MONEY |
Every writer has a special relation to that thing called Money. It finally does come down to a personal matter rather than something projected against the whole society and worlds beyond it. In the worlds beyond it one can only say the development of affluence is a great achievement, a collective one that owes all sorts of debts. These debts are being cashed in all the time from the environment, from nations where resources to sustain the affluence are extracted, from the corporate community who extract their rewards from the political system. On and on it goes. Money distorts value, that is an axiom. It really captures value and makes it its own.
And one could say that the corrupting influence of money throws a just and wonderful challenge at the feet of affluent societies.
The problem occurs in the gap between "unhooking" from the natural bias of the thing and going for the challenge and opportunity.
We look at our personal experience because money and its system is such an intimate part of a writer's life. In the begnning stupendous distorting hooks await the writer to throw him or her off-balance. He finds himself doing things he would never have done before. He has to accept the most ungodly impressions. He is humbled from his lofty goal of "being a writer." After a few years experience the coercive nature of the world appears to be nothing but malevolent. This is the moment the writer becomes serious and dour, especially when he sees there are no alternatives to it. He quickly becomes used to adverse situations and battles both chaos and a kind of compulsive mind. Part of the chaos is brought on because the writer has to figure out if his activity is worthless or whether the larger society is trying to make him feel that way. A moment of panic occurs when the writer wonders if he hasn't spent his time on useless activity, is bankrupt, without resources, and at the mercy of the horrendous society. Some hints occur when isolation sets in and the writer begins to get defensive while others prod him for some accountability. Life turns into a ridiculous affair.
The key, at the end of this process, is whether the writer still has a sense of humor.
A lot of the coercian can be ascribed to the new, technological world that weaves its spell around all people. It's no coincidence that money and technology took over at the same time. Technology has largely been, although not completely, the main engine of wealth creation the last hundred and fifty years or so. Money is embedded in the usefulness of the things we make.
Perhaps we live in the first era that has been made over and conditioned by the machine. It's an academic question but we do know it is the good genie and evil genie at the same time. It is Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. The dangers were unleashed quickly and without warning. There was a car meandering through a lonely road and then there were 400,000 cars all trying to fit into spaces meant for a tenth of the cars. People lived on this planet from 5000BC up to mid-19th century the same basic way. They relied on muscle power, horse power, intricate relations between city, town, merchant, and farmer. And now we are in the first hundred years of the machine age and it is very different. It's amazing when people reach the awareness of this. The two main reactions are one of utter pessimism or utter repression since the mind sets itself up to chase after the liberation technology and money promises and needs to forget a lot and judge a lot to get there.
The genius of machines is that they are set into the environment as though they have been there always. They give the illusion that nothing needs or can be done. They are like the genius of the Emperor that cloaked the masses and protected them from all kinds of dangers.
They are fastened to the conscience of each generation that rise and fall to the machine, changing everything but the dominance of the machine in the life of culture.
The most frightening effect of technology is the utter intrusion into the psyche so that technology is able to operate at the center of men and women rather than men and women operating the center of technology. Men and women become peripheral playthings or appear that way after a time.
There is a quasi-optimistic view that says, "well they are just machines after all. Let us accept them as tools and see how that tool can leverage us and spring us forward so we may develop our minds freed by the machines. And instead of being intimidated and beaten down by our technology let us go back and get a perspective on them; see machines as graspable objects and get an intelligent relation to them. Then we can use them as platforms to spring forward and bring in a bountiful future." So the technologists say. We say, "go through the unintended consequences first or, at least, those that have already been created by technology."
Whatever relation an individual develops there is one antidote to a heavily burdened, suffocating, self-destructive technical world: Joy in life. Joy that comes out of the rooted places of the spirit. Joy not dependent on anything that the technical world offers, no matter how tempting it is. After the joy comes suffering and knowledge.
The computer is at the center of this concern because of several factors. For one, we are now three or four generations into the technological era and have a bit more experience with it. Secondly, the computer revives the idea of "participation". This is especially the case with the advent of the Internet. The Internet has the potential of strengthening democratic values through vast empowering exchanges between free people. The strongest exchange in a democracy is between people and not between people and institutions. To get back to this idea would be a great boon; a truly humanizing one that will have rippling effects through the next few centuries.
David Eide
January 24, 2014