“Ozymandias”
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
<rant/>
Not long ago, it seemed I couldn’t walk out the door without finding a pigeon tucked away under a bush or a bench, quiet, not moving except for slight shifts of its eyes. Thanks to a certain adored expert on the subject, I’ve wondered if I should intervene—perhaps they’re only injured?
But somehow I’ve known these creatures are not in need of assistance but of solitude—it’s the gathering-in at the end of life, and the next step is theirs to take alone. I usually let out a little “Oh” when I realize their fate is imminent (“Godspeed, fellow traveler” is implied)—never mind that it’s everyone’s fate, but we rarely look someone in the eye knowing they’ll die today.
Elderly animals are rare because death is only as far away as the next meal for most creatures. I’m often struck by this: an injury, a sickness, a turn of bad luck, and if an animal who hunts or forages is unable to keep hunting and foraging, that’s it: The End.
This is survival—biologically, it’s not a bad system per se: every creature that ever lived, their mother and father, and their mother and father before them, has each somehow managed to find or kill enough meals to make it to sexual maturity and reproduce in a direct line of success back to the beginning.
In fact we are all only a minute or so from death at every moment of our lives—not just in the sense that every breath could be our last, but that if we don’t take that next breath, we are goners.
I was struck by this when I watched the movie In Time (2011) in which everyone stops aging at 25, and their remaining time is counted down on a device implanted in their arm—time is the new currency, you get topped up from work, drawn down whenever you take the bus or buy a burrito—and when your time runs out, nighty-night, no ifs, ands, or hold on a secs.
The poor are always anywhere from minutes and hours to days from death; the rich hoard time by the millennia, and continuously raise prices to wring out as much value as possible from the plebs. No sitting around having a lazy day for you!
This premise speaks to me about the artificial manufacture of precarious survival endemic to our human culture.
Once upon a time, humans were always only the next forage or kill away from starvation, and defending or acquiring territory—or plundering, pilfering, stealing, and yes, killing other people—could make the difference between life and death.
At some point, maybe around the time agriculture was invented, surpluses became possible. It makes sense that the bigger the surplus, the higher the probability of survival. And once things really got going, we developed currency as a tool to facilitate trade and store value, eliminating the “double coincidence of wants” inherent in the barter system, where you were only as rich as someone else’s desire for your particular surplus, and only as secure as other people’s surplus of necessities.
That’s when things really got interesting: with a surrogate for real value, one that is relatively easy to secure and defend, is not perishable, and does not lose its value (except if there is high inflation) you go beyond the constraints of simple surpluses to entirely new levels over and above surviving and into the realm of thriving.
Stored value allows us to divvy up the work. We don’t all have to spend our time hunting, gathering, or farming in order to survive as a people; some of us can spend our time doing things which increase productivity or enjoyment, like inventing, basket weaving, even writing and painting and sculpting, making music—intangible stuff that enriches our lives.
And in this new and wondrous playground, there is simply no upper limit. “Thriving” is anybody’s to define, in whatever way they wish.
Where one person may be happy with three squares a day and a roof over their head, another may not be satisfied with any old meal or any old roof; they may demand for themselves the very best meals from the furthest reaches of empire, and the very biggest roof—a palatial roof, an important roof, with God’s divine stamp of woo—ordained by tradition, conquest, martial enforcement of property rights, and laws conveniently written by the occupants of the Houses under these ever higher, ever broader roofs.
It’s nice when the eaves of such roofs extend far enough beyond the palace and its walls to also shelter the unfortunates too weak or come-lately to reside in the palace itself; it is by no means a feature or requirement of these golden roofs to provide succor to anyone other than the august personages who acquired the prosperity to build them by hook or by crook.
When one has traveled so far beyond survival into these realms of prosperity, you might think the fear of not having enough would dissolve into a happy generosity—that one might feel the urge to build a bigger table, as they say, so that people might sit together as equals, with dignity, with their own opportunities to also thrive. Turns out, not so.
That drive, that instinct, to accumulate ever vaster stores of surplus value, is deeply ingrained in our species, and it would be a universal good but for the fact that there remains, despite all of this thriving and prospering, a profound fear of scarcity, a fear for survival, deep in the heart of many of us.
That fear—and it is just and only that for many of us, a fear, not a reality except in the strictest existential “I could drop dead of a heart attack at any moment” sense—leads many of us to keep accumulating, keep hoarding, keep guarding long after the store of value in our personal coffers exceeds any need or want we could possibly imagine, passing into realms of excess we might call extreme wealth.
