Hard work doesn’t entitle you to anything.

One of the dogmas of modern society is that hard work is the most important, most valuable, most meritable quality there is. There is an unspoken assumption underlying the majority of social, economic and political ideas of the age, that if you work hard, that entitles you to something, and that if you are entitled to something, well it’s either because you worked hard, or it’s “unfair”.

That my friends, is a lie.

You are not entitled to anything by working hard. You can slave all your life and get nothing for it, and suffer and sweat and die alone with not a penny to your name – and this is not unfair, because, you are not owed anything.

You are not owed anything for working. You are not owed anything for being born. You are not owed anything for being smart. You are not owed anything for being stupid. You are not owed anything unless you enter into some kind of contract to that effect, and even then my friends, even then, you are relying on the good graces of your debtor and their ability to pay, and if they fail, you are at as much fault as they for choosing to engage in a risky endeavour.

My father used to say “nothing’s fair in this goddamn crazy world” (in recent years he has shortened it to “this GCW”. But it’s not really about fairness. Fairness is a social construct which has a specific sphere of meaning. A contract can be fair, if both parties get their due, a contract is a social relationship between to people. But even then… its hard to explain…

When I was born, I was born to middle class parents, with a comfortable lifestyle. Some people are born to parents who are slaves. Some people are born princes and princesses.

It’s easy for me to look up at princes and not consider it unfair. I am not owed to be a prince, it’s not something I deserve. It’s not something princes deserve either. It is, we could say, a grace bestowed upon them (by birth, by life, by God, by society) – a gift they are given without deserving it, but a gift is not “unfair” its something given freely by someone(s), someone(s) who have the right to grant such a gift. As such it cannot be unfair. My parentage is as much a gift, but it is easy for me to look down upon those born to slaves and think that their situation is “unfair” – because middle class guilt was drilled into me from a young age. I was taught to feel that way. Truly, it is no more unfair than the prince scenario. The child of slaves does not deserve to be born into slavery, it is also a gift, although this is a horrible use of the word. It is something that history has brought to bear upon them. The results of ancient wars and conflicts, trickled down to the present, and the princes of the world, and the guilt obsessed middle class families, and the salt of the earth working class protestants, and the slaves – we all are given these situations by these forces which, though we battle with all our might against it, against the thought of it, in our every action, of charity, of selfishness, of self will, of planning, of effort of control – though we fight it, these forces, this world, is bigger than us, and out of our control. Whether we are born a prince or a slave, we are equally powerless. Equally weak. Equally deserving of nothing.

By which I mean… there is nothing we deserve. Not that we deserve nothing. Because the two statements are very different, and the latter is not at all what I mean.

When good comes to us, we like to think we earned it. We like to think our hard work, or our skill, or our good nature can be credited with the good we receive. In truth, the good we receive is beyond our control. In an artificial environment this is not always true, but in the real world it is, and we find it so easy to forget because of how long we have lived in an artificial environment. Where we think we are getting what is fair, but we are really getting the spoils of wars too far away for us to understand. The product of other peoples slaveries. Born princes but educated to believe that we earned it, and thus more dangerous than any young aristocracy who knew that their position was a mere accident of history.

And this …this factors into the whole complaints I have been hearing a lot about the education system. Because it’s an artificial environment. The goal of education was once LEARNING, and by learning, I mean specifically a very high level abstract kind of learning, learning to understand, to think, to process the world at an analytical level above what is required for the everyday.

But the idea that “effort” is entitled to reward. That work in itself is deserving of success, an idea only able to thrive because we live in an artifice propped up by blood money and other peoples slavery, this idea, which seems so noble, so enlightened, so “fair” – has corrupted education beyond recognition. And learning no longer has a place, because there is something that unfortunately comes with education, that corrupts it everywhere, and that is status, and status is a grander reward, even more coveted than money (which is greatly coveted). And so the children taught from the earliest age that effort, hard work – these good valuable things – are in themselves deserving of reward, pound their little fists on the table, because they tried dammit, they tried so hard, and they deserve what they are owed.

And there wasn’t any other point to it anyway… was there?

