Promises

I told Katie I would update, so I am.

But really, I've got nothing. Nothing that comes to mind anyway.

So I'm posting something from a few months ago. At the time, I was mostly fleshing out my thoughts about something stupid, and I thought I deleted it immediately, but I didn't. In retrospect, it sounds like a junior high student talking to himself, making it an almost too accurate view of my actual thought process. But I promised.

Here:

It was a little surprising when a we ended up ankle-deep in snow. In the Valley it had been sixty degrees. A friend and I had driven into the mountains, but only a few miles. The snow was nice, in a sort of peaceful way, but also irritating because my tennis shoes were soaked a couple miles into the woods. The landscape was pretty decent: real tall trees, an ice-covered creek, some bear tracks and a few huge piles along the trail that seemed to be elk shit. For a while we talked about Where the Red Fern Grows, then about Accelerated Reader, then about sham marriages.

Hiking has been a part of almost every one of my weekends since arriving in New Mexico, and I would rank this particular experience somewhere in the middle. Anyway, I was in a decent mood when we got back to the car — my socks were sopping wet, but things were generally fine.

We drove a few miles down the mountain and the conversation slowly wandered into a few sketchy areas: first the Catholic Church, then Thanksgiving, then problems at work, then employer/employee relationships. It would take a while to explain this in detail, but the transitions between each of those subjects flowed fairly smoothly. They were connected in subtle ways, and I had no intention of stumbling into a discussion about labor. But I did. Not that there's anything wrong with talking about workers' rights, but this didn't seem like the time or place or friend for that. I mean, I wish it had been — I'm constantly in search of that time, place and friend — but it wasn't.

Some of the most disheartening experiences of my life have involved long, frank, arguably "serious" conversations with people who genuinely believe they're especially savvy as to how the world works. I'm talking about people who recycle the same clichés over and over without ever apparently thinking critically about what they're saying. Then they say "I'm just being realistic" and sort of believe themselves. One of the heavier burdens I carry through my human existence is a tendency not to tell these unimaginative fucks to shut up.

This post-hiking convo didn't quite enter the "I'm just being realistic" realm, but it came close. The condescending tone was present, but just below the surface. Again, the details are probably unnecessary, but I mentioned a fairly typical complaint about my boss and that led to a more general conversation about exploitation, power, etc. Well, it's worth explaining that it wasn't entirely a collaborative effort to take the conversation into that arena — my reasoning was questioned repeatedly until I was essentially forced into explaining a couple elements of context that would be important to somebody who was THAT interested in my thinking. Usually people are satisfied with letting touchy discussions die at superficial levels, especially when the parties don't really know each other too well, but this thing just kept getting deeper.

So I found myself describing what, to me, is not just a simple concept, but also one that should be very apparent to anyone, especially anyone interested in labor, employment, power dynamics, etc. Basically, I said the relationships between employees and employers are by their nature unequal. I'm speaking in the modern, conventional, American capitalist sense because I have no experience otherwise. This doesn't seem like leftist banter to me. (Again, this just wasn't the conversation for that. I'm not opposed to leftist banter.) By the nature of the arrangement, a business owner will exploit his or her employees. The unbalanced see-saw is pretty hard to miss: the owners in this structure almost always have higher wages, more ability to determine specifics of their daily activities, and the power to hire and fire. I don't know of many instances in which this isn't true.

An issue arose in the car when I mentioned that this relationship didn't seem natural to me. I said — and I believe this as much as I believe anything — that the arrangement is unfair, inappropriate and obscene, so it should be actively resisted. My reasons for coming to that conclusion aren't worth explaining here, although they're probably easy enough to guess. Essentially, I said that my boss's recent actions were effectively a "fuck you," and his message was amplified by the fact that his position as an authority figure is itself a "fuck you."

I mean, that's my opinion. It's not necessarily a definition of "how the world works" — it's just what I feel.

This is when the discussion took a sharp turn down, straight to hell as far as I'm concerned. For approximately the billionth time during my post-fetus existence, I was given this purportedly foolproof prescription: stop thinking about that stupid shit. I'm paraphrasing, obviously, and adding my own interpretation, but that was the gist of the communication. I think the quote might have been "Well that's going to be the case at any job, and you're never going to be happy anywhere if you go in with that adversarial attitude."

See what I mean? He thinks he's being savvy and, at the same time, brutally honest with someone he thinks needs a dose of brutal honesty. What a fuck.

