On Taking a Deep Breath about the Economy

Some years ago a sermon I heard from a priest trying to buddy up to the congregation began with the words, "we all cheat on our taxes." What better moment to thread back to my series on a nonreligious ethical decalogue, and its economic morals, than right after a stock market low and an oil price peak.

Professionals of religion, like conservative politicians, spend way too much worry on sex and too little on economics. Yet the reality that undergirds the only reasonable way to live is that we can all survive only if we focus on respecting the means by which our fellows weather the challenges of ill fortune.

This is the problem with the chain events leading to both the stock market plunge and the oil price surge. Watch the market go up now that I've written this ... and here comes the oil price drop. It actually doesn't matter if the fluctuation reverses, the point is that we are at an unstable moment brought on by unsavory doings.

Some of those are the deeds of the "they" we're always complaining about. "They" unloaded houses on people who couldn't afford them, with mortgages obtained with at least significant omissions of fact, a debt which was then resold and finally repackaged as securities that were sold at values that criminally understated the risk.

In my view, the stock market is reacting to a string of write downs reports of losses that are likely to continue for a year or so. The fluctuations come with people who rush in at each low, buy cheap, then sell quickly. Thursday, it seems, there were fewer buyers, perhaps because people are running scared.

OK, there's all too much greed at the top of the anthill. We knew this, no?

But then there's "Us." You know, you and me, the "little people," as Leona Helmsley put it. Or, as my favorite Catalonian singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, puts it in his song
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho que tiene un amigo que dice conocer un tipo que un día fue feliz (A guy on my street told me he has a friend who said he knows a guy who was happy one day):

a man as any:
ignored,
disoriented,
contaminated as any,
bored, yet a little daring
when you least expect it

That's us, right? We reach for happiness with our cars and our homes and our fast, faster, fastest computers -- a lifestyle that daily guzzles down in minutes fuel formed over millions of years from prehistoric plankton and algae.

Our SUVs consume it, the plastic in our CDs comes from it, the electricity that powers our computers would not be possible without it.

OK, the Chinese are gas guzzlers, too. So? Most of them are like us -- "ignored, disoriented, contaminated" -- it's their faces, too, that show up in the mirror when we search for who got us to $4.61 a gallon gasoline. (That's the price at my corner, if it's cheaper than yours, come visit.)

In a way, we're as bad as the bad actors on Wall Street. Because every drop we burn comes thanks to an exploitative system that gives rise to the irrational rage of suicide bombers.

We have a choice here:

We can be greedy and fearful as our society bids us to be, striving to accumulate in order to consume things to make ourselves popular and good-looking and smart-appearing, all to stoke the machinery that keeps everything going just as always.

Or we can stop. Take a deep breath. Consider what respecting the means by which we and our fellows live really amounts to in hard, practical terms.

This need not mean becoming an anchorite in a cave.

It may mean reconsidering property, what is legitimately private and what remain our common legacy for future generations.

Or we may have to recalibrate pay differentials (I'm of two minds as to whether differentials should exist) as we know them so that they make sense. For example, shouldn't garbage collectors, who do the most odious work, be paid more than people whose work is pleasant or even enjoyable?

At a less lofty macro level, it may simply mean regarding the just wages and fairly held property of others with the same respect we regard what we claim as justly ours, meaning that perhaps we all need to winnow out what we don't need so that we can all have enough.

We can all have enough. I believe that and the facts supports me. Moreover, we can turn greed and fear into the joy of sharing and the hope of loving.

I'm not certain that we can eliminate all differentials, nor that we would want to, nor much less that I know how to do it, anyway. But I am certain that we can all survive together.

Respect the Boundary

Returning to my earlier ethical themes, I now turn to my VIth godless commandment: thou shalt respect the surroundings that sustain thee and thy fellows.

Biblical adultery, which was the object of the item at this location in Mosaic law, was ultimately about forbidding a woman's sexual liaisons in circumstances that might lead to questioned lineage of her children -- significant for the purposes of inheritance. The ancient biblical point was not about sexual morality, as in the dualist, Jansenist view of sex, but about property and the control of women.

In my new iteration of a decalogue based not on a supposed divine revelation, or inspiration, but on the ethical principle of human survival I transmuted the notion of control, a hierarchical view suitable for a theist conception into respect and the object of the verb into universally what sustains us.

Survival -- mine or yours -- is a cosmic thing, but also individual. Barring the spirit and afterlife, when my world ceases to exist, from were I sit, everything ends. My world begins with a sudden blurry light and ends in darkness. Inside that world I am me (and you, you), slowly distinguished from everything until the blurring toward death begins.

My existence and survival then, is rooted with the shifting, uncertain and largely imaginary lines between me and thee. Here I end, there you -- your personhood and identity -- begin.

The imperative here is to respect the line, keep it as a buffer, pull back if by chance or mistake we trespass it. To respect is to pause, to bow reverentially and utter India's Sanskrit greeting "Namaste" (I bow to you), to genuflect, to step back and behold the beauty of the other and the world.

Spitzer, the Mann Act and neo-Puritanism

Never having been elected governor of New York by a landslide on the strength of my character and intellect, I never sat on so tantalizing and grandiose an edge of hubris as Eliot Spitzer's, so who am I to judge this obviously unhappy man? Such a thought does not seem to bother today's garment-rending neo-Puritans -- nor does the fact that the allegedly violated Mann Act is the federal statute most flagrantly misused to bring down celebrities of color.

The online Huffington Post, for example, has no biography of moralist Chris Kelly (author of Eliot Spitzer Disappoints Wife / Commits Federal Offense), so we don't know the details of Kelly's glass house.

But how about the publisher, Arianna Huffington? Shall we forget that Arianna was a conservative who went after Bill Clinton when it was salacious, making a name for herself, and now styles herself a liberal, when the wind is blowing that way.

Shall we forget that her millions come not from journalistic talent but from sleeping with a millionaire, ex-husband Michael Huffington, whose proclivities toward men she reportedly knew well before she divorced him, allegedly for his bisexuality? By my reckoning¹ Arianna's per-hour sex rate during this gold-digging marriage comes out to nearly $175,000, not the paltry $4,600 Spitzer's Kristen got -- which she had to split with the prostitution ring managers.

So Arianna Huffington is in a position to sponsor moral lectures now?

Let's also consider the Mann Act, technically the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910.

