Filial pie and tea - they go together like Paternal donuts and milk
"Gee, Pop, I'm really excited about this stack of, heh, 'liberty' stuff I picked up at the new coffee shop and crack den across the square from the legislature where the laissez-faire geeks and the Randroid freaks at IFU get they fixes, The Stateless Capital. I haven't been this jacked since that time I went to borrow some Titleists from the top drawer of your dresser and found your stash of barely-legal Thai fetish mags, the week before we first got hookered up to Thee Internyets and those most by-then tattered of mags became collectors' items, i.e., very hard to ... come by. Question: could a purely 'free' market society without a state 'work'?
"Why, sure, Son By, I've long held my suspicions, Another Father, with our first milkman the likeliest of suspects - once you've raised the median IQ of the human race from room-temperature to 190, discovered a vaccine that will wipe out greed, envy, sloth ... 'ungoverned', hehe, lust, harhar ... the unequal distribution of talent and character and beauty and self-discipline, uncertainty regarding the bank-shot consequences of any given action such that we all are masters of chess in sixteen dimensions, the tendency of the strong of any era to arse-frack the weak, the tendency of not just humans Balkanized by doctrine toward squabbling unto fratricide but of those already 90+% in your camp to splinter fractally deep into the night over subatomic scholastic issues of no relevance to life outside their 3am bull sessions ... you seem to think such a society worthy of rhapsody: 'Jesus Elfin Christ, it's so arse-frackingly beautyful I cain't staynd to think abou' tit'. Me, I'd not want to live in such a world of grim uniformity among not humans as we know and laugh at - and occasionally with - them, but among humorless robots of a sort with whose advance earthly guard, I suspect, you will have already subjected yourself to an unbidden acquaintance; my 'ideal' society composes itself of c. one part per 500 of self-nominated laissez-faire radicals, 'cos of my Objective need while slumming at life's .002 fag-end for good prime banana-peeled, if 'unwitty' (the best kind), farce, and one part in c. 5 of Toyota mechanics, 'cos I plan to drive both my '93 Camry LE and especially its driving part, the nut behind its wheel, into the fracking ground ... Of the world's most gifted and charming people in all spheres, toward whose alternative acquaintance I urge you as the finite and sifting sands in the hourglass bottle up for no one even for a flash, 99 44/100% among them couldn't care less about that stuff, which is, thank the g-ds, as it should be and gloriously is: the authentic grasp of the division of labor exhibited by the median soi-disant lover of what he with jut jaw and chiseled chin and nine-volt battery perched precariously on his shoulder likes to call 'liberty', all set-piece comic-opera/slapstick pretensions aside, is, much like his equally penetrative prow(ess) when in his fugitive essays in and with, respectively, the/his sack, of millimeter depth ... I once debated devoting my life to donning sword and buckler in service to, hoho, selfless missionary seed-spurting on behalf of such brummagem testaments to the More Abundant Life For All as The Wave to Surf Dumb, For a New Livery Stable, The Theory of Milk and Honey on Credit, and Crouching Hercules, Parasites Draggin', but, however colossal my requisite and deathlessly-vested self-regard, I ran into that one obstacle that for me has always proved fatal at the last to membership in any group whose subscription tally exceeds one: try as I might via serial head-smacks against my desk over the world's top-of-the-hour-news folly, I just couldn't get my IQ that motherfucking low ... Hey, #1 Son, hoho, since your interest in this stuff makes you quite 'Special', hehe, indeed (was that your white crash helmet I saw in the hamper for Mom's next load?), and you seem for this semester anyway to enjoy it immensely, pursue it as long as that continues - like I say to Mom late on Christmas Eve each year after the eggnog's all gone, and whenever you're staying at Grandma's, milk that chicken, O yeah, work it Baby, that's how Daddy likes it - hold on till - AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!@#$%^**&%^$%^$^%#$%@&^@%&^@ I get some more oil! As long as you don't define yourself by it or make it central to your being, or, gods forbid, expect to see it universalized in this or any future lifetime or expect, altruistically enough, to save humanity by it, you'll get the best out of it, just as I have learned, however hot I was to spread their own Good News at your age, to keep those Asian girly mags as a hobby and when among old friends from college and the Board of Trustees at IFU. As for the state and also as I have learned, get as much out of it as you can - see if it's hiring and at decent pay in your chosen field; if you own a business, seek to maximize your contracts with it to the extent it can demonstrate good credit; if it criminalizes a given sphere, weigh the risks against the rewards of setting up shop within it and, if you're good to go, with enough in the reserve fund for bribes and bullets as a hedge unto those cyclical market dips against which every sober investor, whether in wingtips or in roach clips, fully Kevlar-vests himself in tank-topping hi-test. The so-called and self-regarding - if, in truth, anything but - 'private' sector is neither better nor worse, morally or in terms of material efficiency (efficiency, n., capacity to cut me and me only a check at noon that will put a Supreme Rising-Crust pizza [store brand is fine] on my table by six), than that which we call 'public' - it's all a matter of where and when you can maximize your advantage at any given moment, not fretting like some lemon-sucking sub-Marxist nerd over whether you have 'clean hands' after the Gospel According to Fuckface. And one last thing - let's hear no more about 'rights', which never did anyone a pitcherful of warm spit of good. Instead of drooling like an idjit over your presumed 'rights' and those you for some reason I'd rather not subject to sub-sphincterine probing expect to underwrite them, get yourself a good easily-concealed knife, learn how to use and sharpen and, if and when need be, deal death with it ('It could happen!' - Judy Tenuta.) and work up from there. And one more last thing: you like to read - here's a copy of my favorite book nominally thought to be libertarian, but, as that term chooses to define itself in the most radically reduced form as of 2012, anything but, whose seeding of my first blog led one almost-famous, as these things go, almost-libertarian sharing a surname with by far the most-famous and most Prizetigious of all within that fold (no, not Salma Hayek) to ask me, 'Are you sure you were ever a libertarian?', to which I replied, to myself, that I could not recall a time when I could say of myself that I was sure of anything.