In the past I've heard virtually the same message as "That's just how it is," "You've got to work within the system," and "You're wasting your vote." It's annoying every time, not just because the statements are condescending, based in some poorly examined version of common sense, and nearly always hinge on one or two anecdotes, but because they are self-fulfilling prophesies. If every progressive voter assumes he or she is one of only a few lunatics with the desire to vote for Ralph Nader, then of course Nader is written off from the beginning — never mind large percentages of people who say they support his policies. The collective thought process behind this situation is pretty bizarre: significant groups of people say they want something they don't want because they heard somewhere that some larger collection of people (which, of course, includes the group in question) wants something different (which clearly isn't totally the case). The same issue, which seems to come down to a basic problem of inertia, happens in the workplace when the lower ranking workers (generally the biggest group) assumes there is nothing they can do to better their collective situation. People are best controlled when they feel isolated, even when they're actually far from isolated.

The other issue I had was with the "you're never going to be happy" thing. The assumption was that in my list of priorities, somewhere near the top is "achieving happiness." Knowing almost nothing about the history of psychology and philosophy, I have no idea when happiness emerged as some all-important goal for a human being — I suspect Oprah was somehow involved. At some point the command, "enjoy," became the declaration most fundamental to discovering meaning in existence. And if it's not Oprah telling me to do it, it's me telling myself. Even though I know it's wrong, or at least relatively wrong, I can't stop myself. This is unquestionably a learned behavior. And it is somewhere at the top of my list of tendencies to eradicate within myself.

The "enjoy" directive, for me anyway, is difficult to get a handle on. At first, it seems like there would be at least a few glaring exceptions to this insistence on pure contentment: religious orders, societal demands, the law, etc. But the conversation in the car seems to exhibit why these don't usually play out as exceptions. The direction to enjoy effectively supersedes, or at least flows between the cracks, of any of these other mandates. Instead, a person is expected to reorganize their preferences, to alter their own structure of biases that lead toward satisfaction, in order to indulge a world that would purportedly leave them miserable if they didn't do so. We are told: Yes, follow the law, as much as anyone ever does anyway, and give up any values that might keep you unhappy as a reasonably law-abiding person. Those values are no good because they will cause you to feel bad.

Stop thinking about that stupid shit.

(There is alternative here that I think is also popular: you can keep the values that make you feel bad as long as you enjoy feeling justified in your combative stance. You can feel bad as long as you feel good about feeling bad. But it's unacceptable to simply feel bad. I think.)

This is, as far as I'm concerned, exactly the wrong way to act. It's depressing even to think about. I admit, it is a tempting way to make choices — even if I don't understand why — but it is the definition of the go-with-the-flow attitude that seems to be at the root of senseless clusterfuck after senseless clusterfuck every day. It is surrendering the most basic part of our humanity, the consciousness that makes us aware of whether it might be appropriate to instead go against the flow — or at an angle to the flow, or to swim faster downstream, or to sink to the bottom and see how long we can hold our breaths... Whatever it is, there is a distinct likelihood it's not best to just go with the flow.

I would argue even that it might never be right for people to find their desires in perfect harmony with the direction these external forces move. By allowing these inhuman pressures to push us a certain way (down stream), we ignore our humanity — the ability to help pull ourselves out of the mire. By going with the flow, we move in the same direction as all the shit that moves that direction because it has no thought, no consciousness: unjust and nonsensical laws, oppressive societal standards, the most obscene religious practices, etc. There may very well be many attractive parts of the river (the apparent happiness of the actor, for example, or good laws or liberating societal forces or whatever) but they are always accompanied by the shit. Almost everyone seems to acknowledge this at some level. (In a way, people who claim Buddhist enlightenment might be an exception. I think they are at peace with the shit, or something.) As people, we can at least try to differentiate between shit and what's not shit. And move away from the shit. At least.

What I mean is it seems like there is often value in whatever makes life more difficult, to the extent that it doesn't make it unlivable, I guess. (There could still be value in unlivable difficulties, I guess, but that's a different conversation.) And pushing back against an unjust design that allows a few dipshits run the show while the rest of us are robbed of basic dignity at work would be one of those valuable, but difficult, things. The mathematical likelihood of seeing some incredible transformation in this relationship for our efforts is not important. Changing my point of view to accommodate the alleged inevitability that I can't escape the paradigm is not worth it. It's not worth anything.

I realize this isn't something revolutionary. I didn't invent it, and it's a long way of way of saying something very simple. But it just seems like a lot of people totally ignore it.

Anyway, before I got to explain any of these thoughts to the dude driving the car, the conversation was derailed by our stopping at a roadside taco stand. I immediately managed to eat a chile that was so hot I could barely breathe and I spent at least a half hour trying to get the burning to stop. It was extremely painful. I wasn't really able to talk, and there was no meaningful conversation for the rest of the ride, which was probably good. Eventually he dropped me off at home, where I drank about a half gallon of milk and finished my tacos. They tasted like shit.