n a t b s

Is it that crazy to not want to work?  At least, to not want to work in the corporate-America sense?  I have a job right now, and I hate it.  Those are strong words, and when I tell you what I’m about to tell you, you might question my reasonableness: by most standards by which people judge jobs, mine is actually pretty good.  The benefits are decent, the pay is decent, the company is financially stable, it’s not all-consuming of my life, it’s not that hard, and my boss is really cool.  Now you might be saying, “Andrew, you’ve got a good thing going, quit yer bitchin’” and you might have a point.  But let me tell you why I hate it.  It is utterly mind-numbingly uninteresting.  In addition to that, I don’t think I fit well into the 9-5, work-in-a-cubicle corporate lifestyle.

Let’s start with uninteresting.  I know people get jobs to earn money and stay alive.  I get it; interesting is a luxury.  Maybe it has something to do with my privileged upbringing, but I feel like interesting should not be a luxury.  I feel that I have a limited amount of time to be alive, and it pains me deeply to be spending so much of my time on things that I couldn’t care less about.  My time is precious and limited and it kills me to be selling it for a mere $25 an hour.  With an average American male lifespan of 75.2 years, that means my life is valued at approximately $16.5 million.  Sounds like a lot, but no, compared to the infinite value of a human life I find that to be a paltry number.  Money is a necessity in this society, and so I do it.  I work.  But I can’t help but feel on some fundamental level that I just can’t stand doing something that I don’t care about.  I feel that it’s almost a tragedy: all the millions and billions who toil away merely to survive, and on who’s backs others get rich.

On top of uninteresting, I have a real problem with taking orders…from anyone.  I mean, I can do it, but I absolutely hate it.  It fucks with my sense of freedom.  Every day I have to take whatever they give me, and take it with a smile.  It’s awful.  And I work in the drabbest, most un-beautiful place ever: a floor with minimal walls and rows and rows of gray cubicles, windows that don’t open, corporate propaganda on the walls.  I mean, would it kill these people to have some real art on the walls?  All we see is the soulless work of ad executives.  Why anyone thought this feng shui would be good for productivity, is beyond me.  I’m also coming to realize why fascism is so closely related to corporatism.  A corporation is a fascist enterprise in many ways. With the constant propaganda, the suppression of free will and free speech, taking orders, doing everything for the good of the company, taking queues on morals from up top (read: warrantless wiretapping), and living under fear (of getting fired).  Dissent is not readily tolerated.

The really scary idea is that the whole country could be run like this.  That’s why privatization is so fucking scary.  There’s a reason we have governments that are separate from these profit-seeking entities.  Life in a country is, or should be, about freedom and self-determination.  Those are not good things when profit is the only goal.  What I’m trying to say is that the government should stand up for what’s important but not profitable.  The influence of corporations on the government truly frightens me.  They are scary places that suppress humanity.  And the only people getting any significant benefit from the whole thing are the people at the top.

This has been a bit of a rant, but I hope it made sense to some people.  If anyone has any suggestions out there for making a living without giving over your life to one of these entities I’d love to hear it.  I’m young and still trying to figure out the course of my life, and I know that I want to steer clear of corporate life;  I’m just not sure what that will really mean for me.  I’m not sure I care.  I just want to get far away from this place and all places like it.

There’s a term from 1984, doublethink, which essentially means “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”  In the context of 1984 it represents a means of fascist mind control: as in if the government tells you one thing on Monday, and then something completely different on Tuesday, you’d damn well better believe what they said to be true on Tuesday despite the obvious contradiction in your head.  It is a bad thing in this context, however, since we live in a universe of paradoxes, I believe it’s actually an important ability to have.  Often in this universe, two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas are both true.  One example I was thinking of a few minutes ago is humanity.  I feel that we are simultaneously worthless debauched immoral dregs, and at the same time godly and beautiful.  How can this be?  How can we be both slimy scum and perfect god-like beings?

I’ll let you wrestle with the larger question of how two seemingly contradictory ideas can be true since I can’t really answer that anyway.  I’ll just tell you why I think each of those ideas is true.  First the pond scum.  Well, it’s actually quite literal in a way.  Life on this planet started, as far as I know, in some sort of primordial soup.  Billions of years ago, some slime in a tidal pool started to make copies of itself, yadda yadda yadda, and here we are: hence pond scum.  Furthermore, I do believe we were some form of rodentia and some point.  These are all things that we don’t treat with much respect to say the least, yet they are us.  We also do god-awful things all the time.  War, rape, murder, and taking advantage of people are all prevalent in the world.  Humans have no limit of  cruelty, sadism and selfishness: hence, immoral and debauched.

But we are also godly.  We have the ability to create.  We can tap into our vast, probably infinite, imaginations for ideas that we can then turn into reality; out of nothing, there is something.  We have compassion, understanding, and empathy.  We do selfless things: soldiers throw themselves on grenades to save their friends, people give their lives to their children and to other people all the time.  We create art and appreciate beauty.  As far as we know we’re the only life in the universe and we are able to have understanding, to recognize patterns.  We may be the sole manifestation of the universe trying to understand itself, and thus we represent a dawning magnificent awareness.  We have unlimited potential for good as well.  And we are, also quite literally, stardust.  Our atoms were forged billions of years ago in celestial fusion reactors: hence godly and beautiful.

