(repost) Momma Puritan and the Capitalists

This is a repost of a comment made on "What We Saw Today", the excellent blog of Unbearable Lightness, where she was speaking to the unholy marriage of Capitalism and the modern descendants of Puritanism to be seen in today's culture, particularly in the dangerously misdirected activities of the conservative religious right. What is below is a best guess explanation on my part for the momentum to be observed in our nation and culture. It was originally published in April of 2011, it has been bumped to the top for those facebookers who find this blog wondering who in the hell I am.

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A point to ponder indeed! The fate of our culture is solidly immersed in those almost-rational beliefs. I say almost because in this, as in so many matters of mental (illness?), the subscribers are perfectly rational if you accept the original delusions that motivate them. This is well known to any psychologist, any dreamweaver or seductress, anyone who earns their livelihood in a trade where the raw material is people. What is not given much voice is the very powerful idea that the sane need not accept those illusions and delusions as the ultimate motive for the reality observed. With nothing but the faith of a heretic for support I'll assert this to you: the irrational motive does not breed true, if what appears irrational has endured for many generations then the irrational is not the motive, the irrational is the socially approved and acceptable icon of an ongoing motive to painful or conflicted to be acknowledged in daily life.

The marriage of Materialism and Puritanism is an old marriage, they've been together for a long time. I say materialism rather than capitalism to a purpose, they are not the same thing. Materialism was Puritanism's first mate, capitalism as such really did not exist when that union was joined. I will equally assert to you that Capitalism as it is known today, the concept of the corporation, public ownership by way of the markets, is in fact the child of that union, conceived in an attempt to further mitigate the original and still active motive for the marriage.

Capitalism was the great hope of its' parents, and in many ways it has lived up to that hope, but the structure of contemporary Capitalism includes a hidden flaw so lethal that I am convinced it even destroyed Ayn Rand when she perceived it, she who is/was Capitalism's greatest advocate. This flaw is the motive for the current (and indeed often just as incestuous as it appears) affair between Puritanism and Capitalism, the threat driving the ill-fated and desperate mobilization of their resources in the alliance of the conservative religious right. To illuminate a reason for these observed facts requires the use of a comparison to set the stage, please, hear me out.

Ultimately a society lives or dies on the degree of ethics in the morality practiced within that society. I give you that from that perspective these two events are identical: the year is 1795 and a man goes to Savannah to buy himself a slave to work his farm; and, the year is 2005 when his direct descendent goes to his stock broker to buy 1/10,000th of a ten thousand man corporation. What both men have purchased is the surplus productivity of another human, the ultimately unethical ownership of another man's accomplishments, and both men have imbibed exactly the same poison. The mechanism of the poison they imbibed is the covert evil of slavery, the evil that has laid low every slave holding society known to history.

Note Well From History: it is not the slave who becomes weaker, degenerate and debauched, it is the masters who suffer those reductions generation after generation until the society collapses.

In essence, Capitalism has run home to Momma Puritan, hoping her discipline and restraints can reverse the effects of that poison, hoping her influence will allow them to endure and survive where no others afflicted by that covert evil of slavery ever have. The overt evil of slavery has been greatly diminished, eliminated from many cultures and yet the covert evil persists and is even today the driving cause for a great deal of what is seen. There is a way to save Capitalism, to keep all of the good things it has done and eliminate the toxicity, but it doesn't involve God or the church, it involves some changes to the laws of inheritance. But that's a different rant entirely, and not one I'd bring up in a conservative caucus unless I was feeling suicidal and didn't want to pull the trigger myself.

Q, Q and A…

The acronym of the title stands for Quote, Question and Answer. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trolling the trolls so to speak, haunting the offerings of a professionally run page on Farcebook. The page is called “Intellectual Takeout” and it is a conservative page sponsored by the Rand Group. They were honest about themselves when I asked, the honesty a fair indicator of honorable intentions. That I often disagree with their implied conclusions does not detract from their right to present them, and they present them well. Nor are they devoid of points I agree with, being Pragmatic Idealist I stand with a foot in both camps. Such is the nature of true democracy at work.

None of which is to say they’re not a propaganda page, they are, and a high end good one. They know what they’re doing, but then again, since I also know what they’re doing this isn’t a problem for me. Genuine high end propaganda will present at minimum five to ten obscure truths to put a foundation (of misunderstanding) beneath any false  assertion of strategic importance. I’m quite willing to mount the minor effort of filtering out the assertion of strategic import in exchange for those obscure truths, many of which are really only available from those who engineered them into reality in the first place *Spock-ish eyebrow, sidesaddle smirk*.

One of their staff presented a post based on the writings of the German philosopher Nietzsche, using the fact that Nietzsche’s definition of “Liberal” is the exact opposite of the definition the majority of their audience has been preprogrammed to apply to that word, twisting that old lie to torque and  over-torque the bolts holding the prison bars of their bigotries to floor of the CNF agendas. (and anyone who’s ever bolted down a set of heads knows that when you over torque a bolt it becomes progressively weaker until eventually it snaps… hence, my motive to hand them the cheater bar ;-).

Anyway and anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to when not working on the antiPorn story The Care and Feeding of Unicorns or the first full Sundown novel All the Colors in the Box, or setting up the job of building a mighty mouse of an engine to go in the old VW van that’s been a closet on wheels for thirty years so he can go back to fetching the groceries home from the store… or being a mobile motel room for some long overdue travels.

What is below is the quote presented, the question asked of course “is this what’s happening to America?” and below that my response. Just for an example of what I’ve been talking about.

“The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

Ordinarily Nietzsche and I tend to fence a bit, sometimes with the buttons on, other times not, but in this I would tend to agree with him although I feel the quote presented overlooked the most critical component of such a thought, the one that establishes the context from which it is most easily demonstrated a truth.

I would posit that what he spoke of was the price associated to having a motive of one's own choosing, the noble cause, the grand quest. Such a motive self chosen is the deepest essence of freedom. Of all things that elevate the human above the animal it is the sense of a purpose larger than the self, a reason to justify the effort, a reason for all other reasons. Stripped of such motive? Yes, the human tends to degrade as being purposeless morphs into life made meaningless.

Sadly, human history demonstrates that various forms of conflict external to the self are the most common template of motive, they are the most easily understood from the immature perspectives common to that age and stage of life when people are most likely to be searching for such a motive. To adopt a conflict as the essence of a motive then becomes the most futile and self defeating of things for victory in the conflict destroys the larger portion of the value involved... the motive dies with the victory but the habits of war and strife do not. Doubt this? Look long and hard at the world between WW2 and now.

The habits of war die harder than any enemy, and the habits of war can only breed more war causing equal if not greater harm than the original enemy might have. The United States of America is, in my opinion, teetering over the edge of self destructing to this fact. All the forms of hedonism to ever color the dreams of Bacchus become pale outriders to the debaucheries introduced by the habits of war seeking a reason to remain in power.

We'll never know for sure...

Goodly mother shares two men...
Father, son, ne'er love rescind.

Mia, if by some chance this image comes before your eyes? Look up the name, it's really the highest of compliments.