The law was most egregiously used against boxer Jack Johnson, who in 1910 defeated a white contender and later had to flee the United States after marrying a white woman, Lucille Cameron, as Southern ministers called for his lynching. In 1920, Johnson was prosecuted for allegedly violating the Mann Act by sending his white girlfriend, Belle Schreiber, a railroad ticket to travel from Pittsburgh to Chicago. His life was the inspiration for the 1970s film "The Great White Hope."

The Mann Act was also used against rock musician Chuck Berry and Rex Ingram, a 1940s film and stage actor, both African American, in dubious circumstances.

The law wasn't just used against blacks. Charlie Chaplin was accused; he was acquitted, but the charge eventually became the basis for his blacklisting in the 1950s.

Think about it: might you (or, if you are a woman, your boyfriend) have violated the Mann Act? According to a 1917 Supreme Court ruling that has never been challenged, the statute's prohibition against "transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes" applies to noncommercial consensual sexual liaisons.

How many millions of Americans should sit in jail next to Eliot Spitzer?

Perhaps the answer should come from an ancient tradition. It is said that 2,000 years ago there was once a woodworker who became an itinerant preacher in the hills of Galilee. The story goes that he was brought a woman caught in the act of adultery and was asked whether she should be put to death by stoning, as Mosaic law prescribed.

He replied: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

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1. Arianna Stassinopoulos married Michael Huffington in 1986 and divorced him in 1997. The settlement was not divulged; however, Huffington spent $29 million of his own money on a senate race against Diane Feinstein, so let's assume she got $100 million. Assume sexual encounters that, on average, lasted an hour once a week on average over roughly 11 years, that's 572 times. Dividing $100 million by 572 yields $174,875 an hour.

A Call for Glückenfreude

We all cheer for the underdog, the person who is depressed, who lost a job, who is ill. Secretly, we also occasionally cheer when someone we dislike experiences misfortune, deservedly we believe: schadenfreude. But perhaps the opposite is required somewhat more -- and is considerably nobler.

Schadenfreude, we all know, comes from the German Schaden (harm) and Freude (joy): joy in the misfortune of another.

Face it, you think you might not feel a teensy weensy bit of it if Bill and Melinda Gates got divorced? If Osama got cancer? You weren't secretly glad when Barry Bonds got caught using steroids, Hugh Grant was arrested for getting oral sex from a prostitute in a car, banks lost money due to shady loans, when Scooter Libby was convicted?

Good. Now it's out in the open. We all feel a little schadenfreude now and then. Now Let's consider the opposite.

Your pal gets a promotion or award while you're still stuck in the same old job. Your best friend falls madly in love and you can't get a first date to save your life. Your neighbors take that dream vacation you've always wanted and you haven't been to the next town in three years.

Don't these people make you mad?

For years I felt invidious irritation toward James Fallows. Although he is only three years older than I am, he was Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter, when I was an apprentice aide to the speechwriter of an international diplomat.

He glided from the White House to the Atlantic Monthly, NPR and endless books, essays and a generally placid and comfortable life with wife and, I believe, daughter. I was let go, later fired from another job and have since toiled obscurely on an economic publication that is revered in its field -- but let's face it, I'm no James Fallows.

How dare he show me up like this!

At first I comforted myself that his passage through Harvard and Oxford were mere perquisites of being born with a silver spoon. But no! He had the effrontery of coming from a working class background and winning scholarships on his own merit.

Surely he would divorce. Surely he would have children with disabilities. Get cancer. Turn out to be a plagiarizer. No, no, no.

People like James Fallows should be shot.

So imagine my shock when I discovered that other people felt similarly about me. Ten years ago I had the good fortune to manage a very leveraged buyout of the firm where I worked. I went to lunch with a dear friend, showed her my new business card with "President" on it. Her face was blank. I thought she didn't understand, so I told her.

"Oh, I have thought of starting a publication," she said. No "congratulations" or "I'm so happy for you," no matter how insincere. I chased her for another lunch over the next three months and it was clear she despised me for my good luck. At least, she was honest; she just couldn't deal with my admittedly modest success.

Since then, I have experienced moments in which I wanted to cry out for joy -- all amid the humdrum teeth-gritting reality in this vale of tears. Sons getting into prestigious universities and embarking upon challenging, make-a-Dad-proud careers.

I have gradually learned that no one is interested in my good fortune. Indeed, they'll likely get upset.

So beginning in this Winter Solstice season, I am calling for a new campaign of Glückenfreude -- joy in the happiness and good fortune of others.

Let me begin with James Fallows: I raise a toast to you, sir, I am honored to have read your marvelous prose, am delighted you have traveled well with your delightful family. If we ever meet, I admit, I will be starstruck, bask in your good fortune and consider it my own to have such a privilege.

Live, Give Life, Multiply

Dicebamus hesterna die ... when I first began my series on ethics, the main point was to underline that the source or foundational basis for norms need not be, and historically has not been, a divine being whose very existence I seriously doubt, but the universal human imperative to survive. In examining my proposed decalogue, we have reached the point at which we touch upon the subject of norms concerning life.

Put simply, I argued and continue to argue, good is whatever enhances the prospects of my survival and bad is the opposite. The corollary to "my survival" is that I could not have survived the first few years of my life alone, would not likely be able to survive in the style to which I am accustomed by myself and it won't be long before I will once again need to be nursed until I die.

We are all accustomed by movies and television to think of the "thou shalt not kill" imperative as involving a tawdry city murder by a jealous lover, a jilted husband, a betrayed conspirator and so on.

We are less accustomed to think of war as wrong. Indeed, our government makes every effort to enshrine Horatio's encomium to the young -- dulce et decorum est pro patria mori -- in advertising that simulates video-games. (Anyone who remembers the 1992 film Toys and is aware of the astoundingly successful 2002 PC war game America's Army will no doubt marvel at how life imitates art.)

Not only that, but no one ever considers elbowing someone in the subway or dropping a snotty word to the bus driver who is running late to be "killing."

Yet I meant to include both ends of the spectrum when I changed the Mosaic injunction into something broader and more appropriate to the ethics I am proposing: thou shalt not diminish the life of another human being.

Whenever we make life miserable for someone else, for even one second, we have stolen a possibility of joy that is irreplaceable. That second will never come again, that chance at some semblance of happiness is gone forever. We have killed that person for one moment.

Of course, those who know me will wonder where I get off spouting this proposition. Dismissive words? Moi? Guilty as charged. (Although I would still maintain that some things -- let those who have ears hear -- deserve to be dismissed.)

