On Our Ravenous Appetite for Pieces to the Wrong Puzzle
“I’m entitled to an explanation! You owe your stockholders an account of the whole disgraceful affair! Why did you pick a worthless mine? Why did you waste all those millions? What sort of rotten swindle was it?”
Francisco shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know why you should call my behavior rotten. I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn’t everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastiàn project. Isn’t it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn’t it evil to work for profit? I did not work for profit—I took a loss. Doesn’t everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of its employees? The San Sebastiàn Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they provided a livelihood for thousands of men who could not have achieved in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day’s work, which they could not do. Isn’t it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden he San Sebastiàn Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn’t it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn’t everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned.”
Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand, 1957
Is the whole of our machinations driven to simply fuel our machinations? In the same way that news organizations must find—or invent—“news”, do people need events, goals, and all the stuff comprising “life”, to sedate them against the void of purposelessness and make them want to exist? Is it evolutionary, are we adapted to delude ourselves so that we continue to exist?
Asking those questions takes me back to high school, to those long-winded reconnaissance missions into Deep Conversation. They’re simple and naïve and sophomoric and unanswered. Still they’re unanswered. Most of us seem to ask, if at all, in those years when the world is recognizably becoming The World, the domain of human industry, when we’re losing sight of anything else. We soon thereafter find comfortably familiar, reflexive pursuits and let slip any potential objection to the foundations of The World. Sure, we might seize upon objections to elements of The World, e.g. human rights violations, unfair taxation, those implications of climate change that threaten to dismantle the cage of The World; but none of these exists in the hinterlands beyond our interests, but rather just redistribute pieces within them. It’s of more than epistemological interest.
That’s not a completely accurate indictment—there are folks who ponder this stuff; but a lot of it seems still to sit within rather than without human notions, in direction and scope. A simple fix to part of that is to say that human thought is, by definition, human, so there’s nothing to be done with the scope of our notions. I counter that that’s defining your way out of it, where you might just as well suggest we accept that but still try to expand the scope. And I’m not talking about “spirituality”, any more than I’m talking about phrenology or E.T.s. There’s certainly a limit to such expansion, the point at which our brain chemistry and physiology become impregnable boundaries; but we could game the system, maybe, if we found a way to identify patterns of broader scope and select them, in a Darwinian sense. But that’s a hard nut to crack, for all kinds of reasons.
That sounds like old-school eugenics, and might as well be, I guess. If the squad came rapping at your chamber door, how would you justify your existence? If given that chance, would you instead welcome the reprieve of their syringe or manacles or whatever? Are you so in love with The World that you’d want to continue your service to it?
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