1.) Recondition
Your Status Quo Conditioning
"A hero is not a champion of
things become
but of things becoming;
the dragon to be slain by him
is a precisely the monster
of the status quo."
Joseph Campbell
Yo! Plutocrat!
Yeah, you with dollar signs for pupils and a
clinched fist for a heart.
You are a victim. You have been psychologically
and morally compromised by
the system. You have been spiritually deceived. You have
been existentially bamboozled.
The system has convinced you that greed is
honorable, that profits matter more than people, that ownership
trumps relationships, that power matters more than compassion,
that material possession matters more than personal integrity,
that money is greater than the heart, that equity trumps
equality, and that competition is more important than
cooperation.
This is nothing but machine-reasoning from a
machine-state with a machine-heart spewing machine-lies from its
machine-mouth.
But, like
Noam Chomsky said,
"States are not moral agents; people are."
If you would be people, and not machines, extract
yourself from the status quo state, and become a human being.
Recondition the precondition. Become an agent for
humanity instead of an agent for an inhumane state. Transform
yourself. Turn the shadows of your past into stepping stones
toward a better you.
Like
Nietzsche said,
"The great epochs in our lives are at the
points when we gain the courage to rebaptize our badness
into the best in us."
I dare you to have such courage.
I dare you to look into your own soul and find a
deeper meaning than what the status quo has conditioned you into
thinking is meaningful. I dare you to think outside the box (or
overflowing safe). I dare you to become better than the
plutocratic status quo.
Like Eliezer Yudkowsky said,
"You are personally responsible for becoming
more ethical than the society you grew up in."
2.) Get Power Over
Power
"Nearly all men can stand
adversity,
but if you want to test a
man's character,
give him power."
Abraham Lincoln
Plutocrats the world over, I'm putting your
character to the test.
I'm triple-dog daring you to become a hero over
power as opposed to simply a hero with power. I'm challenging
you to question the very concept of power. If you question far
enough, you will discover that you are doing it wrong, very
wrong. True power is not lording your wealth over the poor. True
power is using your wealth to liberate the poor.
True power is not syphoning wealth from the poor
through system-regulated
Ponzi schemes.
True power is expiating wealth through
sustainable means, despite the system. Power tends to corrupt,
we all know this. And it will corrupt absolutely if it is not
regulated.
As it stands, you are the only person who can
regulate your own power. You might think your hoarding of power
and wealth is well-intended but,
Like
Malcom Gladwell wrote,
"There comes a point where even the
best-intentioned application of power and authority begins
to backfire."
And it most definitely is backfiring, whether you
realize it or not.
You probably imagine that your sense of worth is
wrapped up in how much money you can make. It's not. Your worth
has only ever been determined by how healthy you are and how
well you treat others. That's it. That wad-of-money you have for
a brain needs to be excommunicated.
You want to know why you suffer, and why you are
existentially unhappy: because you are chasing numbers. You are
chasing power. You're like a chicken with its head cut off
chasing its own tail.
And if that doesn't explain it well enough, heed
the wise words of the Buddha,
"Attachment is the root of suffering."
You want to get power over power? Let that shit
go! Expiate your wealth, lest it destroy your soul. Go from
being an unhealthy hoarder to being a healthy provider.
And practicing capital munificence is a good way
to do exactly that.
3.) Practice
Capital Munificence
"The first task is to win something;
the
second, to banish the feeling that has been won;
otherwise it is a burden."
A.C. Grayling
I dare you to have the courage to transform the
ritual of greedy moneymaking into the far superior ritual of
moral prestige.
The best way to do this is through capital
munificence. Paraphrasing
myself, imagine that you are
the head hunter of a tribe, and that we are your tribe. Imagine
you are a prolific hunter with great prowess, skilled in all
weapons.
There are other hunters, sure, but none with your
unique abilities (whether given to you by nature or by nurture,
through skill or through luck).
Imagine all the hunters go on a great hunt. At
the end of this hunt you end up in the 1 percentile of hunters
who gets the greatest amount of kills, where the vast majority
of hunters (90%) end up with exactly zero kills.
Maybe those other hunters were lazy. Maybe they
were unskilled. Maybe their weapons weren't adequate enough.
Maybe they were simply unlucky.
Maybe it was a combination of all of these. It
matters little the reason. What really matters is that they, and
their innocent families, will most certainly starve. Unless?