A Rant About Immigration

I am irritated by the discourse about immigration. Rapid demographic change is a dangerous destabiliser to society, this is a fact, but the way people have talked about dealing with it is so… messed up.

First of all, the scapegoating of asylum seekers, is absurd. Asylum seekers make up an absolutely miniscule portion of all migrants to the country, miniscule. We could be FAR FAR less strict in who we let in and still it would only be a blip (except in the sense that looser criteria might encourage more applications). Asylum seekers are here for a reason, we should be compassionate to them, the process as it is is humiliating and cruel. If we are going to limit immigration it is not here we should be looking. Most people who complain about “Asylum Seekers” just mean immigrants anyway, the whole asylum seeker issue is a distraction.

But the other thing that really irritates me is, like when Gordon Brown said he will only let in highly skilled workers that the country needs. Ok, from a purely selfish perspective that has a logic to it, but it is purely selfish. Skilled, especially highly skilled workers like doctors and lawyers and so on are exactly the kind of people who whether they like it or not are NEEDED in their own countries to build up infrastructure and improve quality of life for everyone there (thus reducing overall the need for economic migration). They are also the people least likely to actually need to economically migrate in absolute terms (that is they are less likely to be suffering severe poverty in their country of origin). If we are going to let economic migrants in it should surely be the ones who NEED to migrate to make a reasonable living, but who are not needed in their countries of origin, therefore basically unskilled workers.

Of course you can argue that letting unskilled workers in has more problems than skilled workers, unskilled workers can drive down wages in the unskilled sector, a sector which is most likely to have low wages in the first place. This is indeed a problem… but its just a reflection of the fact that globally wages are low, the answer is to encourage higher wages worldwide (thus reducing the need for economic migration in the first place) – something which is undermined by taking skilled workers able to develop their countries of origin from their countries of origin and do already developed countries. The second problem is that the lower educational attainment of unskilled workers makes it harder for them to integrate in general to a new culture and into a post-industrial western European culture specifically. There is not really a good answer to that unfortunately, problems with integration will always be an issue with immigration though. That is ignoring the point of whether or not they OUGHT to integrate, because while abstractly lack of integration causes social instability, there are significant problems with contemporary culture that could even be rectified somewhat by the presence of people with different values (maybe WE should integrate a bit with them…).

An argument that is made against this kind of thing is basically “if we let poor people into the country then statistically the country is poorer which looks bad on international measures”. Basically though all that has happened is that poor people who were poor in one place are now poor in another place, the rich people in the country have not lost anything by that, the problem is purely one of on paper statistics looking bad. Prettying up the appearance of our statistical achievements on paper is hardly a good aim of government.

Immigration policy should be realistic, we cannot let in everyone who would be better off here and seeks to be here, this is just a sad fact, any one place can only absorb so much stress. It should however be moral above all. We should not base our economic policy on purely selfish concerns, but think about what is best for the world as a whole – cheesy as it sounds, what is good for the world as a whole is ultimately good for us as well.

And now that everyone thinks I’m an evil internationalist communist I will for now be quiet, leaving you with a link to my flickr account bearing my pics of my trip to Constantinople: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49738859@N02/

Just saw Starsuckers on more4

http://www.starsuckersmovie.com/

All I can say is – it’s very good, I recommend it.

Well I did say I would

So I will try and rant about “aspiration” today. My heart is not really in the idea of ranting right now, but perhaps it will get into it as we go along.

What do I think of the whole idea of “aspiration” – what is “aspiration” and what is it for? When I say the word, automatically my voice takes on a tone of contempt, of disgust – aspiration after all is so very, disgustingly middle class, and like all good middle class people I despise that. But trying to be more rati0nal, what is the problem with a culture that encourages aspiration? What after all, really, all middle class and anti-middle class prejudices aside, wrong with wanting to better oneself, with wanting to reach higher, to achieve more, to get beyond where you came from?

There is truly nothing wrong with aspiration in and of itself, the problem is that aspiration as generally lived is so incredibly small, so incredibly limited. People aspire to have a better car, people aspire to have a better house, people aspire to having a higher status job making other people rich instead of the lower status job making other people rich their parents had. People aspire to a neat garden, the right number of children they can afford to send to the right school in the right catchment area. They aspire to go to the right parties and drink the right wine wearing the right dress. In short, what is wrong with aspiration is the banality of what it is that people aim for.

