Rain on our parade
Remind me again, I implore you, how capitalism is just so damned good for the world.Look, if you are buying a forestry concession with a machete, you know you are doing something wrong. You don't need a course in ethics.
But ethics have no place in capitalism. When you invent a system that says that the purpose of carrying on business is to increase value for those who own the business and nothing else, you are not going to create heaven on earth. You may, or may not, create some very rich people -- for whom the earth may well be some kind of secular heaven, if you think heaven consists of a yacht and someone to feed you peeled grapes -- but you will not be doing good.
All in all, I don't mind people who are not doing good so much. I don't do much good myself; I'd be the first to admit it. I don't even much mind people who are doing bad, so long as they're upfront about it. What I don't like, never have liked, and never will like are people who do bad and pretend they're not. Hucksters, corporatists with "visions", religious leaders whose religions of peace include an unfathomable amount of hate, governments that focus on the banstick and the enrichment of their wealthy supporters, bloggers who echochamber the shitheads, the World Bank, Dennis Wise, you're all in my sights. (Okay, Dennis, I accept that you're trying to do good, but you're Chelsea, you fucker, and I for one am not forgetting or forgiving that. Not even when your useless arse is finally sacked. Not even if by some miracle we survive this season and are promoted next. Yes, it's lose-lose for you, Dennis.)
And I know, we demand the flooring. We remain wilfully ignorant of how the flooring is made. I know that we too, all but a very few of us, are complicit. I do sometimes think we should live in shacks. I do sometimes wish we could find a way to that world. We would not be unhappy. It's only marketing makes you think we would. That's our tragedy.
posted by Dr Zen @ 3:52 pm
1 Comments:
Zen wrote, "I do sometimes think we should live in shacks. I do sometimes wish we could find a way to that world. We would not be unhappy. It's only marketing makes you think we would."
boots sez:
You've been smoking more of that clearsight herb haven't you naughty lad. Good on you, because you're as right as right can be.
According to the local goobermint I've been living in the equivalent of a shack for several years now. Not a shack as such, but damned close, a very tiny trailer, less than 100 square feet total. It's been the happiest time of my life, having most everyone out of my face, living close to nature, experiencing a small amount of actual freedom.
This year we're building a cabin. Every inch of the way I'm having to fight my way past petty bureaucrats without pissing them off, because nothing we're doing is conventional.
At times I tell my wife we should pack it in and move to some third-world shithole where the federales are upfront about the bribery, where people do not judge each other by their freshly minted luxury items because they are all living in shacks. And when I tell her this, she says "If you really want it you have to hang in there" and I calm down and go back to figuring out how to deal with the local federales.
It's not about living in a McMansion and driving a new Lexus, it's about living. Really living.
There is something simply not right about feeling as if you are an alien from another world while living in the land where you were born.
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