The Mischaracterization of Rich vs Poor in Douglas Rushkoff’s Survivial of the Richest

 

An Everyone is Going Conscious drawing by my friend Forest

Not easy reading for an empathic person, but I decided to have a gander at Rushkoff’s book, Survivial of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. 

Firstly, the title makes it out to be fantasies of all tech billionaires, which it is not. Secondly, the title makes it look like apocalyptic prepping is a tech billionaire niche, even though his own interviews are with politicians and hedge fund investors. 

Also, the book does not recognize that the prepping is happening within individual families all around the world and in the US. This idea that there can be a self-created Shangri-La where one can escape the turmoil and collapse of global and local systems is not particular to the super rich. 

I mention this because his premise is that the tech billionaires are the ones destroying the world, leading to the destabilization of the ecosystem, etc. 

This is a notion held by the majority of folks who espouse the idea of eating or killing or beheading the rich. 

What we are dealing with is not an us vs them scenario. And we are not facing an innately human flaw of greed that perpetuates generation after generation and culture after culture. 

What we are dealing with is an economic system and human nature, and what the environment of the system in place allows and inspires humans to become. 

There is absolutely no difference between the billionaire prepping for apocalypse and building a bunker isolated from the world’s woes, and a person in the poor south of the United States building their own underground shelter, stocked with guns and ammo and lots of dried beans. 

In fact, there are far more of these non-billionaires doing this type of prepping than there are billionaires in existence, by far. 

What should be focused on is not the rich, or the people, or the prepping. The focus should be on sustainability and ensuring local access to locally grown agriculture, which should include a culture that is moving steadily toward home gardens and community grown agriculture on plots of land within cities and towns and surrounding cities and towns. 

What bothers me about seeing the constant calls for killing rich people as a means of coping with the rich and poor divide, is that I’m acutely aware that environments create people. If any person were born into privilege or found themselves in opportunity where thriving was possible, they would thrive and rise to the top economically. 

This means that each of us is susceptible to taking advantage of economic advantage. 

So the answer isn’t to kill those of us who find themselves born into this position, but to create a world where that position doesn’t exist. Otherwise, we just simply repeat this same chapter again and again, from the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution, to whatever revolution is next. 

It will always be a world of rich and poor divide until we create a world that does not allow for rich and poor divides. And the answer to this is not communism or socialism or any of the isms already created. 

There are many fore-thinkers bringing up new ideas of ways to create an equal and equitable world, where poverty simply does not exist, and everyone thrives. Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, by Erik Olin and Robin Hahnel is a book that explores these ideas. 

It’s far more beneficial to explore ideas and potential systems that benefit everyone rather than blaming and threatening the lives of the few who are rich because they’ve followed the dictates of the system they were born into. 

Everyone is guided by the need to survive. And we can all survive and thrive together in an evolved world with evolved and novel systems that relinquish the age old and repeated us vs them, rich vs poor ideologies. 

Could it be possible to be rid of rich people and poor people without falling into the traps of dystopian society? I think so. And so do many others. 

Perhaps a good place to start is to look into these matters with a simple Google search and see what you find. Or you can simply ponder what a perfect world would look like, and see if you can imagine and envision how such a world would operate, sustain, and be. 

#Bernie2016

#Bernie2016

Everyone Is Going Conscious

Just some morning thoughts at this coffee shop on this dreary Sunday:

It really would be a lie to say that when we die we become one with the universe. The phrase itself is misleading. We are already one with the universe. We are already God. That is all God is, is the entirety. Death is the relinquishment of all you thought you were completely. The body is gone. The mind is gone. The thought world has dispensed. All that remains is all that always was. Pure essential everythingness. Allness. Truth. Unification. 

I’m highly reluctant to call all of this “God” or “Love” because those are only words—words that have too many historical connotations that are diluted and mutated into subjective and highly relative ideas within each mind that speaks or thinks these terms. Reality is far beyond these subjective, and thus opposable, ideas. Reality is unopposable. How could reality oppose itself? How could the left hand grab itself? 




The existential bummer, of course, is that we fall deeply in love with the transient world and wish for this subjective experience of beauty, truth, goodness, joy, and bliss to last forever and ever. The bummer comes when we realize that none of it will last—none at all. Most people spend their entire lives avoiding facing this reality. It’s quite an easy reality to come face to face with in large doses of personal solitude. But most people never spend more than an hour or even a day alone. How many of us ever spend a week or month or even year alone? Many Buddhist monks and seekers do. Some people just fall in love with reality so much that despite the many discontenting bummers facing reality can bring, such as the fact of everything being destined for death, nothing can keep the lover of Truth from peering unhindered into the mystery of existence, no matter the inevitable pain, isolation, and waves of despair. My only advice, of course, is to just keep moving forward. The gift is the fact that none of it, not even the existential despair, is permanent. 