If people would only aim for things a bit more imaginatively, well maybe I would still criticise, but at least I could retain my respect for them. At least when the fascists aspired they did it with style!

And aspiration, ultimately, is fascism, and fascism ultimately is aspiration. Just read the futurist manifesto, the energy, the violence, the will to power. And the devotion to doing things with style, that whatever else they can be accused of, the blackshirts surely can be credited for (not like the Nazis who just seemed like some nerdy tryhards), is something the advertising industry, the vast consumerist machine which controls our lives while telling us we are in control, has thoroughly assimilated. That burning energy which burst forth and demanded we destroy museums with all their dusty relics to the past, that adolescent velocity that refused to wait its turn, that burst of creativity so tragically marred by so much war and death, so tragically corrupted by the violence of the 20th century, so utterly enthralled by it too – that velocity is now placed in front of us, again and again, to make us want things, unnecessary things. It is the power of human sacrifice, human sacrifice and aesthetics that these advertisers have tapped into and turned to magic to make us shop and shop and shop – while feeling like we are avant garde artists for doing so.

Which has something to do with aspiration. In the sense that when people aspire to a “better life” in this present time and place in which we live, what they are aspiring to is the life of being enslaved by the magic spells of the advertising industry.

What they are aspiring to as well is vice. Power, wealth, fame. Pride, greed, vanity. Greed is good said Thatcher, and far too many people listened. Greed is not good. They try and tell us that when one man seeks to grab as much for himself as he can that the system forces him to produce for everyone else, but its a lie. He takes what is good for himself, and exchanges it for things he knows are lies, for enchanted toys. He laughs at the children who swapped their bread for his amulets, he mocks the “adults” who exchanged their lands for his potions. He only cares for himself, just as he was taught he should, and if you challenge him, well he worked so very hard on his tainted amulets and his toxic potions, and he deserves all the precious things that the people are now deprived of.

And then there are people who aspire to an education or other similar things? Isn’t that laudable? Maybe, but what do they really want? An education or status? Are the lovers of wisdom or are they lovers of human respect?

Aspiration more or less is a vice. It is a very productive vice… society thrives on our vices and aspiration especially. It is a very common vice, have I been immune? No indeed. But we can get no-where when we pretend that vices are virtues. Aspiration is violence, aspiration is lust for power, aspiration is thirst for glory, aspiration is pride, aspiration is desperation, aspiration is selfishness, aspiration is death. Lady Macbeth knows it.

But ultimately, having said that, in many ways aspiration is a vice because we aspire so low, we aspire for so little. We want petty possessions, we want fleeting glories, we want physical attractiveness, we want temporal conquests, we want such small things here on this earth, when we could aspire to such great things, we could aspire to genuine love, we could aspire to truth, we could aspire to wisdom, we could aspire to the glories of heaven, conquest over our passions, to great and beautiful things, or even just to make one person smile, or even just to watch a child grow from infanthood to adulthood, or even just to comfort someone in trouble, to hold the hand of someone in travail, and you don’t need to be religious to see how those things are greater and more lasting than houses, greater than cars and wine and pretty dresses (as lovely as wine and pretty dresses are!). Why do we aspire to such small, such petty, such pathetic and fleeting things?

A more innocent time…

It strikes me as quite tragic when I learn about these old times, well at the moment I have in mind the Anglo-Saxons, but probably many other examples would work as well. It strikes me that we are so… perverse in comparison, and they were so innocent. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to romanticise the past. I do not mean they were better than us, clearly your average anglo-saxon lived a probably more brutal life, dealt with more explicit violence with those around him – but even there, even in the brutality of times like that, there is a glimpse of the innocence of times like that.

Take for instance this story the source of which I have long forgotten, a group of men are discussing how all their slave-cook ever does is boil meat for them, and they can bloody well boil meat for themselves, but their slave afraid of being cast out into the cold goes to them and tells them, now now, don’t be so hasty, if you didn’t own a slave, you wouldn’t be lords. The men satisfied with this answer keep on the slave-cook, even though all he does is boil meat and they could do that for themselves.