…Unless you, the most skilled of skilled hunters,
decides to share his/her meat (wealth) with the rest of the
tribe so as to maintain a healthy tribe: this is eco-moral
awareness and compassion for others.
Of course you would get more of the meat, and the
choicest cuts: this is ego-moral awareness and self-compassion.
But at least the other people in the tribe
(world) wouldn't starve.
As it stands, the problem with the wealth and
inequality divide isn't a systemic problem. It is a psychosocial
problem. It's a value-system disorder. When acquired wealth
occupies a higher position than compassion, when fame is admired
more than wisdom, when success becomes more important than love,
the culture itself over-values Ego and must be regarded as
psychologically and socially unsustainable.
Like the old Cree Prophecy said,
"When all the trees have been cut down, when
all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are
polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then
will you discover you cannot eat money."
You will probably discover more meaning in eating
your money than in hoarding it.
"In a strange Kung ritual
known as "insulting the meat,"
when a man hunts and kills an
animal,
especially a large one,
he is expected to act extremely
modest
and to minimize the importance
of his contribution to the tribe.
In addition, the other tribe members
insult his kill by proclaiming
how small and worthless it is."
Stephanie Segal
"Accountability" Does that word scare you? It
shouldn't.
If it does, you are probably doing something
wrong or immoral. Accountability is simply social
responsibility. Human beings are social creatures. In order to
be a healthy human being in this world, you will have to be held
accountable by other healthy human beings.
With great power comes great responsibility,
sure, but the reverse is also the case. The best way to be
responsible with your power, and powerful with your
responsibility, is to hold yourself accountable, first and
foremost. Insult your own meat.
There's no reason you should have to wait for
others to do it for you. But until you are capable of insulting
your own meat, you can be damn sure others will insult it for
you. This entire article is insulting your meat. Deal with it.
If you would be a human being who cares about
life, then practicing
reverse dominance is a way to
maintain humility and a healthy perspective while having more
power than you probably should have.
Practice it on yourself. Practice it on your
fellow plutocrats, like this guy did. Practice it on the entire
notion of hierarchy being the best thing for human beings.
A huge part of being responsible with your power
is implementing leveling mechanisms that keep you humble so that
power never gets to the point to where it becomes corrupt.
Like
Derrick Jensen wrote,
"We are the governors as well as the
governed. This means that all of us who care about life need
to force accountability onto those who do not."
5.) Discover a
Moral Question (below video)
"Do not be too moral.
You may cheat yourself out
of much life.
So aim above morality.
Be not simply good;
be good for something."
Henry David Thoreau
Your belief that you can "reach the top" and "be
the best" has caused you to lose sight of what it really means
to be the best.
It means doing the right thing. We need to return
to the ethic of reciprocity: to the Golden mean, the middle-way,
and the Golden ratio. Otherwise we're just boiling ignorantly
like frogs in an immoral, unhealthy, unsustainable soup.
We need to ask the kinds of questions that the
eco-feminist,
Starhawk, asked,
"How does my spiritual practice and daily
life serve the earth? How does my spiritual practice and
daily life affect the poorest third of humanity? How will my
spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to
come in the future?"
In short, we need to personally discover a moral
question and then attempt, for the rest of our lives, to answer
it.
What does it mean to embrace the Golden Mean and
the Middle-way? It means living in a healthy balanced way, while
having poise and grace in your relationships with people and
nature. It means being healthier: mind, body, and soul. It means
practicing moderation by not hoarding more than you need. It
means practicing compassion by being kind to your fellow man.
There's a reason why you fail to discover meaning
in money: because money is meaningless. It really is that
simple.
Money is a cartoon in the brain, an abstraction
of an abstraction, an invisible hook that your too-big
fish-mouth has been "hooked" by. You, and you alone, plutocrat
or otherwise, have the power to unhook yourself.
I beseech you, you who would be decent, healthy,
moral people, don't place the value of your intrinsic life on
extrinsic money.
Like Voltaire said,
"All paper money eventually returns to its
intrinsic value, zero."
Better to be a valuable human with zero money,
than a zero with money.
Money is a tool. It always has been. You
can either be a hero responsibly using a powerful tool, or an
irresponsible fool being used by a powerful tool. It's your choice.
You might think that I am being too strict, or
holding people to too high of a standard.
Again, deal with it.
