Have
you ever been referred to as a consumer? If you have, then you have
been insulted. And worse than insulted, you have also been targeted
by powerful men for moulding; socially-engineered into something less
than you are. You have been belittled and dehumanized, reduced from
a Whole being into a single part. You have been made into a statistic
to be scientifically examined, reduced to an ever-hungry mouth for
the producer to feed. As the producer is a parasite seeking to profit
from you, being referred to as a consumer is not so different to
being referred to as prey. Greedy prey, stupid prey - the fly who saw
the spider's web but crashed into it all the same.
We must not be satisfied
with being a feeder, a mere sucking mouth against the teet of
hedonism. Ignorance is never bliss, it is uncertainty and
frustration, the inability to see beyond the next fix. Ignorance
means being unable to make and understand choices; it is the enemy of
freedom. We need truth and enlightenment. There is more to us, which
we must dare discover; a balanced being, a whole being, a free being.
It
was only when reading the work of the world's first self-proclaimed
anarchist that I came to realize all of this. And it starts somewhere
extremely simple. How we are addressed
shapes how we become, in the same way that being praised or insulted
might raise or lower our esteem. Proudhon referred to his audience as
'citizen-reader', and it sent me into an upward spiral of thought and
discovery.
The confluence -
A confluence is the point
where two or more streams form into a single river. How many
confluences make up the whole of us is perhaps beyond categorisation.
In fact, even categorising things into neat little sections is
suspect, as life and being is never so simple. Nonetheless, I will
endeavour to present three large and definite tributaries which make
up our totality. Ideally, we would all have an understanding and
appreciation of these aspects, rather than being trammelled into any
individual one. Understandably, we specialize in various places, and
are not equally spread across all aspects of our being.
Economic
-
There are invariably those who value money above all other things,
like Dragons upon their golden hoards. For these sorry people the
term consumer might fit extremely well, for the concept of a consumer
is a creature which exists wholly in the realm of economic
transaction (Homo
Economicus).
They are the ones who want to get things with absolute certainty and
familiarity, moving as
the crow flies without
appreciating the journey. They are easily malleable, and can be
satisfied with any conditions provided they get their reward at the
end of it.
They obtain their monetary
rewards by doing what they would not like to do because they have the
promise of spending it on something they want at the end of it.
Monetary gain is the consolation for what is often dreary and
unimaginative labour. Perhaps we all need to be cajoled into action
sometimes and led along by the carrot on the stick a short distance.
But to live exclusively for the weekend is to sacrifice five-sevenths
of ones life to the machine.
Money is glorified beyond
the sum of its parts and becomes a thing of value of itself, rather
than a piece of paper used to promise the bearer such and such a sum.
It also becomes the main unit of comparison and competition, such
that one can never be satisfied with how much one has, for there is
always someone with a little more. Thus the value of money is
symbolic, rather than useful, and one's attachment to it is not the
attachment to one's tools or actual needs, but a symbolic attachment.
It is to build oneself on an imaginary foundation (and we call such
people 'realists'!) To be disdainful of such a one-dimensional
money-clutching character is not elitism - it is simply being
something more than an unimaginative creature!
I should like to think that
the hypothetical hoarding Dragon I have described above does not
really exist. I should like to think that the bulk of our species is
somewhat more subtle, and that economic realities are not the be all
and end all of existing on this Earth. To the enlightened, economics
is but one tributary leading into the river of totality. Economic
calculations are a necessary head-ache but one which we would all
rather was done away with it. Spending power might illicit the
occasional burst of joy, but this would not be an addiction, but an
occasional vanity.
Political
-
Everyone should be political. Not because there is much gain in it,
but rather to prevent suffering losses for it. At least in our
present epoch of representative democracy (demagoguery), politics is
very much a case of damage
control.
It is equivalent to self-defence.
What is the value of a
voice? What is the value of a vote and a movement? I should answer
that these things are as valuable as the 'economic' category above.
Just as obtaining things by exchanging currency can cause good
feelings, so too can discussing things. The difference of course is
that discussing important things is free.
The power is there, waiting
to be taken, and it costs nothing but effort and time. We should long
to have a share of power in government and public affairs, as it is
in our interests to do so. The disillusionment with a crooked system
(see any currently existing system) only feeds into that system. One
of virtuous and balanced character should strive to create something
new if the existing surroundings threaten the virtuous. This also is
a political action.
Spiritual
-
The concept of spirituality is one stained by misunderstanding,
misuse, and mistrust. Understandably so! Our first introduction to
spirituality often comes through dogmatic religion, which drives the
dissatisfied toward atheism. Conventional religion is so flagrantly
repulsive that it encourages us to denounce spirituality as
dangerously stupid, for the most dogmatic of priests oppose all other
aspects of human being (such as scientific endeavour) which they
consider threatening to their little bubble of perverse power. This
might also lead to rational and open-minded religious people being
'tarred with the same brush'.
The
necessity of a specific God, or belief in a certain set of
scriptures, is also a problem for spirituality. There is nothing
worse than competitive religions. Only tolerant religious groups
should be tolerated! For that reason I believe spirituality requires
total openness and should be proclaimed as an universal
individualism. It is a deeply personal experience where,
paradoxically, the personal vanishes - for self
and
all
often become interwined during such experiences. But the personal
does not vanish forever, and the individual is still left to
interpret and ponder their experience, and that is what makes such a
spiritual moment special.
I
wish here to purify the idea of the spiritual, including within it
things we can immediately identify with: to aimlessly observe a white
horse grazing in a gladden field; to be lost in a piece of music and
to forget time; to see the logic in the absurd; to be part of the
unexplainable life
of
the city; to use language in a nonsensical way; to create art in
luminous splendour; to touch the nose of a cat with your own; to
imagine one is a sorcerer of a lost race saving a dying realm;
watching smoke rise from an incense stick recognising that it doesn't
really go anywhere; these are all spiritual experiences.
The spiritual does not align with what is arrogantly called 'the real world', and it is not just a consolation used to maintain a regimented life. The spiritual must be purposeless when all around us demands 'as the crow flies rationality', and accumulation, and severity, and pretension.
Real poverty lies with
those who are incapable of fully appreciating this side of
themselves. The spiritual does not need to be mutually exclusive with
other more 'practical' aspects of our being; they can all co-exist.
Close -
Like any Virtue Ethicist I
stand at the foot of the mountain I have raised, dwarfed by its
splendour, cast into its shadow. Is it an impossible task to be a
balanced and virtuous creature?
Selim 'Selim' Talat