An ethical principle is not false merely because I fail to observe it from time to time. Enhancing, protecting, giving life is still the human imperative -- and every diminishment detracts from our collective and individual survival.

The wisdom of The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose proto-gay lib motifs are today all too obvious and uninteresting, is that, indeed, we do disfigure ourselves with our killing.

Our sarcasm turns us eventually into bitter prunes, our bullying weakens us, the hunger we inflict on others when we eat their rice bowl fattens us to the point of diabetes, the war and ravaging we inflict turns us into animals and the people we execute haunt us.

Taunt, prejudice and deprivation are all merely prolonged forms of premeditated murder. Most of us, I would argue, partake of these. Similarly, through our taxes we wage war and execute.

No one is pure any more. In Christianity, Augustine of Hippo called the condition "original sin"; in Hinduism and Buddhism it is simply referred to as awareness. When we become self-aware we become moral agents, enmeshed in our foibles and co-conspirators in the foibles of the society we choose to live off and in.

Let's turn this inside out and stress the positive.

To live is the only way we can continue to be moral agents, human. (After we are dead, who knows? The body is certainly gone; the "soul," which I am increasingly convinced by personal experience and what little I know of science is merely a compound of chemicals, returns its matter back to the universe. Most of us, I'm told, becomes nitrogen.)

To make life enjoyable, worthwhile, dignified enhances one's own life by enhancing that of others. To find ways to settle disputes peacefully and to reconcile criminals with society challenges and develops our intellect and makes us better people.

Values vs. Ethics

In attempting to define the terms "values," "morals" and "ethics," Julie Pippert proposes what I see as three normative levels: one defined by oneself, another by society and yet another by subgroups of society. She elides, unwittingly I think, the whole point of norms in moral philosophy, namely to distinguish between right and wrong.

One of the first themes of this blog was my still-unfinished series on moral philosphy. Having chucked the existence of a god or gods out the window, I turned to looking for some basis for normative ethics. I insisted, against the grain for many people in cyberspace, on a universal grounding.

I would like to suggest three problems with the definitions as given.

If a norm only exists for you, it is useless to me. We might as well all go back into the jungle. (OK, yes, what do I mean "back"?)

If a norm is what a society says it is, then it is akin to Anglo-Saxon customary law, forged by precedent rather than by principle; it can be false, misleading and ultimately immoral. How are two societies with different norms to settle their differences?

If a norm is merely a series of ideals chosen by various clubs, they might as well not exist. We all know that clubs make awards and canonize the behavior of those members who curry popularity most successfully.

The epistemology behind these propositions is that we know truth by consent and consensus.

This is not without problems. Just believing the moon is made of green cheese, won't make it so. Even if we were to agree that the earth rotates round the moon, for example, that grass is blue and that water is dry, none of these things -- understood in their everyday sense -- would become true.

Galileo was right: "E pur si muove" (And yet it moves.) The common "knowledge" of his day was wrong.

I would contend that normative philosophy attempts to discover what is truly right and truly wrong. One might question whether the proposals of a given philosophical system or thinker are correct or true, but right and wrong is an irreducible dyad. One can't be equal to the other and viceversa.

As I wrote three years ago, the universal norm of human behavior is that "all behavior that enhances my survival is good and desirable, whatever detracts from it is bad and to be avoided." At the time (amazing how quickly time flies when you're blogging!), I was hesitant to affirm it, but at this writing I am every day more convinced that this is the universal norm par excellence.

I welcome contrary opinions, although I am nearly certain this is an unassailable proposition. Not because I have chosen it (OK, I do listen to myself a little), but because in my observation it is warranted as true and factual, as well as intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

Sowing and Reaping

Mindful of a question that was asked of me in response to my recent minimalist post, I have been attempting to assess what exactly I have sowed, but this farm image has this city boy mightily confused.

My reader wrote "Et toi, qu'as-tu semé que tu puisses récolter?" (And you, what did you sow that you can harvest?).

We get this notion about cause and effect from a biblical phrase "For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap." Is this pastoral image true for humans as it might be for crops? What would the biblical writer have written in the 21st century? What might we write in the "bible" of our hearts?

Humans just might not seed in their lives, other than literally, in their farms and gardens.

The seeding image for human sex, for example, dates back to a biological era in which the ovum, undiscovered until the 19th century, was unknown. In the absence of the ovum, moralists, philosophers and scientists -- all men -- concluded that each sperm was a homunculus, or "little man," implanted in the soil of woman, who played an entirely passive role in reproduction. We now know better.

Similarly, it's not immediately evident that we reap what we sow in other respects. Over the past year, for example, the top 20% of U.S. earners got half of all money income and the bottom 20% got just a little past 3%. Moreover, the richest got richer, while the poorest got poorer.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told an audience of reporters in which I found myself this week that his daughters had gone to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Yet he also spoke of the poor of his city, for whom he announced a new initiative imported from Mexico, as people "who weren't dealt as good a hand of cards."

Whomever you deem the cosmic Card-dealer to be -- and I vote for humanity collectively -- it's evident that all we are and have springs largely from happenstance. We neither sow nor reap, to turn biblical again, we are like the lilies of the field.

I cannot be proud to be an American as I did not choose to be born in New York City. Any more than I chose to have parents with the means and the aspirations to see me attend university.

Nor did I choose to have linguistic abilities, nor to have the opportunity to develop them as a child, nor any number of particulars that started me off on an immeasurably higher socioeconomic plane than a child born from parents who lived in Harlem rather than Sutton Place.

I reap what has been sowed for me to reap. Gratefully. I do not deserve my good fortune. Noblesse oblige. Whatever I have suffered is, in the grand scheme of things, no more than life's hangnail.

We All Belong in Guantánamo

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel First Circle, an officer in Stalin's secret police, unsure which of four men have tipped off a dissident over the telephone, decides to arrest all on grounds that they've surely been disloyal at some point. I'm reminded of that logic upon learning of the publication of Poems from Guantánamo, an anthology written by current detainees.

Solzhenitsyn learned the NKVD officer's logic, of course, in Soviet prison, where he ended up for sending a joke about Stalin to a friend in a letter from the front during World War II.

The notion that unjust imprisonment can be fertile literary ground first came home to me one college summer afternoon while reading a slim volume of Ho Chi Minh's prison poetry. As my father passed by, he glanced at my book and proclaimed that prison was "an excellent school." He had been a political prisoner at about the same time as Solzhenitsyn, although his letters from prison have little more than personal value.