If Buddha was anything, he was a stubborn son of a bitch. He was like, “Fuck it! I’m going to sit here and have a good look at reality, and I’m not going to turn away no matter what the fuck happens, no matter how much pain and suffering arises from facing these truths.” And apparently he came out the other side quite contented and accepting of it all. 


We all bitch and complain about the world. But all we bitch and complain about is the suffering, greed, and selfishness that is the result of people not facing reality and going after the existential Truths of life. So as long as we ourselves are avoiding going into the deep, dark, mysterious unknown of it all, we can bitch all we want, but there is nothing going on here but the pot calling the kettle black. I don’t even know what that phrase means.

Edit: In the interest in sharing, I’ll be posting the current Wikipedia info on the phrase “The pot calling the kettle black.”:

The pot calling the kettle black

Proverbial idiom referring to an example of hypocrisy

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"The pot calling the kettle black" is a proverbial idiom that may be of Spanishorigin, of which English versions began to appear in the first half of the 17th century. It means a situation in which somebody accuses someone else of a fault which the accuser shares, and therefore is an example of psychological projection, or hypocrisy.Use of the expression to discredit or deflect a claim of wrongdoing by attacking the originator of the claim for their own similar behaviour (rather than acknowledging the guilt of both) is the tu quoque logical fallacy.

A pot and kettle both blackened by the same fire

Origin

The earliest appearance of the idiom is in Thomas Shelton's 1620 translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote. The protagonist is growing increasingly restive under the criticisms of his servant Sancho Panza, one of which is that "You are like what is said that the frying-pan said to the kettle, 'Avant, black-browes'." The Spanish text at this point reads: Dijo el sartén a la caldera, Quítate allá ojinegra (Said the pan to the pot, get out of there black-eyes). It is identified as a proverb (refrán) in the text, functioning as a retort to the person who criticises another of the same defect that he plainly has. Among several variations, the one where the pan addresses the pot as culinegra (black-arse) makes clear that they are dirtied in common by contact with the cooking fire.

This translation was also recorded in England soon afterwards as "The pot calls the pan burnt-arse" in John Clarke's collection of proverbs, Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639).A nearer approach to the present wording is provided by William Penn in his collection Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims (1682):

"If thou hast not conquer'd thy self in that which is thy own particular Weakness, thou hast no Title to Virtue, tho' thou art free of other Men's. For a Covetous Man to inveigh against Prodigality, an Atheist against Idolatry, a Tyrant against Rebellion, or a Lyer against Forgery, and a Drunkard against Intemperance, is for the Pot to call the Kettle black."

But, apart from the final example in this passage, there is no strict accord between the behaviour of the critic and the person censured.

An alternative modern interpretation, far removed from the original intention, argues that while the pot is sooty (from being placed on a fire), the kettle is polished and shiny; hence, when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pot's own sooty reflection that it sees: the pot accuses the kettle of a fault that only the pot has, rather than one that they share. The point is illustrated by a poem that appeared anonymously in an early issue of St. Nicholas Magazine from 1876:

"Oho!" said the pot to the kettle;
"You are dirty and ugly and black!
Sure no one would think you were metal,
Except when you're given a crack."

"Not so! not so!" kettle said to the pot;
"'Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean – without blemish or blot – 
That your blackness is mirrored in me."

• In ancient Greece, mention of 'the Snake and the Crab' signified much the same, where the critic censures its own behaviour in another. The first instance of this is in a drinking song (skolion) dating from the late 6th or early 5th century BCE. The fable ascribed to Aesop concerns a mother crab and its young, where the mother tells the child to walk straight and is asked in return to demonstrate how that is done.
• The same theme differently expressed occurs in the Aramaic version of the story of Ahiqar, dating from about 500 BCE. 'The bramble sent to the pomegranate tree saying, "Wherefore the multitude of thy thorns to him that toucheth thy fruit?" The pomegranate tree answered and said to the bramble, "Thou art all thorns to him that toucheth thee".
• Talmud: "Do not ascribe to your fellow your own blemish" (BM 59b).... "a person stigmatizes another with his own blemish" (Kid. 70b).
• The Mote and the Beam - In Matthew 7:3-5, it is criticism of a less significant failing by those who are worse that is the target of the Sermon on the Mount: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"