There is something, childlike about it. An innocence I can’t quite pinpoint, not only present in the characters, but present in a world where this story is plausible at all. I don’t know how to explain it, but it does seem tragic to me that we have lost whatever it was. That these men could slaughter and enslave their fellows, yet have an innocence we who decry violence and force do not.

It’s not just them though, lots of people, some of the tribal island peoples seem to have it. I know the “myth of the noble savage” is just that. But its not that… its… something more like simplicity, or… just a lack of contact with corrupting factors. Any people who is more sheltered has more chance of not having the ideas that have done whatever did to us what was done.

Machievelli to a great extent must share some of the blame. It may be that princes discussed these things among themselves before him, but it really was him that popularised… real politik. And then when it became known this is what it is, the people did not trust their leaders and the leaders did not trust the people – but …that is not exactly the whole story – just one little corner of a far bigger beast. Did the Anglo-saxons trust their leaders? Did their leaders trust the people? No… this isn’t exactly about that… its not about trust or mistrust… its about slyness, its about the cleverness of it all. The subtlties, the intricacies, the bluff and counterbluff – it is the sophistication of civilised discourse, civilised intercourse, civilised sexuality, civilised politics, civilised art, civilised literature.

I don’t want to be anti-intellectual, there is nothing wrong with subtlety if you need it to fine tune a point, there is nothing wrong with sophistication in itself, it’s when it becomes a veil, part of some complex machine designed to hide the knife that guts, the hand that holds the whip, when everything is calculated, when people can discuss the dysgenic effects of giving food to the poor, and worse, when people consider the dysgenic effects of giving food to the poor but discuss something altogether different all the while holding it firmly in mind. It’s not dishonesty, a bald-faced lie can be an innocent thing – but the malific influence of enchantment to mould the world, with an utter disregard for truth one way or the other…

…or maybe that’s not it. I don’t know. Something is missing… something we once had, that is the tragedy of it.

——-

You know… there is something of it… in the idea… that we revel in our badness. Where a violent bastard from a more innocent time might simply be a violent bastard, we hide our violence, but not just behind sanitisation – which we do, and is part of it – but also behind glorification, and not glorification of the glory of battle, which is natural, but glorification of evil, fetishisation of the very corruptness that induces the fetishisation.

Crash. The film Crash by David Cronenburg, but really, any of his films, lay bare this thing, this …perversity, this glorification, not of what is glorious in a generally evil act, because generally something genuinely is, but for the darkness itself, for corruptness itself, the attraction of suicide, infects everything we do, we are not satisfied with mere sex, we must have death with our sex, and we are not satisfied with mere death, we must have degridation with it, and even then, even then we cannot face up to what we are doing, so we craft grand edifaces of sophistry to normalise the abnormal, to make our sickness seem natural and worse – to make them seem like haute couture.

“I’ve faked my life like I’ve lived, too much. I take whatever you’re giving, not enough.”

From the Enchiridion

29. In every affair consider what precedes and follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit; but not having thought of the consequences, when some of them appear you will shamefully desist. “I would conquer at the Olympic games.” But consider what precedes and follows, and then, if it is for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, nor sometimes even wine. In a word, you must give yourself up to your master, as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow dust, be whipped, and, after all, lose the victory. When you have evaluated all this, if your inclination still holds, then go to war. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, at another a gladiator, now a philosopher, then an orator; but with your whole soul, nothing at all. Like an ape, you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar. For you have never entered upon anything considerately, nor after having viewed the whole matter on all sides, or made any scrutiny into it, but rashly, and with a cold inclination. Thus some, when they have seen a philosopher and heard a man speaking like Euphrates (though, indeed, who can speak like him?), have a mind to be philosophers too. Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler, consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for different persons are made for different things. Do you think that you can act as you do, and be a philosopher? That you can eat and drink, and be angry and discontented as you are now? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintance, be despised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet; come off worse than others in everything, in magistracies, in honors, in courts of judicature. When you have considered all these things round, approach, if you please; if, by parting with them, you have a mind to purchase apathy, freedom, and tranquillity. If not, don’t come here; don’t, like children, be one while a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar. 

(thanks John)