What strikes me now, however, is not the literature but the reality of the logic of being guilty unless proven innocent. As Solzhenitsyn's NKVD officer might have said, everyone is guilty of something.

While that might not be a good basis for a legal system, in philosophical terms the idea resonates in my bones as true. All of us have contravened what we believed were the rules of right and wrong, knowingly and willingly, at some point in our lives. Most likely many times.

The men in Guantánamo might not really be menaces to the United States -- certainly no court has found them so -- but they are not innocent and the best they could hope for from a court would be the verdict of "not guilty." Not guilty as charged.

That's not innocent of all wrongdoing. Maybe some cheated on their wives or girlfriends. Maybe some swindled someone. Maybe some were bullies in the schoolyard.

President Bush also belongs in Guantánamo by the logic that holds the detainees: name anyone who has greater power who has inflicted more death and torture during his term in office. Knowingly. We know he knows because the various dissembling masks have already peeled off.

Let's not get too righteous, however. All of us are also guilty, by thought, word, deed or inaction.

There used to be a prayer in the pre-1979 Book of Common Prayer that expressed the thought majestically: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done: And there is no health in us."

Even newborn babies? Absolutely. There is hardly a creature more self-centered than a newborn human. Or child. Or adolescent. Or adult.

A very young child, of course, has developed neither the knowledge nor the will-power to make moral choices. To some extent, being self-centered is a matter of survival. Babies cry to be cared for. Children make demands to have some legitimate needs met.

Yet they also make illegitimate claims on our time and resources that will not further their survival. Indeed, if satisfied, indulged children will become lazy, willful and helpless adults. We all belong in some Guantánamo or another.

All of which brings me full circle to the literary.

It is said that Henry David Thoreau, when imprisoned as a tax dissenter during the Mexican-American War, was asked by a visitor what someone of his standing was doing in prison. Thoreau asked the visitor what he was doing outside.

Street Cents and Uncommon Sense

A wiry light-skinned African American man wearing tan pants, what looked like a pressed, clean shirt and a natty cap came up to me to sell me a newspaper, Street Sense. It's a newspaper written by and sold by homeless people in Washington, D.C.

The man explained the paper to me -- I had heard of it; in fact, someone I know had been a volunteer copy-editor of the paper for a while -- and I saw he had a picture ID badge hanging from his belt, just like every preppy congressional intern in town. The price is a dollar, "but anything else you can give, or even nothing at all, is appreciated." I gave him five bucks.

Then I kicked myself.

After decades of railing against the Protestant work ethic for the way it breeds anxiety, invidiousness and antipathy among peers, self-righteousness and unbridled materialism, I'd been easily won over by the image of someone presenting himself as performing the quintessential American sacrament: pulling himself up by his bootstraps. "A hand up, not a hand out."

It's the very idea I normally find detestable. How did I get suckered in?

I know full well that the sour fruits of the work ethic are the legacy of the Reformation. Pace Protestants: this is not a religious argument, but merely a restatement of historical context.

In the "dark" and benighted Middle Ages of Europe, as in antiquity, everyone pretty much worked as little as they could. In pre-Reformation Europe, the richest were not the most hard-working (not that they are today, either). Work, people believed, was an unavoidable consequence of the loss of Eden: "With labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life" (Gen. 3:17).

Work did not bestow status in the medieval social structure. Everyone worked as befitted their station in life and work rarely yielded social mobility. (Before we get too high and mighty about those backward medievals, ask the American working poor whether this doesn't happen here and now.)

Work was merely part of the curse of being a limited human with a life that was, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.

Yet even Marx and Engels recognized that there existed a two-sided social compact prior to the industrial revolution (see vol. III of Das Kapital): the peasant worked, the monk prayed and copied books, the lord of the castle protected the community. Sure, it was better in some respects to be the lord, as always; but the lord had obligations and when he egregiously neglected them, the peasantry revolted.

With capitalism and industry and its Calvinist religious ideology (see Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), however, came the social notion that effort begot success, which in itself was a sign of divine favor. Those who were wage-slaves rather than investors had only themselves to blame, the conventional wisdom concluded; and all the more so those who didn't even have jobs.

This is precisely the view into which I was gently suckered by the Street Sense hawker.

More accurately, he and I have been subject to such a steady stream of social propaganda that we have given in. He and his associates have taken on the trappings of entrepreneurship -- the clothes, the badge, the pretense of selling a product. For my part, I could see myself in an imaginary Dickensian role: I'd toss him a copper smiling benignly, then utter in a kindly but smug tone, "Here you are, my good man."

After all, he looked so clean and honorable and hardworking.

What if he hadn't? What if he had smelled? What if he had been leprous? Would he be less worthy of a smile or a contribution or a moment of attention? (I've been told by people with some experience in this matter that most begging is an attempt to make human contact.)

Do we live to work or work to live? Do we work hard, because the work fulfills us or to have things that will make us feel more important, good, good-looking, better than others? Does all this striving give us joy? In the end, we have only one life (as far as I can tell, I won't get into a reincarnation argument). The life we know has limits. Is it to spend most of it acquiring things?

If we were, for an instant, to assume that poor or homeless people choose their lifestyles, romping happily through their slums and sleeping on grates in the enjoyment of bacchanalian freedom ... what would be so wrong about choosing not to work, not to live with a roof over one's head, not to follow social etiquette or fashion, not to bathe or live a middle class life?

I will provide grist for an answer with a story told to me by an old Italian.

One day there was a young man fishing by the pier. An old man sat next to him with his rod and his bait and shook his head.

"Ragazzo," the old man asked, "what are you doing here whittling your hours away?"

"What should I be doing instead, old man?"

The old man stroked his beard and replied, "Why, you should be in school."

"Whatever for?"

"So you could learn your lessons, graduate and get a job."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"So you could then get the hand of a beautiful young maiden, marry her and have many children."

The young man looked alarmed. "But why would I want that?"

"Well, then you could be sure that you would be cared for in old age."

"What for?"

"Ah, that's easy. So you could eventually be like me, retired and out fishing all day."

Then the young man smiled. "But, sir, that's what I have been doing all morning."

The Joy of Giving

Anne's comment to the post about tipping, prompted some thought about what's involved in giving and receiving. Our text today, campers, is: What a joy it is to give and how generous of those who receive!

