvert of self-righteous virtue survives, for his virtue is independent of public opinion. He has risen above the chaos of nihilism, the irresponsibility of the Public, and he has completed the intermediate cocoon stage of leveling. He has emerged, as was Kierkegaard’s project, as an individual possessing a moral authority that none could rob him of. He answers only to those that demonstrate a similar authority. He need not rationalize about the feelings of lesser people, nor listen to the rationalizations of those manipulators that herd such people. And if he is accused of hypocrisy, he knows that he is being accused of a phantasm: equality in inferiority, equality without solidarity – equality in slavery. The contradiction is Orwellian, like suggesting freedom to be slavery. To deny this is not to condescend upon any ONE victim any more so than the manipulating egalitarian tries to condescend upon any one person when he says that all are inferior. Yet the former is of course less condescending than the latter, for the latter effectively DOES have a target to bully: the former, the elitist. If all men are equally inferior, and no virtue exists to govern them, then what is to stop a bully from pushing down any one trying to exist, or pulling him down just for trying to rise above this state? The egalitarian is not OVERTLY condescending, for he professes the mutuality of all slaves. Yet Covertly, he is simply the slave that drives the others with a whip.

*and a path that the post-structural professors cannot run from, for to do so would be to condemn humanity to a godless nihilism, especially if God Himself has been denied by these same atheistic preachers. There is really nothing but their own laziness that should bar them from reconstructing the archetypes that have all ways woven together the world’s true religions.

Dm.A.A.

The Problem of Equality. Part One.

The Problem of Equality.

By far one of the most puzzling quandaries of our time is this problem of Equality. The meme of egalitarianism threatens all social institutions that were built to strive towards a higher plane, bringing man as close to God as possible. And whilst some of these institutions were evil, and demanding their destruction was good, to tear them asunder in a way that justifies their destruction, putting in their place a GREATER good, requires a moral discretion that has largely been lost. The same tool that could be used to supplant a tyrant could be used to kill not only a crusader, but all that that crusader has fought for.

Allow us first to examine the fruits of Equality that have not gone rotten.

Born into the world, I am not at fault for the sin of birth. Christian society has tried me for birth as though I were GUILTY of my own conception, yet thankfully existential thought and post-modernity in general have dealt a blow to this attitude. There still are many Christians ensnared in the patriarchal trends of the past, who raise their sons to be possessive by denying them access to the fruits of others’ labours. The effect of this is a redundant pattern: the sons continue to hoard the fruits of their OWN labours, resentful of their fathers but claiming to love them, really hoarding these fruits in SPITE of their fathers, so that should the father go bankrupt one might choose to be either a benevolent or malevolent tyrant towards that patriarchal figure. Either would be a form of vengeance. But supposing that the father never did go bankrupt, for his hoarding of his own wealth rendered him financially secure. (with the aid of course of a state that chose to nurture his patriarchal estate, for its own purposes, since it has use for the producer of hard-working, ungenerous children.) Now the son’s resentment can only find release in the next son. And thus the cycle continues, until broken by a son either so generous that he feeds beggars that would otherwise have become employees (thus robbing the rich of their most precious resource, LABOUR, by the very act of giving to the poor) or so gloriously self-entitled that his refusal to work for his own food leads others astray as well.

Having been both I can say confidently that the latter is the stronger of the two, yet both are stronger than the former, the traditional patriarch.

So Equality is a form of Freedom in such cases as self-entitlement. Yet self-entitlement is only valid insofar as it is towards one’s own needs. All societies that practice yoga preach the renunciation of the fruits of one’s own actions. Once the work is done, the work is the reward. The remaining labour is then to share the fruits of work with all one’s kin. Only thus can one be freed of work, for all work becomes not one’s own struggle against others in a COMPETITIVE WAY (a hallmark of the THIRD CHAKRA) but instead a struggle FOR them in a COOPERATIVE WAY (a hallmark of the FOURTH CHAKRA.) Thus the karma pent up in the last of the three “animal chakras” is released, and one is free to experience the Divine Love and to develop it along noble lines.

