Well I would think by
attempting to construct an argument, however ramshackle - with those very
symbols the person is so comfortable with - in order to logically justify the
act of unconditionally giving. Of course in order to truly grasp such a concept
in the first place, someone would have to grasp it emotionally, which is something you
can't make someone do. They have to reach that point themselves. But until
then, you can at least argue by symbols, and at least try to alter the
intellectual climate, perhaps in the hopes of making such an emotional event
more likely.
Let's first
consider the negative: what is wrong? And then we can work our way to the
positive: why we should all be unconditionally giving in accordance with our
ability.
So what is wrong? Can we
not all agree that something is seriously wrong with our culture? That its own
climate generates an array of actions that are not only fundamentally
antagonistic to the environment, but antagonistic to our own selves?
Our institutions -
government, corporation, religious establishment - are all increasingly
run by egos of increasingly concentrated power, with the resulting flow of
goods increasing in proportion as they are restricted to a dwindling number of
those egos. And these egos will oversee mass actions that rob, injure, maim and
destroy any human beings, animals, and ecologies that stand in the way of their
perceived fundamental right to indefinite accumulation.
These institutions are
structures that function in accordance with three major principles:
1. There are people that
are willing to simply work* and take orders in order to receive rationed
pleasures.
2. There are
power-hungry people that are willing to climb tiers of these workers because
being above someone else makes them feel secure. Being higher in a hierarchy
also secures them greater material rewards**.
3. The people at the top
of the hierarchy, and even some rare people climbing their way up the hierarchy
as well, desire a greater and greater accumulation of goods, which necessarily
results in the diminishing of any adjacent egos whose resources can be
taken.
*Work in this case means
anything from manual labor to politicking to spiritual administration.
**We have this curious
intuition to establish hierarchies and then distribute proportionally greater
rewards further up the hierarchy we go.
The dynamics of these
three principles form a tension that holds institutions together. Power to
secure rationed pleasures is divided proportionally to each tier. These
hierarchies are animated by the expectations of each person within the
structure that they will get a piece of the pie.
Now this entire
structure takes place nested in the greater structure of the human mass that
makes up what is currently in the form of global empire, which itself rests on
top of the total accumulated mass of the global population.
Most social relations within this totality take place in accordance with exchange
logic. Everything takes place by exchange logic because no one trusts each
other (you give me this for that and we are even, we are done). No one trusts
each other because everyone wants to climb everyone else in order to secure
greater reward.
Now, in accordance with
this logic, whoever happens to have more resources to exchange necessarily has
more power. This aspect of exchange power is not to be questioned. To each
power-climber, climbing is hard work, and that work is not to be surrendered in
any circumstance. All power-climbers enter into this tacit agreement when they
play the power game.
The problem with this is
that for any one person to gain the ability to enjoy a good, they must trade
something for that good. If they have nothing to trade, they must supply their
own body power. Their labor. What happens is that this process goes on and
through chance, several individuals become more efficient at accumulation while
others become more selfless and sacrifice goods in order to pick up that slack.
But this asymmetry in power does not snap back. It stays. Because power, or
accumulated exchange objects, is not to be questioned, as the most powerful
write the laws and ultimately set the rest of the structure's morality.
So you have an
ever-increasing polarity between the powerful and the powerless, and an
inherent tendency of the powerful to inflate in resources but dwindle in
number, and the powerless to inflate in number but dwindle in resources. Life
of the structure is sustained so long as each individual does his/her part.
Each individual does his/her part so long as he or she can expect to increase
in power enough to at least not be in pain, though many will always want more.
Structure death begins to set in as more and more individuals decline to a
point of perpetual pain, with no hope of ascension, save for natural or human
intervention. This is calcification of structure. Stagnation. An end of
motion.
If you are powerful,
great for you. You are frozen at a point of material bliss. However for the
rest of the powerless this results in great material and psychic pain. And yet
even the powerful are universally resented, so there must be pain and
unhappiness on their end as well, even if it is not consciously
acknowledged.
Given this state of
affairs, do you wish to perpetuate this material, psychic pain or alleviate it?
Yes, this is a very serious question.
Now we are back to
unconditional giving. If you choose to give as much as you can give without
unreasonably diminishing yourself, your goods can flow to those less powerful,
those ultimately unable to secure those goods themselves. For the powerful to
ask the powerless for something in exchange for what they give is a cruelty at
this point. It requires that the powerless diminish themselves in
compensation for what they don’t have, to give to the powerful what the
powerful already have too much of.
The more powerful you
are, the more responsibility you have to give until you and the powerless are
no longer in pain. Otherwise we can simply thrash around at each other stuck in
this inert structure and remain miserable.
So we should say to this
increasingly cold and inert capitalist structure: It is cold. It is time to
go.
Where’s the warmth?
One last thing: this
entire argument itself is a construction. Built by symbol in time and space to
offer justification for a moral action, which is in the end a vector that takes
its direction from its relation to human power structures. This argument is a
mere working model that should be dissolved after it is no longer useful or
relevant. It is a limited set of symbols that are limited to this period
in history that are being used to attempt to understand something that is
essentially infinite and eternal in scope. At least as far as the human
intellect is concerned.
Arguments like these
form the germ-seed of living power structures themselves. Those who read and
understand the arguments interpret them in accordance with their own
ego-spatial arrangement. Religion forms when those grasping the spiritual
truths wish to perpetuate them past their historical-emotional origin. And so
they communicate with others judging the argument, forming their own consensus
and a resulting power structure of its own character, which may eventually
necessitate the breaking away of egos.