Let's think about it. I have always felt good whenever I freely gave someone something. A present, money to a friend in need, time to someone who asked for it, a donation and even a tip.

Does anyone take pleasure in feeling somehow superior to the person receiving? Do you? Not that I have seen. Most people delight in the ability to have something that someone else might value.

Giving feels good. It is "blessed," or healthy, or just plain happy to give. Whatever you gave, if you had kept it, wouldn't it eventually have broken or become boring or useless or forgotten?

Does anyone really get pleasure in looking at the balance in their savings account? OK, so you feel secure for a moment, then you think about what it won't buy. How much money is enough, John D. Rockefeller was once asked. "Just a little bit more," he replied.

The deed of giving stays with you. It feels good. It's a memory you can always recall. It's a memory others will have of you. It doesn't cost anything, it doesn't wear out. It can always pick you up. ("I may feel terrible today, but look what I did for ... yesterday.")

Now about receiving, I have a little anecdote.

A number of years ago, shortly I was in the selection committee for the rector of the Episcopal parish I attended (long story, for another day), the priest we ended up choosing gave me a ride home one evening. I explained that I didn't have a car and the buses might be infrequent at the late hour, etc.

"How wonderful!" she said. "You go around giving others the chance to give you a ride and get to know you better."

I had never thought of it that way. I was always just the guy who had to ask for rides when it was late or I was in the burbs. Suddenly, I was the guy who gave other people the opportunity to give.

Receivers are heroic in ways large and small. Life deals them a need, yet here they stand and carry on, with dignity. They receive with a smile.

In a way, receivers give the joy of giving.

We'll go to a meeting and I never get to do a good post-mortem in the car with someone, as I often did. Nothing more empty and solitary than getting into your own combustion-engine bubble. I have a car now. I love giving people rides, although all too many people have their own cars.The car will need repairs. It will cause me to fret and worry. I'll eventually get rid of it.

But the conversations I had as a rider, many of those are forever. The people who gave me rides can also recall how good and neighborly they were. They can treasure that always, too. Thanks to me, who was there to receive.

In addition to the joy of giving, there's the generosity of receiving.

The Nurturing Chain

Retaking the quest for "godless ethics," I am confronted on the morning of Father's Day with the Mosaic commandment to "Honour thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest be longlived." Why and whatever for?

Perhaps this is the problem with starting with the Mosaic decalogue. All the Judaeo-Christian sources I can lay my hands on begin with the presupposition that it must be done because God ordered it. To honor parents is to honor God: God made us, with our parents participation.

Now let's say that one is skeptical that there ever was a god, least of all at the time one's life began. What then? What is the purpose of this very widely held notion?

I write this at a time at which I stand to gain as a net beneficiary: I am a father and my parents are dead. Yet why should my sons live under ethical compulsion to honor me?

As with many of the other ancient commands, I find myself thinking of the economic, social and practical reasons such an encomium would have been cast in the form of a universal norm. The first to come to mind is that until Social Security, and the various forms of old age support in Europe and Japan, becoming old was a tragedy.

Do note that Social Security is not a forced savings plan: it is an intergenerational transfer from the working age generations to the one beyond that age.

So the idea that God, the all-purpose source of everything someone would, without bothering to rhyme or reason, wish to impose on another, declared that parents should be "honored" -- includes caring for them in old age -- makes some economic sense. To me. But why would it make sense to my sons?

The idea, I suppose, is the whole notion of parenthood as godlike. You give life. You clean diapers. You feed and clothe and house and educate for half a lifetime. In your prime years. Then they let go and that's it.

"Al olor de la flor se le olvida la flor" (the scent of the flower forgets the flower), sang Catalonian composer-singer Joan Manuel Serrat in the 1970s, in a song addressed to his girlfriend's mother.

Of course, there's another rendering of the story. You have sexual urges and, in love or in lust, you copulate. With no effort, often without the slightest intention, a sperm and an ovum (discovered only in the 19th century!) make a microscopic meeting in a flood of intermingled fluids. A new life begins.

Discovery of the life is greeted with chagrin or joy depending on the copulators' intent (see above). The actual life involves a lot of work that was not bargained for; the baby has a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to spew out excrement, tears and the most annoying noises in the universe.

But there are rewards. What parent does not revel in the moment this creature suddenly ... smiles! The love of one's children and the love of one's parents is clearly a matter of brain chemicals to ensure the nurturing of young humans.

Is that practical good an ethical good? I'd start to answer from the universal imperative to survive, enunciated three years ago here, which runs as follows:

All behavior that enhances my survival is good and desirable, whatever detracts from it is bad and to be avoided. My survival is linked to the survival of all humanity.

Seen from that perspective, the Mosaic principle, based on the idea of human survival rather than a god, needs to be amplified to apply to all who are in the nurturing chain.

We need to honor parents, grandparents and children, but also cousins and uncles and aunts, and also greengrocers and farmers, cobblers and tailors, and carpenters and masons. We need, indeed, to honor the other species of plants and animals that sustain us, the rocks and waters that shelter and refresh us.

We are children of the universe, its stewards, and in a biological relay race, we are also its mother and, yes, its father. Happy Father's Day everyone!

Love, Fear, Words, Deeds

A friend I know as a truth teller writes in response to the last post, that maybe we shouldn't love everyone, since there are predators. Even more trenchantly, my correspondent questions whether people who say they love everyone can be trusted.

In my mind this raises two sets of problems in the application of the principle of love.

First, of course, is the fact that we live in a dangerous world. Turning of the other cheek is the least frequently applied of all the teachings of Jesus. In the weeks after September 11, I do not recall reminders of this teaching; instead, most pulpits dripped with words of rage and vengeance. Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the nation is still paying the price for that sort of sentiment.

Perhaps the reason why turning the other cheek doesn't work is that it's thought of in isolation from everything else. The average churchgoer may be a law-abiding citizen and behave with good manners, but this is not what the point of the challenge to love is about.

Love as described here was unstinting, disinterested merely for the reason that the loved one exists. This is not business as usual except for an hour a week in church.

This involves a whole change of perspective. Here the Buddha's surrender is meaningful. The bodhisattva (or Buddha-to-be) can love everything and everyone without fear because he or she has shed attachments and desires.

So what it there are robbers, no possession matters to the bodhisattva. So what if there are those who would harm the body, it is a passing thing. So what if someone would cause me pain, all the world is full of pain. (One of the Four Truths.)