I hope I’ve successfully demonstrated that both of these ideas are in fact viable, and that they both could be true.  But how can this be?  How can we be both divine and profane?  Perhaps humanity is a contronym, a word which is it’s own antonym, like awful.  Humanity is awful: 1) Extremely bad or unpleasant; terrible  2) Filled with awe, especially filled with or displaying great reverence.  If the word awful can be two things at once, why can’t we?

I just got back from a 10 minute walk around the corporate campus, which is something I’ve been doing with increasing frequency as of late.  Today as I reentered the building, the contrast between the natural beauty of the outdoors (even the limited natural beauty of a corporate campus), and the drab dull soulless interior of corporation land was espcially stark.  It took quite a bit of will power to make it back to my desk, and I realized that one of the many consequences of society is to make the world more like this building and less like the beautiful outdoors.  Why?  What is wrong with people?  I think humanity has a few screws loose.  Personally, I don’t think I can stay at this job much longer.

It’s always dangerous to create a class of citizens with no rights. Especially when the definition of said class is an ideological one. Then anyone can be labeled as one of those people, and thus be stripped of their rights.

What will you be labeled as a terrorist for? Criticizing the government, protesting the war, or just acting ‘unusual’? We already have a “terrorist watch list” with over 700,000 names on it. Can all those people really be terrorists?

See, the amazing thing about our criminal justice system is that it’s designed to determine whether people are guilty or innocent of crimes using evidence. Why can’t we use that system for suspected terrorists? The government acts as if human rights are an impediment to keeping us safe and achieving justice. But I ask, how can we be safe, and how can we have justice without basic human rights? Bypassing those rights is a means that’s entirely antithetical to its supposed ends. And it’s dangerous. Basic rights protect you when you’ve fallen. They only come into play when being accused of something by the government, but now they disappear when the government accuses you! It’s madness, they might as well not exist.

There are cracks forming on the ground beneath our feet, let’s hope we don’t fall through them into the land where “innocent until proven guilty” becomes “guilty because we say so.”

Update:

Thanks Reddit for providing an example of this type of injustice:

‘Unusual’ Ferry Passengers Identified These two European business men were under suspicious for “unusual” behavior on a ferry. What constitutes unusual behavior? The FBI doesn’t say. Better be careful you’re not acting “unusual” in America. We don’t like “unusual” people around these parts.

Update2:

Terrorism Charges Leveled against RNC Protesters

Property is an interesting concept. I’m not sure like it very much, at least in the theoretical sense. I guess I’m referring primarily to land ownership. How can people own land? It’s a tempting concept, and it brings a sense of stability to say “This is my piece of the Earth.” There are some major problems with this idea however. Perhaps it’s your designated or claimed piece of the Earth. And maybe there’s a huge institution willing to aggressively back you up on that claim. But it is not your land. It’s everyone’s land. No one can claim it any more than anyone else can. This should be obvious, it’s why you need guns to maintain land ownership. Indians were here first, but oh shit the colonists had guns (and small pox, and no morals), so I guess it’s not their land anymore.

I suppose that bit of perceived stability provides the entire basis for society. But is it right, and is it worth it? By giving people ownership you give them a foundation on which to build something. You also give them a means to exploit other people. “Come be my farm hand, I’ll pay you” means little more than “come help me work the land. Do as much or more work than me, but since it’s my land I reap most of the benefits.” If you’re both working the land shouldn’t you both reap similar benefits? The person who owns the land simply paid tribute to the last asshole to claim it for himself.

Intellectual property also provides a similar platform for wealth and exploitation:

“I have this idea, so give me money.”

“But you showed it to me, so now I have it and we can both benefit from it”

“Sorry, you can only benefit from it if you give me money”

The concept of ownership makes more sense with intellectual property, although it still makes no sense whatsoever*. With intellectual property you have created something. With land, it’s just there. It has always been there, it’s not made by people but simply claimed by them. People don’t own land, they take land and they violently defend land. Remember the Alamo?

Can we all share land? I don’t know. It seems a little idealistic, but I still think it’s important to point out the fact that it’s ridiculous to say you own something that you found. Our whole society, when you boil it down, is based on the concept of finders keepers. That’s an oversimplification, but there is truth to it. We have an immature society whose cornerstones are selfishness, greed, violence, intimidation and fear.

There is cause to be hopeful though. We are slowly maturing. We might make it, or we might fall under our own stubborn selfishness. But we need to be careful during this period of growth; the status quo is quite powerful and it will violently and aggressively defend it’s “property.”

*The fallacy, however, in the intellectual property argument above is that people don’t create that either per se. They draw on countless ideas presented by others, or presented by nature. They pull it out of the ether where it and every other bit of possible information exists waiting to be tapped into by our imaginations. Also, enforcement is severely crippled by the infinite duplicability of information.