FEED!NG PEOPLE and HAVING FUN DO!NG IT:

FEEDING PEOPLE and HAVING FUN DOING IT:

At present, the greatest barrier erected between how we are and how we have the capacity to be is this: where will the money come from? Even fifty years ago Alan Watts ridiculed this gently, “as if money CAME from somewhere!!” Apparently, the most profound philosophical quandary and the most pressing socioeconomic question is this: who will possess enough capital to incentivize people to save the World? If he or she does, will he or she find the motivation to? The question of WHY so many members of the wealthy elite turn their noses up at philanthropy is not asked; it is presumed that if we “deserve” for even a moment to hoard the “fruits of our actions” then we cannot have been corrupted by those actions by which we pursued those fruits.

But why must people be PERSUADED to save the World? It is clear that the physical capacity to accommodate the physical needs of all intelligent life on this planet is not merely utopian but statistically possible and thereby, by any classic assessment of moral teleology, ethically imperative. “Can” implies “should”, and “should” is no different from “must!!”. One has only to feel the desperation of one’s fellows.

The first and most pathetic line of defense, a mere pawn in a deeper game, is that argument which gun rights activists make; CAPITALISM does not fail, but PEOPLE fail. Yet just as in the case where “guns don’t kill people” (actually, they do, by being fired) the expression is tautological, since we must PRESUPPOSE that “people” exist as individuals with sovereign natures who are responsible for their individual prosperity. Not only is this laughably ridiculous assumption suicidal in scope, barring absolutely any hope of a genuine and effective altruism by which a genuine and last happiness might be attained. Just as the gun rights activists presume upon the inevitably NATURAL state of human aggression, drawing upon this state as though it made self-defense, by avenue of aggression and surpassing power, morally permissible, so it is that the capitalist PRESUMES that people MUST be treated as individually responsible, despite the overwhelming LONGING which people everywhere (unless I am to set myself apart in virtue and thus appoint myself to sainthood) feel to alleviate and understand the ongoing suffering of one another.

Erica from Stranger Things, in its worst season to date, echoes many American kindergarteners in claiming, with both malice and naivete which is disturbing even (and especially) in a child, that if you do not pay people, they will cut corners. But it ought to have been obvious by the moment that we graduated high school, or even before then, that people are not “motivated” by money to perform well. The most absurd of superstitions, which leaves us in a stalemate by confronting us with an insurmountable idiocy, is that it is exploitative NOT to pay people but to expect them to come voluntarily to the aid of one another. But would people honestly prefer to be told not only what to do but HOW to do it by a self-interested party, whose only motivation is to make profit in direct proportion to their stolen effort, who arbitrates their actions without conscience, since it is unethical to pause for thought when time is money, to whom they have sold an estimated third of their lives, about half of their waking lives, who presumes them selfish and expendable, selfish because he sold his altruism long ago, expendable because he managed to forego his own expendability by doing so? If this employer pays them, it is often a bare minimum so that they might return to work. They would divide their lives between the drudgery of work and the banality of consumption, and should they manage to amass enough savings in order to begin their own line of profiteering, they can rest assured that every insult they have thrown under their breaths at their bosses will return to them, as by a law of karma, when they turn into the hated boss.

I would MUCH sooner cut corners just to spite that sort of individual. Wouldn’t you?

Consider then the alternative: doing things, primarily, because you want to, without hope of reward. Consumerism only accounts for the lowest form of happiness; the Positive Psychologists proved this. A far higher form of bliss lies in the autotelic personality, for when we become again as children, treating our work as play and playing by the rules of sportsmanship, fairness and fun, thinking not on the morrow or the past but rather focused on the present, we enter a flow state that so engages every neuron in our brains that we forget all our worries.

It is the eye of the supervisor that challenges this. Slave drivers seldom want you to have fun, productivity notwithstanding.

But this is even a SECONDARY form of happiness to that ideal which Martin Seligman calls the MEANINGFUL Life: a life lived for others. Far happier than even the enthusiast is the philanthropist, for while the former does things just to do them, he or she might still be bogged down by the restlessness to look back and to know that what was done still holds some sort of meaning. To be able to do things without promise of reward is one thing; better yet is to do those things and to feel good ABOUT doing them, knowing that you will continue to feel GREAT, in every sense, (feeling great AND feeling one’s SELF to be great) for having done so, so that when the flow state is over and one returns to self-consciousness one comes home to a DEEPLY and UNSHAKABLY positive self-concept.

Above all, the Positive Psychologists agree that if one can have all three kinds of happiness, the whole transcends the sum of its parts. If I can, by doing something purely spontaneously and voluntarily, manage to change the World for the Better, enough so that I may continue to enjoy its simpler pleasures alongside my fellows, then I am truly as happy as is humanly possible.

This is our question to answer:

Why must we be FORCED to live this way?

 [({Dm.A.A.)}]