Granted, I'm not there myself. I'm just saying that I understand why detachment makes sense. Detaching is the ultimate protection. As Janis Joplin put it: "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Or, more conventionally, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt preached from the presidential bully pulpit in 1933: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

It seems to me, then, that we need to add one more qualifier the universal ethical principle: we are speaking of fearless love.

Secondly, when we attempt to establish this goal for our behavior, it must go beyond words. Love is a verb best performed without much fanfare.

The Sermon on the Mount says; "when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you." (Matthew 6,3-4)

"When we give, we should not be attached to the giving itself, nor take too much pride, nor brag about our giving," writes Venerable Tsang Hui in the Chinese Buddhist tradition. "Having wisdom will not give us too much conceit. Only through cultivating wisdom can we cut off our mental defilements."

Our rational mind cannot read into the thoughts and feelings of others, but it can grasp deeds. When words and deeds are at odds with each other, as my correspondent noted, it is evident.

These things are my yearnings, rather than my accomplishments.

Loving

What can one say about disinterested, unstinting love of everything and everyone other that it's a very hard value to embody? Just finding the words to describe such a love doesn't make one change to become loving in this way.

I'm still a flea-bitten observer of politics: the plainest "good morning" makes me wonder about the greeter's agenda and as much time as I devote to thinking of systemic solutions for humanity's ills, I don't much like the real individual people on the street. Can a misanthrope be loving?

The traditional paths to loving, abrahamic, dharmic and taoic, speak of some kind of inner change that leads to the adoption of a set of rules or goals.

Christianity's metanoia takes the ancient Greek term for changing one's mind, or retracting a statement, and imbues it with the notion of repentance and a continuing transformation. From the gospels' Beatitudes to early Christianity's Didache, the essentials replace the human order with a divine one and the habitual response to reality with an intentional one.

In the dharmic mode, Buddhism has it four truths and its eightfold path through which the believer reaches enlightenment, although at the core is renunciation, even of the desire for enlightenment. In the end, as Herman Hesse's novel Siddartha spells out to the Western reader, even the rules, rituals and mental structures of Buddhist teaching can stand in the way.

The Tao calls for a oneness with the flow of the universe that keeps everything in order. Out of this arise the compilation of maxims of the Tao Te Ching and the endless prescriptions of Confucianism.

Then there's the fourth traditional, non-religious set of paths, those that stem from reason, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and more -- take your pick. Reason calls, at a minimum, for coherence between one's understanding and one's actions.

Intuitively, however, a believer or rule-follower feels quite short of a lover. I have been a believer, not a particularly good rule-follower (although I know some who are).

My experience tells me that believing and following rules falls short of utter, blissful, disinterested appreciation of others for themselves. I'm thinking of the sort of thing one tastes at a first kiss, when the other is unknown but lovely. Or the magical moment in which a child opens up for a grandparent a tiny window into wisdom.

These are moments of youth and of old age, rather than the in-between, where most of us find ourselves still.

I am left uncomfortable, where I started, which I suppose is what this realization is all about.

Like the ego-boundary shattering experience of orgasm, the mere notion that an utter love transcends everything and transforms everything yields a high. But the post-coital feeling while Lady Wisdom has her cigarette leads to wondering whether she will respect me tomorrow, and the little mental worm eats up the unstinting face of love.

Is the answer to begin with self-love, a love that radiates from one's core and slowly loses itself in others? Why do I think I must stay at that moment, that rain will never fall again, that all suffering will cease, that time will stop?

Perhaps the answer is to find one's way to integrate love into life, with its ups and downs. Easily written, harder to live out.

Thou Shalt Love

My assertion of absolutes does not have the purpose of proposing a deity, but rather to provide a foundation for the ethics I see necessary to the survival of humanity in the 21st century. In so doing, and in no small part thanks to Tom Head's comment, I stumbled upon George Edward Moore's Principia Ethica, in which the author proposes two possible instances of the absolute "good" without relying on an overarching deity to ground them.

The heading of this essay gives away the one that interests me today: disinterested, unstinting love of everything and everyone.

Earlier, in my criticism of the pope's sole encyclical letter so far, Deus Caritas Est (see here), I attempted to do battle against the classic Western boxes into which love is put, in order to diminish it. The pope's cry that God is love (per the encyclical's title) claims love for the Judaeo-Christian deity, with all that implies.

Other authors focus on a typology of love -- of family, of friends, of romance and altruism -- focused on to whom and in what manner love is dispensed. In the West we do not even like to think of these loves jumbled up in, for example, romantic love of kin or altruistic love of friends; we have a strong taboo against incest and a free market interpretation of friendship that requires mutuality.

Indeed, in my journeys in the middle-aged world of dating I have discovered many people's lists of qualifications and their a priori model of the "Right" mate; and given the industry with which they construct the image of what they want, they might as well be perusing consumer magazines to prepare for shopping for detergent.

They say they want love, but they don't; they want a human object that performs certain functions and fulfills certain needs and they want to seal the deal with a contract commonly known as marriage, or maybe something more ambiguous, such as cohabitation. A little honesty with oneself about this might spare everyone a great deal of wasted time and anguish.

So much for what love is not. As to what love is, as an absolute ethical good, I think it is best described as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested caring.

Let's break this down.

Appreciation involves a recognition of the quality, value, significance, or magnitude of another or another thing, resulting in a favorable judgment or opinion -- including the aesthetic -- of whom or what we are perceiving in this way, a gratitude for the existence of such a person or thing and a assignment of rising value or price to the person or thing over time. Note the combination of awareness, esteem, gratitude and rising valuation.

Love begins in the emotions and this appreciation is emotional. We feel love. We feel awareness, esteem, gratitude and our feeling cascades into a stronger stream of appreciation as we continue to love.

For it to be an absolute good, love must be directed at all people and things -- even beggars and cockroaches -- and it must be directed at them for who or what they are, independently of their usefulness to us, or the way they fit into the criteria for judgment we have employed before becoming aware of them.

Finally, while love begins as emotion, it fulfills itself in a continuing action -- this need not be a Western laundry list of tasks, but may include the action to be, as in "don't just do something, sit there."

Ethics and Values

Someone who may cease regarding me as a friend was offended by my admittedly imprudent comment concerning what I observed was this person's lack of ethics, which I expressed -- with some imprecision -- as "values." Because I think this is a crucial issue of our times, I'd like to review this, as a self-clarification and an exposition that I think is missing in our society.