This Spiritual Elitism has an equivalent in Western Thought, and that is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As in Hinduism, Maslow’s elitism is based in egalitarianism. All human beings have the same BASIC needs; all that differs is what they do WITH the energy they receive when those basics are met. So Maslow becomes the perfect Marxist. He would have us give from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, and this would be not only ethically imperative but clinically so. Since we all have equal needs, each of us gets an equal cut of the cake. Since we all have different abilities, it is ridiculous to expect that each of us would put an equal part INTO the cake. Yet each contribution, even the most menial, is a contribution, and can only be incentivized by the promise of EQUALITY. There can only be one way to bypass this sort of lure: to promise something greater than Equality, and this would be SUPERIORITY. Yet obviously this cannot be promised with honesty to all. So evil has found a way to SEDUCE people into competition and in effect slavery by promising the INDIVIDUAL, an isolated unit, the right to rule the masses. And this Elitism underlies the Egalitarianism of the American capitalist.

Now we see all ready where Equality has become a devious problem. One view of Equality which is psychologically healthy is based upon the acknowledgement of our independence as individuals as well as our interdependence as people. It is based upon the awareness that we are BASICALLY all the same, though at our FINEST and most REFINED we are totally different. And it is aimed at accommodating all of us according to both that BASIC universality and to nurture thereby that crucial and TRANSCENDENT peculiarity and diversity. We are all plants in one pot of soil, if we are to agree with Maslow’s model, and frankly this writer has not seen any evidence against him, only dogmatic complaints without warrant.

But there is an other and more prevalent view of Equality in the United States, and this is a corrupted form that a corrupt oligarchy has circulated by way of cultural warfare. And this is the notion NOT of equal pay to all, regardless of unequal work, but an attitude of SELF-ENTITLEMENT according to which “equal work creates equal pay”. Of course this is but Fascism in a thin veil. For who is to be appointed to judge work to be EQUAL? The only measurement for such an Equality [even M.S. Word rebels against me, underlining my words “an Equality” in green to tentatively suggest a grammatical error, as we speak.] would be by TIME. And hence we get the corporate slave state, with its insistence of claiming ownership of a good third of your life, and half of your waking life. (Presuming that you choose to sleep according to a clinically healthy standard. This is all so presuming that one works seven out of seven days, eight hours each, which while it may be more than the conventional formality of forty hours a week it is not uncommon for people short on money, and where this is not the case weekends are still spent predominantly in sleep or laziness, owing to exhaustion, so they may be dismissed from the denominator of the fraction.)

It would be IDEAL that one could show up to work at a retail store, get all the necessary work done at one’s own pace, neither having to strain to catch up with the rest nor to suffer the even less bearable burden of BOREDOM in waiting for others to catch up. It would be HUMANE to have such an arrangement, for the worker could then spend one’s post as an old soldier would, reading and writing or playing cards until the next customer. And according to this model all of the NECESSARY WORK would get done, even if some do more of it. They can be a shining model for the slower and lazier workers, who admire them and reward them with gratitude and praise.

Yet our society does not like idealists any more. Nowadays, if you apply for a job, you are selling a third of your soul, and half of your waking soul, for minimum wage. This means that the moment that you sign up you know that eight hours of each day will belong to the company you serve. You will have no downtime except for the fifteen minute breaks and half hour lunch breaks that the Unions have won for you. And that is all ways determined by your managers. They cannot choose to DENY you these breaks. In FACT, YOU cannot choose to deny you these breaks! For fifteen minutes you are not allowed to help ANY customers or to solve ANY problems, for theoretically if you did then you could turn towards vengeance and sue the company. And of course who could be a more pitiable victim than an enormous corporation that grosses millions of dollars, not only from sales but from deals and investments? And when you DO get your break, it is at a time that YOU YOURSELF DO NOT GET TO CHOOSE. So you are free to be a human being only OUTSIDE of the confines of the store. You own no part of the store unless you are a stockholder, and in that case you own no physical STORE but rather a minute fraction of a large [again M.S. Word gets on my case.] revenue that could disappear in one fell* economic swoop. And besides that, you are free only at a time that your BOSSES assign. Is some one outside injured? TOO BAD. YOU have to accommodate a line of bitter consumers buying ribbons or some thing. These may be the sort of people who are so complacent and jaded that THEY would not help the injured person, even though they are not EVEN ON THE CLOCK. But you owe the customer your allegiance, for You ARE on the clock, and you risk termination otherwise. I cannot even elaborate on the idiom “on the clock”, for those people who do not know its meaning, without all so seeming to rationalize what is to an innocent mind a totally barbaric and dystopian turn of events.