"Gee, Pop, you're the greatest, above all in length - I mean, harhar, in prolixity ... and I'm gonna put those magazines back in your drawer right after I wash the dishes and the tea-towels and our bibs, say my bedtime prayers to the Sky God and the Earth Goddess and hurl my maledictions and anathemas at the Evil Ones - and finish reading my brand-monkey-spanking-new Supreme Allied Command Forces of Salvation thrift-store copy of - O Boy and Gee Whillikers! - Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man!"
"Hahahahaha-"
"-hohohohoho ..."
"This pilot episode of In The Time Machine With Pop and Junior was brought to you by the Church of DSL. of Lahti-Dave Scotts - because a clean mind, like your dog after a bath, is just waiting to roll around again on its back in a fresh steaming pool of its own runny scat. Pick up our weekly newsletter at your local Rexall, between the Lysol douches and the corn plasters."
................................................................................................
"RING!"
"Hello?"
"Fuck the state!"
"Whatever, Queer [CLICK]."
"Who was it?"
"Some douchebag."
"RING!"
"Hello?"
"Smash the state!?"
"Ah, shaddap [CLACK]."
"Who was it?"
"Same douchebag."
"LING!"
"Hurrow?"
"Torch the state!?"
"Suck a bag of dicks [QUACK]."
"Who was it?"
[after "suave" Fred Flintstone with Latin-lover 'stache] "Ah-yabba ... ah-dabba ... ah-how-douche-you-dou? ... shahbag."
Conflict and the bitter contest for power will always be with us. And thank g-ds for it.
Man is not a rational animal, or is only when at his
We can learn more about these things, as about everything else not purely technical, from reading Sophocles and Shakespeare than from anything in the way of daily punditry or academic theorizing, large or small - which latter, however "exhilaratingly subversive" and "bracingly radical", understandably hymned thus among those schooled in and with an adult lifetime's cognitive-cum-emotional investment in such categorical coterie-tribalist modes, speak not so much to anything objectively binding upon the rest of us outside the ranks of those contributing blurbs to the annual Fall catalogs of the university presses, let alone to the dewy-eyed future of "meaningful social change" beyond the green quadrangles surrounding the campus pump, but to such among the first-order Maslovian motives as the libido for tenure and for subsidised Coach fare to the next MLA panel on "Adorno and Bitch-Slapping the Postcolonial Phallus: En-Gendering the Subaltern Moment in Post-Modern Queer Theory".
Nature is the most ruthless of aristocrats and distributes talent and aptitude and character with a radical inequality that would make a hedge-fund manager with a titanium underground lair blush in envy.
The infinity of human wants and the limited material resources to satisfy them, and the endless capacity of human ingenuity, building on all that came before, to enact scientific/technical innovation (the Bomb, the Pill, Thee Internyets), upset any notion of steady-state "sustainability", as does the tendency of the picnic of latter-day affluence to attract enough ants to eventually ruin around half of it or more.
The idea of an "abolition of work" as dreamed by the lotus-eating left-anarchists, eco-primitivists, and anti-civilizationists, turning the stone of toil into the banana-nut-bread of gaily-tripping petal-strewing play, isn't something I see happening, ever, as a social destination.
All we can do to improve society, said Nock, is to present it with one improved unit.
Or in the immortal tag closing Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
By focusing on the half-free aspect of our half-free, half-slave existence, which realm, however circumscribed, is of still vaster amplitude than we allow ourselves to dream most days, we can do enough of an Archimedes turn for one lifetime.
Problem for most people is, it entails huge tradeoffs, as does all athletic or spiritual endeavor.
The secret of the Eastern Bloc resistance, as we often read, was that in spite of the grip of the rule of lies and a prevailing unfreedom, they chose, with becoming audacity, to live in truth and act as if they were free.
There is no all-or-nothing, pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-
All change begins and ends at the capillary level.
Every moment of every day you have before you, in a thousand tiny and accumulative ways, the option of living less or more as a free and self-respecting man, as artist and craftsman-aristocrat, cultivating his talents further than they lay yesterday, and so lifting up all within your orbit, rippling in a pool outward from there, unto outcomes that cannot be fathomed in advance.
Why then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
- Pistol, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Lose this day loitering -- 'twill be the same story
Tomorrow -- and the next more dilatory.
Then indecision brings its own delays.
And days are lost lamenting over days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute --
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Courage has genius, power and magic in it;
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated --
Begin it and the work will be completed.
- Goethe, Faust
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