First, I need to distinguish between value, values and ethics.

A value is the result of a comparison: X is more worthy than Y. There are economic values (thing X is worth Y amount of work, represented as money), aesthetic values (the looks of blonde X are more valuable than those of brunette Y), behavioral values (I like doing action X more than action Y) and so forth. These are all largely subjective, arbitrary, malleable and impermanent. Values lend themselves to collective persuasion, either through coercion or through seduction of various levels and degrees, as is the case in dictatorships, advertising and fashions enforced by peer pressure.

Everyone has values. They represent some of the limits we place on behavior due to social convention, ranging from manners to law.

Ethics, on the other hand, is the branch of philosophy that studies human behavior, its concepts, its norms and its application. At one level, we explain what ethics are. At another we propose what is virtuous and what is not. At yet another level we attempt to apply or derive principles from questions about certain human behavior: Is abortion moral? What are human rights and how do we determine them?

In our society, the majority is not ethical. Many people derive ethical values from their inherited religion. Some people merely observe group behavior and christen what is conventional as ethical. Most people, in the end, rely on their own will to decide what is ethical.

It is this latter point that concerns me today. We have gotten to the point that most folks think that they must canonize whatever they do as moral and good, regardless of its consistency with any other kind of thinking. In this, my friend is like the majority. This is not ethical thinking, this is self-indulgence disguised as "ethical" by way of setting oneself up as one's own judge and jury -- without an external or internal code to which the court must hew.

In the last half century, it seems, we went from inherited, external and absolute systems of ethics to their displacement by allegedly higher internal, situational ethics that in the end became one long paean to the self -- anything goes if I feel good about it and since I should be good to myself and my precious self-esteem, it turns out that anything can be made to feel good.

No one is ever guilty of anything; even politicians who claim "family values" (but divorce often or are caught in flagrante delicto) will go so far as to assert responsibility but avoid having to give the required response, the payment due for the wrong done.

I find this problematic, yet when I assert it I get in trouble. I am called self-righteous, priggish.

People don't like to be asked to consider what ethical standards there, much less to weigh submitting to them, whether it feels good or not, whether it is legal, fashionable or acceptable.

Let's examine an example that is close enough without being uncomfortable for too many people today.

There was a time in living memory in which certain prejudices were acceptable, some forms of it were enforced by law, in some circles some form of prejudice was acceptable. Jews called African Americans Schwartze with disdain; the Irish called Italian Americans "wops"; people knew of lifelong bachelors who never married or lived with roommates of the same sex and whispered about them; a woman's place was in the kitchen; and, of course, no white Southerner wanted his daughter to marry a Negro or a Catholic.

All these ideas could be expressed more or less openly -- although the politest people did it behind the backs of the victims. Now they can't. Conservatives call the change in norms "political correctness"; they would like to go back, to "conserve" the ethos of prejudice.

In fact, prejudice hasn't disappeared. Jews whisper Schwartze and it has been reported that a black actor on the set of television's Grey's Anatomy called another actor, who is apparently homosexual, a "faggot."

Now, to ethics. Is prejudice wrong? Why? Was it always wrong or is it merely wrong since 1964? Are most of us guilty of this wrongdoing (in thought, word or deed)? Do we deceive ourselves by thinking that we are not, only to surprise ourselves when we blurt out something not quite as ridiculous as "macaca," but close? What ought we to do to assume reponsibility and give the required response for our actions?

Or is it that if I feel it's OK, I'm entitled to act, speak and think in a prejudiced way?

True confession here: I am prejudiced. One of my prejudices is against British people. I deplore so much of what the British Empire did and find the British so obnoxiously arrogant, that I rarely cut Brits much slack even though I admire many things that are of British origin. It's just the people I can't stand.

Granted, I tell myself that a large part of British arrogance, imperialism and general obnoxiousness is compensation for living in a small island with terrible weather, for being stripped of humanity in childhood by parents who care for pets more than for their children (go to England and you'll see plenty of fat pets and plenty of underfed children). It's a sense of inferiority disguised as somethings else.

Pity the poor Brits. They are racists because deep down they hate themselves. They are obnoxious because they are shy. They conquered everywhere because who the hell wants to stay somewhere you get soaked every day of the year. They started the slave trade from Africa because they knew their own workers were whiny shirkers whose skin was too sallow and bodies too infirm from their benighted climate to be any good at sturdy physical work.

So it's not really fair of me to prejudge every Brit I come across. Not really kind not to look for explanations and excuse. I should think of them as I think of the Spaniards: valiant, stubbornly principled, religious to a fault, life loving. Or is that a prejudice, too?

How does one confront the ethical wrong of prejudice? How does one, having admitted (with a little fun) that one is wrong, take a different course?

It seems to me that merely passing a law (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and adopting a new fashion (political correctness) hasn't worked. Prejudice abounds. Racism abounds: witness the Bush Administration on Katrina.

Here is the core of ethics: a principle that makes us all uncomfortable because it describes ways in which all of us could improve. Whether we like it or not.

An ethical principle survives the excuse of upbringing, suffering, anything other than lack of awareness -- which ends when we've named and recognized our behavior in the damning principle.

Others and Ourselves

In the 2001 film The Others, Nicole Kidman plays a woman who lives with her two light-sensitive children in a beautiful house on the isle of Jersey awaiting the return of her husband, a soldier away in the Second World War. The house seems strangely haunted until the viewer begins to see everything from the point of view of the haunters.

An inversion of a similar sort is needed to take the next step in this series of meditations toward an ethic. We have seen, in the last post, the conflict between how we see ourselves from within and how we are seen from the outside.

The problem with my self-perception is that I cannot see all of myself, even physically. I'm told that elephants, when shown a mirror begin to inspect themselves thoroughly to gain a view of parts they never are able to see otherwise.

The problem with mass thinking is best seen in context. Groups of adolescents, from male gangs to female cliques, tend to enforce among members a uniform style of clothes, speech patterns and behavior subject to the whim of the alpha male or female, precisely at that point of personal development when individual self-image is weakest and most malleable. The result is often antisocial, self-destructive behavior that ruins lives.

In the adult world we have the world of fashion, which tyrannizes how people, although mostly women heed it, must look and what they must wear.

We also have William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), in which such individuals were collectively described as

"people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions."

They remind me of Catholic priests; which brings me to the third possibility, the therapist.