*M.S. Word does not even recognise “fell”! (nor does it recognize “recognise”.) It would sooner have me write “feel economic swoop”!

The store is a slave state. Whether you divide your forty hours into one occupation or multiple makes no ultimate difference. You still lose a third of your humanity, time that could have been spent adapting to life AS IT HAPPENS. Your company does not care about the woes of the common man. It barely even cares about its CUSTOMERS. One young woman I knew worked at an “amusement park”, and one of her clients was injured on a ride. She was forbidden to even try to HELP this client, having to wait passively until a more formal source of aid arrived.

I do not know how many of my readers are or have been in the military. But have you ever HEARD of such $#!+?

An other time I can speak for from even more primary anecdotal experience: A woman had left her purse somewhere, and she wanted to check the store to see if it was there. This was a middle aged woman, so for those of you who do not know from experience, the purse meant a lot. It probably carried her economic means, as well as her legal means and several physical means. Well: it was after closing time, by about a few minutes, and the doors had been locked at precisely nine o’clock. We were BARRED from our enemies, who were apparently the very customers that we had had to handle (with such painstaking and subservient care) earlier in the day. And as night was fallen I heard a frantic knock upon the glass door. I heard this desperate woman asking for admittance, insisting that her purse was lost, imploring with some sense of entitlement towards decency that she be let in, if only for a moment and under supervision.

Well: I fetched my manager to unbolt the door. And there I stood, watching my Napoleonic psychopath of a boss tell this other woman to come back tomorrow when we opened. You should have seen the look on the customer’s face. I don’t suppose that she was a customer again after that. I hear many ill reports to this day about that place. Yet the store still runs, for the corporation, like any other hegemonic entity, can spare the occasional disgruntled deviant.

Between the endless stream of busy work and this general ineptness at not merely customer service but all so human consideration, one would have to conclude, if one has worked for one, and one has worked conscientiously and consciously, that a corporation is the most inefficient machine on the planet. It is never self-content; it all ways has more needs to be met. It is perpetually understaffed yet constantly hiring. In service to it one learns isolation and unlearns solidarity. One learns compulsion and unlearns patience. One learns discretion, but only arbitrary discretion that is at the expense of one’s noble Zen detachment, a nobility that all of us are given by birth. The corporation does not even WANT to hire more people, but it must for them to survive, for its presence is so overbearing that few alternate forms of survival remain alternative to the lifestyle of part-time producer and part-time consumer, earning money at the expense of one’s humanity to spend in a feeble attempt to buy it back, only to find survival and diversion.

So why do corporations persist?

We have seen them fail time and time again. Where they fail, people die young. A brief fluke in the National Gambling System, the Stock Market, left many jobless Americans to die without a unifying entity to turn their labour into meals and shelter. Based upon the indulgences of a wealthy class, which many middle-class people aspired towards with naiive abandon in the all-too-Roaring Twenties, the one thread holding our interdependent ecosystem, the economy, together was broken. That thread was money, the root of all evil. (I am told that it is the LOVE of money that is the root of all evil. But would hatred of it not remedy this love? Is it so wrong to blame it?)

Corporations are not driven by concern for their people. They exploit people for labour. The slavery of the nineteenth century was peculiar to one ethnic class. History has since then yielded to the progeny of that class, inventing a name for that period: Slavery, and a psychoanalytic label for its instigators and proponents: “racism”. By so doing they accomplished this much: first, slavery is a thing of the past, or if it exists now it only does as it did then, with one CLASS of people being oppressed by an other. Secondly: “racism”, a word more nebulous and equivocal than “bipolar” or “schizophrenic”, was the cause then. If it does not exist now, then neither does the effect. If the effect does exist, then the cause MUST be the same. And so in no case do we admit that the MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN POPULATION ARE ENSLAVED.