It seems necessary. It seems justified. What could be more survive-full than the means to defend oneself, one’s family, and one’s property—a private army of bodyguards, a private fleet of armored cars and jets to move at will away from conflict, a private cabal of lawyers and bankers to ensure the easy transport of one’s wealth to a secure location of one’s choosing? (“Borders are for poor people.” - Rule of Acquisition #46)
“Gold beyond measure; beyond sorrow and grief.1” There. That’s the real aim, isn’t it? Not just to thrive, not just to prosper, but to exceed even the inevitability of death; to live forever, at least in name—a legacy at whatever cost, especially when it can be billed to others or the future.
It leads to some interesting decisions. Anyone who’s ever tried to make a living in the arts or education will tell you that they’re the first things to go when times get tough, nice to haves that can be postponed indefinitely.
And there’s actually good reason to have large populations of undereducated, fearful and desperate people if whole sectors of your economy devoted to protection, warfare, and violence are funneling money into your friends’ pockets. (“War is good business Invest your son.”—Allen Ginsberg)
Also, when a corporation is viewed as a collective good irrespective of the individual welfare of its component parts (the workers, the environment) the owners of that “collective” (who also make all the decisions—you can call them MVPs or CEOs or captains or kings of industry, whatever you want) generally have a free hand in stripping off the stored value, and cutting loose the “parts” to fend for themselves when necessary. The money train keeps going even if some of its cars must be sacrificed.
That tradition of stripping away—withdrawing the eaves, pulling up the drawbridge—to protect the divine upward trajectory of the palace/fortress at the expense of the whole community is as long as history.
Are we actually even moving away from a hierarchical feudalism, the concentration of power and wealth within a jealous, terrified coterie of capitalist survivalists whose excess prosperity may or may not trickle down as their nerves dictate?
(I’ve always thought “trickle-down economics” was telling—not “gush” or “rain” or “flood” but something far more miserly.)
It’s hard to say whether we are headed in a more egalitarian, democratic direction—whether the excesses of the Sun Kings of yore far outstripped the oligarchs of today. In part, the revolutions of the 18th century onward taught people the wisdom of obscuring the true extent of their wealth. They’re still flaunting it, but one seldom bothers to make a show of it nowadays except to the people who really matter: other oligarchs.
After all, why build a court or own a government when you can own the sycophants in the government, and make them pay their own rent, too? It’s cheaper, and more efficient.
The outsourcing of aristocracy to corporatism makes it possible to be as rich as Croesus without any of the responsibility toward the collective good of the people. Colonialism turned globalization shows us that you don’t have to invade and hold another country in thrall, you can simply shift labor and consumer markets to suit your purposes, opening up whole new opportunities to strip away value and put more altitude between you and the huddled masses.
It’s still feudalism, just with a different face.
And all of this is, of course, perfectly legal, and will remain so as long as politics is as sure a way to join The Club as guns, casinos, and payday loans.
Legal yes, but is it moral? Is it morally defensible to keep a personal hoard of wealth so vast it eclipses the GDP of entire nations?
The mechanisms of currency, trade, and markets may not be immoral, but the profiteering and hoarding endemic to our winner-take-all capitalism is a selfish and outmoded survival strategy that threatens the long-term survival of our species.
While excess and unused value concentrates in the hands of a few opportunistic idols, enormous populations around the world remain hand-to-mouth, underemployed, malnourished, under siege, and without access to housing, healthcare and education, and would mostly not have to if humanity could freely implement commonsense solutions to a soulless system which artificially perpetuates a collective fear for survival—a sleight-of-hand Us vs. Them—while suppressing human rights, sustainability, social innovation, and productivity.
Where might We be if it weren’t all about me, Me, ME?
</end rant>
‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art’ –Ursula K Le Guin
Next time on Terrible Takes with Troy—“How does money cause mental illness?”
Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Grandpa Thror pictured.)
Hear hear! Well said, Troy. Reasoned, poignant, and powerful.
If capitalism were just you’d get a whole lot more money for writing rants such as these! :)
Winner-take-all capitalism is indeed immoral and a clear threat to the long-term survival of civilization and our species. Ironically, and as you so skillfully point out, this is a model that has flourished because it's rooted in that visceral/instinctive fear associated with survival. It is also rooted in greed, selfishness and sheer stupidity. We know, that the hoarding of resources by a handful when millions starve and our habitat continues to degrade cannot be sustained forever. So we can go on delluding ourselves a little longer while we sink deeper into chaos, or we begin to dislodge the global structures that maintain the status quo and replace them with something less lethal to humanity.