The problem with the therapist -- in past ages priests and shamans, oracles and seers -- is that they are not without their own agenda that may be quite distinct from our own goals. The priests and shamans were, like artisans and scribes, dependent on the king's bounty and pleasure, as they did not produce their own sustenance, nor exercise brawn to protect the realm.

The therapist today is freer but still vulnerable to pecuniary corruption -- it's very handy to draw that fee every week for years on end from patients supposedly never quite ready to fend for themselves. Therapists are also subject to the fashions of their profession and, on the whole, are society's ultimate organization men, wielding the power to lock people up. (Speaking of power, let's not forget Aristotle's thinking on power and potential.)

Nonetheless, in the ideal, the therapist is a trained and experienced observer. As a journalist, also a trained an experienced observer, I often hear people say they can get information themselves. Journalism isn't mere information retrieval, but sifting through what's misleading, erroneous or misleading, to arrive at some preliminary, first-draft of what might possibly may have happened.

Something similar might be said of the ideal therapist. This is someone whom we vest with the potential to help us discern who we really are and what we really want to do and be in our lives. The point is not, should not be, the therapist, but the therapeutic process.

Its essence was captured by an old joke: How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

At heart, it is not the therapist who lays out a picture of our selves, but rather we who pick up insights from the therapist's active listening and rejigger the picture we had. Who we are and who we are seen as, taken in this context, interact with each other. The therapist need not be a credentialed specialist. A good person will do, as will a good book.

All we really need is an active "mirror" that allows us to see ourselves as we are seen and that leaves us free to transform ourselves to what we would like to be or become. To develop a true image of ourselves, we need to interact with some one or some thing, an Other, who offers glimmers of what we appear to be.

In times past our forebears made of the Other a god, or at least a powerful intermediary, ceding independence largely because they saw themselves as powerless kites in the winds of Fate. Today, I think, things are different.

The Others may well be inside us, challenging us, showing us what we do not wish to see but need to, or it may be another, on the outside, summoned by the inner voice. As in the movie, it may turn out that we are the Others.

Alice and the Mirror

Just as I had polished off the notion of making one's own true images, convinced that I am a peace-loving wisdom seeker, an acquaintance declared my temperament fearsome and my responses oversensitive. Are we the way we see ourselves from the inside or the way others see us from the outside? Which image of ourselves is the true one, valid and overriding?

There seemed to be many answers.

My initial response is that only I know what I am thinking on the inside as I commit thoughts to words, in writing or speech, or as I commit my being to action. Hence, the image I form of myself from the inside is the True Self, it is who I really am.

A friend replies, to the contrary, that I don't really know what I am. My intentions are hidden from myself by genetic predispositions, the unconscious and plain self-delusion. The best judges of who I am are those who observe my behavior. If five people judge me from the outside to be X, even though I protest with interior self-knowledge that I am really Y, I am really X.

Another voice says: neither, the true self can only be found by a therapist. The source is, you guessed, a therapist (not mine; I have none, although some think I should). Let's replace "therapist" with someone whom we vest with the potential to help us discern who we really are and what we really want to do and be in our lives.

Three options. Three doors. Which is right?

Make True Images

We have seen that loving ourselves is not an automatic free pass to indulgence and bacchanalia. Alcohol abuse can ruin the liver, wanton sex can kill, overeating can make us obese and diabetic, and so forth. Nor is self-love a door to solipsism; self-delusion is as dangerous as self-abuse.

Who is in the mirror? Is it an image of my father or mother? Is it a person older or younger, handsomer or uglier than the one in my dreams? Can I agree with myself which image is truly me?

Making true images of oneself is a task of a lifetime.

We can be proud only of the true selves we are, with commendable traits, as well as drawbacks. Not "proud to be [put nationality, local identity, race, sex here]," nor "embarrassed to [same categories]." Not what I was born but who I am.

Who am I? Am I a son, a father, a husband? Am I a professional, an employee, a business leader? Am I the guy sitting in the back of the bus reading a novel? Am I all of these? More?

Am I capable of revealing what I know about who I am without fear or concern for the opinion of others? To be who I am simply because that is who I am?

Have I come to believe the false images of myself that I have made to deceive others? If so, I am in trouble.

Interrupted Solitude

Prompted by e-mail list discussions concerning my last post, I have realized that, although the human condition is at heart solitary, we have the option, in a world of 6 billion inhabitants, to choose an interruption.

That is to say, although the links idealized by religion and popular sentimentality are a mirage, there are benefits to gaining access to human intercourse (yes, gutterminds, in that sense, too). In the world of individuals, as in that of nations, we sail in international waters, we journey in a moral jungle in which survival remains always a struggle.

After all, interrupted solitude is merely that.

Relationships, much like relations between the nations, are based on compacts if conflict is to be averted -- this includes those encounters that do not surpass exchanges as lacking in intimacy as one might have with one's mail carrier. There's a protocol, commercial agreements of coincidences, treaties, etc.

At heart we return to what's been said here, so long as we can exercise our sovereignty we are sovereign beings, different, solitary. We have the option to interrupt solitude and whenever we do we expose ourselves to the consequences.

The important thing is not to fall into the delusion that the abundance of people that may surround us at one point or another, due to the accident of large families, or because we belong to a union, or for whatever reason, constitutes an inexorably independent reality, a vectorial sum that exceeds the total of the individuals.

The society and laws that we accept, or have been forced to accept, are perishable. Community or society does not exist. It is a temporary mirage. Sure, it's the mirage of life, the brief period in which we acquire awareness, we squander it, then return to eternal sleep.

When one holds up these realities for all to see, the common response is a protest that is actually the fear of death. We need to have the valor to see things as they are to be who we are and, at a minimum, to enjoy the profligacy of life.

We Are Alone

The world is not here for me; I am alone.

No one came to my bedside to bring tea, nor did I go to anyone else's, when dusk came upon the damned cold that is circulating in this city and that everyone has caught.

Saturday morning at 7 I have no one with whom to discuss the worry that wakes me up.

After a day of rambling by the library or the movies I find I have not exchanged a word with anyone.

Most people bore me, and I bore them. Increasingly, what interests them most are unappetizing details of their medical conditions. To be fair, what interests me most is my economic future.

Toting up my donations and volunteer work, it becomes crystal clear to me that the real motivation is to feel noble and good about myself.

We are alone. No one will look after us. Conversely, let's be frank, unless we are paid, in psychic or somatic currency, we will not look after anyone else.