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?

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?

Stranger than that we’re alive

We’re all still here
no one has gone away

When I was a kid it seems like we (my family and I) drove around a lot more than we do now. We went places, we did things, and in the hours and hours we spent in the car traversing the country, we listened to music, and one of the things we listened to a lot of the time, to the annoyance of my mother who found it boring, was The Incredible String Band. And two songs by the Incredible String Band stood out to me when I was a child, two that I particularly liked (my dad never tended to play the Hedgehog Song, which I also like a lot but didn’t really discover till later). The first, which seems to be more well known, was the Cellular Song. The second, which I liked more, was Job’s Tears – I sat through the rather awkward beginning, because I knew it built up to a wonderful ending, with a high pitched, almost angelic (but just too scottish sounding to really be an angel :p) voice, because very high pitched singing really did it for me when I was a child, even though now I prefer deep voices.

But even then, and still now, one part of the song really imprinted on me – really sunk in, and in a strange way even today shapes very much how I feel about life, even at times when I feel humiliated and tears are streaming down my cheeks. Right in the middle after the male lead singer sings listing marvel upon marvel

The winter and the midnight
Could not hold him
The fire could not burn him
Nor earth enfold him
Rise up Lazarus
Sweet and salty
Brother soldiers
Stop your gambling and talk to me
The thieves were stealers
But reason condemned him
And the grave was empty
Where they had laid him

he sings:

Stranger than that we’re alive
Stranger than that
Stranger than that
Whatever you think
It’s more than that, more than that

And that’s it… for me, that is really it, it says everything. It’s just a song, by some hippies from the 60′s, and there is probably plenty about it, both theologically and musically that could be criticised, but it says everything to me. Here we are, alive, here we are, isn’t it marvelous? With pain, with terror, with humiliation, with sorrow, but here we are… how strange, how wonderful!

Keep on walking where the angels showed
(All will be one)
Travelling where the saints have trod
Over to the old golden land
In the golden book of the golden game
The golden angel wrote my name
When the deal goes down I’ll put on my crown
Over in the old golden land

I won’t need to kiss you when we’re there
(All will be one)
I won’t need to miss you when we’re there
Over in the old golden land

We’ll understand it better in the sweet bye and bye
You won’t need to worry and you won’t have to cry
Over in the old golden land

Ted Kaczynski

Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all essential respects leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible.” They want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.

Look to the God of Abraham

Yesterday I offered to give someone my copy of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy by Lev Shestov, so I read over some bits of it again. It’s definately challenging stuff, and yet I cannot help but feel, as I read it (and in conjunction with it the various writings of Czesław Milosz about Shestov – Milosz is a very good analyser of the man) that my time would be better spent reading the Bible. Perhaps this is exactly the value though in philosophy, and especially in Shestov’s philosophy. That it so aptly demonstrates, both through reason (despite his rabid anti-rationalism) and by example, that as Emil Cioran stated so forcefully, the problem with philosophy is it does not help. It has no power to save us. We would be better off with Job and with the Psalms. We should turn to Abraham not Socrates. The only reason to listen to Shestov is if one does not yet realise this. Once it is realised he can give us nothing, we must listen instead to God.

Lev Shestov

Since about three weeks before Gregorian Easter I have been getting into the philosopher Lev Shestov.

I like him. He reminds me of a less whiney version of Emil Cioran and I adore Emil Cioran. Shestov sometimes makes me concerned, I worry that he runs to close to nihilism, that his antinomianism goes at times …too far. But like the Existentialists in general, he is not creating a system, he is not laying the foundations for society, he is not telling us how the world ought to work. His aim is something different, to strike a chord inside the heart, to make us tremble and think again.

The influence of Kierkegaard on him is immediately obvious. Before even looking at the book he wrote about Kierkegaard there is a sense of the two as kindred spirits, in different times and places – but they are the same.

For a while I think I will spend sometime getting into Shestov’s head. This means I will appear to agree with him even when “I” don’t. He is interesting. I wish to get to know him. I only wish his books were cheaper…

Ah well, there is always the Lev Shestov website, which I have not yet exhausted.