The slavery of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not one of a minority class but of a collective class. Its evil is in its subtlety. We are raised as children to believe that slavery is dead. Then we learn that racism still lives, yet this only would inspire us towards competition. Liberals compete with conservatives for the ethical ground, politicians compete with each other and with legislators and lawyers, who all so compete amidst themselves, all for the minority vote. Each group is a minority. The minorities of the American poor all compete between one an other. According to rather arbitrary ethnic distinctions, “white” people compete with “black” people, and so on and so forth.

All the while our only comfort is in this: that we are pursuing equality. And we only feel this when we are at work, selling our souls for whatever wage. We maintain the naiivete of children even in the cynicism of adulthood. We do not want to beat the system, but to refine it to our liking. And this is in fact no different than the complacency that created the Great Depression, for it is a desire to assert our own vision for what should be the paradigm, rather than living without a paradigm at all. The motive, be it equality or money, is all ways the same. TRUE equality would exist outside the system its self. The slavery of the past, up through the first half of the twentieth century, was one of realism. We could not unify as people against the corporations because too many of us wanted to feel Superior, rather than Equal. The slavery of the present hits the mark even less, for even more people are robbed of a conscience, by constant submission to the tyranny of corporations. We are further from “equality” now than we were when only a MINORITY of us were enslaved, for to be enslaved is just as much a sin as to be a slaveholder. To be enslaved is to refuse to rebel, and it is all ways a choice. If all of us are enslaved, rather than only some, then all of us are guilty, rather than a minority. Speak not of the guilt of the masters of old, as well as those who were part of the master class but had no part in emancipation. The victim may very well be the villain if he does not take responsibility for his own rebellion. Only by acknowledging this is a rebellion possible now, for only so can we acknowledge that the time we sold to our jobs was time when we were GUILTY FOR PERPETUATING SLAVERY.

So the slavery of the past was an attempt to choose superiority over equality. The slavery of the PRESENT is an attempt to choose equality over freedom. For we consider one an other equal only to the degree that we are, to use a Wattsism (an aphorism by the Zen master Alan Watts) “equally inferior”. True equality could ONLY exist outside of this economic system, for to be truly equal is and has all ways been to tend to the NEEDS of PEOPLE. Yet so far as we are stuck in this SYSTEM we REFUSE to aid PEOPLE. We can only visit it as employees. We do not feel that we belong to it or that it belongs to us, or if we do it is only a matter of time before reality falls upon us like a brick upon a head. And not unlike that brick, it falls from the crumbling edifice of a precarious and poorly constructed institution.

So “equality” now is the great danger, where before it was the greatest of aims. If the slavery of the past was one of realism, the slavery of the present is one of idealism. Before we blatantly chose superiority over equality, and we were fooled by the fact that only a few could get in on it. Now we choose equality over freedom, and we are fooled by the fact that there can BE no equality WITHOUT freedom, nor vice versa. Our equality has been sold to us, and it has been sold to us with only the intent of slaveholders: to maximize profit, perpetuate privilege, maintain power, divide the population against one an other, and to steal hours of labour. It matters not if you work for three different companies. They all answer to the same corporate oligarchy, whose competition is all so an arrangement, as is the case with all competition. All competition is secretly cooperation, but we shall never win OUR competition with our BOSSES unless we realize that even in competing amidst ourselves we are cooperating. By refusing to see such conflict as Absolute, we can liberate ourselves from our petty squabbles and use our collectivity to challenge the Powers That Be. Yet few now glimpse this possibility, and when they do it is through psychedelic drugs. The experience is in many cases so extreme that they even begin to see how the plight of the worker against the controlling oligarchy is but an other form of arcane cooperation. And so they forget to carry out this fight to its natural fulfillment, pretending that this human hell is in fact all ready heaven, and that the next life will absolve all sins. Yet not one of us can permanently live in such a drug induced nirvana, and a more permanent state of Nirvana, if it is possible, can only be found through rigorous resistance to the temptations of the corporate game.

