Man-oh-manifestos
This essay started as a spontaneous Twitter thread inspired by just one point in a ”Manifesto” by Gareth L Powell. (garethlpowell.com/manifesto/) I highly recommend you read it. He manages to say more with less words than I can every time.
I suppose this is my own ”manifesto”, sparked by Gareth’s point #2, because it seems so RIGHT to me and yet I rarely see it expressed, as if we’re ashamed to think something so simple can be true. Gareth called point #2 ”Scarcity is bullshit...”, so I think I’ll call mine...
”...and everyone knows it!”
I’ve been trying to hammer Gareth’s point #2 (”Scarcity is bullshit...”) into people’s heads for years. People say ”the US can't feed the world”, but in point of fact we COULD. We just don’t have the will to do so. Hell, the US could feed the world on the perfectly good food we throw away!
Modern agriculture is so good we have to pay people NOT to grow food. This isn’t to benefit the individual family farm. It is meant to assure the huge corporate farms make insane profits by creating artificial shortages.
Hunger is engineered to make the wealthy wealthier. Homelessness is engineered as well. Modern materials & construction techniques could cheaply house all of the homeless. But antiquated building codes are designed to keep these techniques from being used - for the purpose of propping up companies heavily invested in doing everything the hard way so they can charge you more.
Education is similarly hamstrung, as is free communication and expression. Universal broadband access linked to dirt-cheap tablet computers is there whenever we want it. It isn’t that we don’t have the tech. But big telecom wouldn’t be able to make grotesque profits on it.
There is NO REASON for poverty. None. We can eliminate it world-wide ANY TIME WE CHOOSE. We just have to be willing to allow EVERYONE to share in our expanded productivity. But we won’t because a few would not be able to accumulate massive wealth.
And why do the ultra-wealthy POSSIBLY need such enormous amounts of wealth? No limit of luxury can put a scratch on such fortunes. They spend most of it to defend their ability to deny a piece of the world’s wealth to others.
The ultra-rich spend massive amounts to buy political influence and personal power so that they can continue to accumulate more wealth than they can possibly expend otherwise. Why? Not to make their lives & their children’s lives better.
It is not enough for them to have more than they can possibly need or want. What good is it to have everything if everyone else does, too? There is no shortage. Shortages are created by converting increased productivity of many into a form that can be hoarded by a few.
Communism in places like the former Soviet Union & China fail for the same reason we do. It is corrupted by the desire of a few to have more than anyone else. Capitalist Russia today is no different than Soviet Russia. The rhetoric is different, but the result is the same.
China deprives the mass of people to build incredible wealth and power for a small number. The ”New China” is no more modern in this respect than it was under Mao or under centuries of imperial dynasties.
America was founded with the idea of DOING BETTER, and it still could, if America’s practices matched her ideals. But we have so deified the idea of HAVING MORE than others that the idea of NOT doing so is widely believed to be shameful.
Christ taught sharing & denounced greed. His Church today chooses carefully who is worthy of favor by standards He would not recognize. The support of the evangelical Christian church for the wholly unChristian philosophies of Donald Trump proves that utterly.
There is no need for vast numbers of people to toil and scrape by today, when the labor of one man is as productive as that of hundreds only a couple of short centuries ago. Labor is not ennobling. That is a fiction created by those who want to be nobles among serfs.
There is no need for the 8 hour workday or the 5 day work week. All that does is separate us into those who work ourselves to death and those who cannot find work enough to survive.
Not long ago in this nation the labor of one person supported an entire family. Now, the full-time labor of TWO people can’t even support themselves, let alone children. We only SEEM to have more. The truth is there is a lot more to go around overall. Proportional to what our labor provides now, though, we have far less than we had then.
And it DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! As soon as we can get over dividing ourselves by race, religion, culture, experience and a million artificial ”differences” created to prevent us from working together, WE CAN ALL HAVE EVERYTHING WE WANT.
I didn’t misstate that. I didn’t say ”we can have everything we NEED” for a reason. We can have far more. It is raining soup. You can have all the soup you desire... if you don’t spend all of your effort in trying to take away everyone else’s bucket.
Moreover, we can do it WITHOUT DESPOILING OUR PLANET or destroying the other species with which we share it. We just have to CHOOSE to pay attention to what we are doing.
I’m no prophet, no wise man, no special seer, no more or less insightful than anyone else. All of this is self-evident, unless you choose to ignore it. If you buy into the shuck, this sounds like pie in the sky. Guess what? There IS pie. But some people don’t want you to know that.
Admit it. You’ve always suspected it is a lie. The person next to you wants what you want, and you can BOTH have it without taking it away from each other. All you have to do is believe it, and act accordingly. America moved that direction SO MANY TIMES, only to be distracted by the blasphemous idea that some of us weren’t getting more than we can possibly use, while Those People were actually getting enough to get by. Can’t have that!
We still can turn America back to her ideals, and be an example to the world. There’s time. Not much, but there is time.