Soren Kierkegaard, the Dane, wrote of the problems with Equality as early on as in the nineteenth century. Whilst the desire for superiority could have been said to govern the American psyche at that time, the Danish psyche was one of radical leveling, as would continue in Europe for many generations of socialism, Marxism, and Fascism. Some of these economic systems had a considerable success, yet the attitude of EQUALITY was no less of a danger. Even back then, Kierkegaard intuited that it was a pretense, and thereby he acts as a perfect prophet of the contemporary day and age, the future. To honor his simplicity of vision, I shall elaborate no more upon the thought that equality could have been a good goal back then but a quest haunted by hypocrites. It is sufficient to say that such is the case right now. All that I shall say to accommodate equality in respect to Kierkegaard is what he himself said: that the Age of Levelling could have as its only benefit the development of a radically Individual relation towards the Greater Good. In other words: if all men are equal, all have an equal shot at unriddling the mysteries of God’s Moral Universe, and they ought to do so in isolation as well as in solidarity, and may ultimately have to choose solidarity with God over solidarity with others in finding their own way. Thus Equality serves Individuality, and the two together produce a new Morality. Beyond that aim, however, the failings of the degenerate cannot be justified by Equality, and nor can the complacency of the enslaved.

Levelling is in most cases an attack upon the morality of the individual. It is a cession of responsibility. It may be easy for either an American redneck or an American Marxist to deplore all elitism and condescension, parading a conformist’s view of what “equality” should be. Yet the Right simply argues for equal pay for equal work, according to the Bible and the business interests, and denying that there is a “wage gap”. The Left simply wants to reform the system to resolve this “wage gap”, and they too espouse equal pay for equal work (two sides but one coin). The wage gap is a statistical myth. It has absolutely no significance except in the mindset of American Pride. Both forms of equality are attitudes of gross self-entitlement. The former denies the existence of a slave class, forgetting that it is its self a slave like most others. The latter strives so hard to AVOID slavery that it becomes a master. And all that they spend time debating is a set of numbers published by some mysterious and nebulous organisation that never seems to publish the METHODS FOR ARRIVING at those numbers.

So what we are really working with here is a universal American detest towards Authority. We PRESUME that to condescend is a right so long as it is to maintain competitive equity. Beyond that, condescension is a sin worse than murder, and a perversion more disgusting than pedophilia. To “talk down” to any one can only be a sign of sexual frustration. So it is no surprise that we come to this conclusion: that the egalitarian is the responsible one, and not the elitist. (forgetting all so that that assertion is its self a form of blatant one-upmanship, vengeful of the more blunt yet less vulgar* elitist who at least has no PRETENSE towards equality with others.)

Yet why is the elitist unresponsible? An aristocrat might subject himself and others to incredible extremes of deception, and a bourgeois person might suffer delusions of grandeur. Yet both can at least work VERY HARD to maintain this lifestyle; even if they are not slaves, it would be too great a concession to their RUSE to say that they do not suffer. The myth that the rich suffer less than the poor is used to serve the delusions of the rich, who would love to BELIEVE that they do in fact suffer less, and that for some reason or an other they deserve it.

Of course, the MINUTE class of oligarchs that run every thing might be exempt from all sufferings but the judgment of God. Yet I am speaking now of the AVERAGE millionaire, just so as to draw an example for the responsibilities of the elite. Their only irresponsibility is in ignorance of the equal suffering of the poor. Whether they delude themselves that they suffer more or that they suffer less, the rich elitists are guilty often of this ignorant illusion. And in EITHER case, to claim that the rich suffer less accomplishes nothing. The rich do not care for insult, if they are proud of their suffering. They only care for flattery. If it would not be FLATTERING to a rich person that he should suffer less, he will ignore the insult; if it WOULD be flattering, he would accept the compliment in his stride. The same selectivity applies if he is accused of suffering more. If to suffer is embarrassing, he will ignore the insult. If it is Noble, he will accept the compliment. In neither case does any thing change. It is all but the Resentiment of which Nietzsche spoke, and the complacency that Marx pointed out.

*“Vulgar” traditionally means “public”.

Dm.A.A.