"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them."
Those are the words of Bill Watterson, the creator of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes which ran from 1985 to 1995. Bill Watterson is a strange breed of person. People, on a subconscious level, feel that his mentality is a threat to the American dream.
The American dream being, of course, making fat sums of money.
When Steven Spielberg called Bill because he was interested in making a Calvin & Hobbes movie, Bill just turned him down flat.
That’s incredible. In this culture, shunning greed is the utmost sin, the most unforgivable and incomprehensible outrage. When he refused to license his characters (all those truck decals you see
with Calvin peeing on rival truck brands were made without licensing) to make a profit, he was essentially making the statement that the integrity of his artistic creation was more valuable than any sum of money, than any life of comfort.
As much as I adore and admire his resolve, I do not perceive that sort of integrity in myself and allusions to such integrity would be illusions. However, just because I lack Mr.
Watterson’s immense and incorruptible virtue does not mean that I lack all virtue or that I cannot recognize the validity of his virtuousness or admire the strength of his convictions, just as I have gotten a great many people to admire the strength of my various convictions by becoming a public-speaker, sometimes-comedian and freedom-advocate on the popular internet website YouTube14.
Honor has essentially exploited our tendency to admire those of great resolve by standardizing morality. Our admiration is permissible, in the eyes of the powerful, only when it is directed towards their ideal. Their ideal, it should be noted, is never the ideal that they themselves live by. It’s the ideal that most conveniences them to have others live by.
Let me say here that I don’t for a moment believe in the idea of CEO’s and Politicians as arch-villains dividing and conquering the populace with ingenious deceptions and carefully-crafted propaganda. I think this vile tendency emerged quite naturally over the course of our social evolution and have
14 My account can be located here: http://youtube.com/user/TheAmazingAtheist
rarely, if ever, been conscious acts of malevolence.
And because this tendency has been hardwired into us by evolution, it can only be overcome with cognition. There is a good reason why so few films financed by major studios encourage introspection—it is subconsciously perceived as detrimental to the agenda of the corporations, which is to keep the population dull and complacent. Only people disconnected enough from any sense of self to watch MTV would be undiscerning enough to inhale the glut of insipid and intoxicating miasma known to mankind simply as “commercials.”
Honor is used to teach us who to admire and who to revile.
Those who adhere to the social codes for their given class—99%
of celebrities and athletes—are admired and revered because of the misdirection of our natural love of those with strong convictions towards those who have only the strong convictions approved by those in power.
Those in power despise with infinite vitriol the Bill Watterson’s of the world because the ethic that he exhibits is not conducive to their vision of utopia, wherein everything and everyone is for sale; where art is nothing more than a product to be cynically peddled to the masses for a little capital gain.
What upsets the powerful more than anything about Watterson’s case is that to berate him openly would have displayed to the whole world what they really were. Despite all of our programming to the contrary, many human beings can still recognize genuine integrity when they see it—which is why
occasionally the powerful let someone with genuine integrity infiltrate the mainstream. Usually they do it on accident and, when they’ve realized their mistake, cannot possible fix the problem as long as the individual of integrity is successful. To do so would be to declare themselves open enemies of true integrity and undermine their unquestioned authority.
I fear, however, that the day is fast approaching when few people will recognize true integrity and the powerful will be in the position to oppose it openly. It’s as Bill said. “A person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.”
What merely seems eccentric today may be called subversive tomorrow. And what is merely subversive today may become unforgivable tomorrow.
The “pursuit of happiness” that our founders15 felt important enough to call an inalienable right in The Declaration of Independence is now viewed as evil by the majority of Americans.
Of course, if you sat most of Americans down and said, “Do you believe in the pursuit of happiness?” they’d nod their empty heads until the sound of the spare change rattling around in their skulls gave you a migraine—yet, those who truly pursue happiness are cast in a villainous light. The enterprising young businessman in the slums who tries to make money selling drugs that the US government doesn’t approve of will find himself crushed beneath
15 Apologies to non-American readers.
police truncheons because, as Chris Rock so astutely pointed out,
“Only the white man is allowed to profit from other people’s pain.”
I would substitute the word “normal” instead of the “white” but otherwise have no qualms with his statement.
The pursuit of happiness cannot only be for the rich, the well-connected or those willing to sell their souls for table scraps from the big corporate banquet. If happiness is to truly be an inalienable right than laws must only be passed and enforced when the cost of one man’s happiness is the destruction of another man’s will. The drug dealer peddles his wares to drug users who have a choice—they can choose to take drugs or not to take drugs. The murderer’s victims have no choice—which is why murder must remain illegal. The murderer’s right to the pursuit of happiness must be alienable to safeguard to inalienable rights of others.
This does not, however, make the urges of a murderer evil—they’re simply not pragmatic. If the murder finds a willing victim, one who wishes to by killed because he is tired of life (or for some other reason), then said murderer can pursue his happiness without violating the right to another’s happiness.
We are here making the assumption that our lives are the property of our selves—which is the assumption that our founders, despite their slave-owning hypocrisy, made when they founded this country of rugged individualists who reviled the authority of the crown of England.
This idea is contrary to all presently popular
socio-theological-political models. We are viewed by a great many as property of a God whose will is known to us only through the 5,000- to 2,000-year-old desert scribblings of Jewish nomads.
Our lives are seen by those who subscribe to this ludicrous fairytale as nothing more than kindling to stoke the fires of Hell or drones whose sole purpose is to act out the will of their fictional deity.
Others see us as belonging to the state. The state can decide what’s best for us, take our money to create weapons for our soldiers to use to attack countries that we have nothing against. And if too many of our soldiers die, they’ve no qualms about ordering citizens to fight in their wars. “Fight or go to prison” is the choice they give us, all while claiming that we’re fighting for “freedom.” What freedom? Their freedom to tell you what to do? Their freedom to conscript you into an army and make you kill your fellow man for the sake of a cause that you’ll never understand? Their freedom to send you to your death the moment that your death will fatten their pockets in the slightest?
You are not free as long as you are the property of a God or a government. You are only free when you are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. The elections that they hold are nothing more than a means of placating you with fake freedom, whilst strategically keeping you from the historical understanding of what true freedom entails. It is as Benjamin Franklin once said: “Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the
result.”
When you allow yourself to be fodder for the wars of powerful men, you are not well-armed sheep contesting the result.
You are pawns on a chessboard, viewed by the King and Queen as wholly expendable from a larger strategic perspective.
If you kill enough for them and are brave and selfless (what a terrible thing to be) enough for them, you could win a Medal of Honor. You could be a hero, like Ira Hayes who raised the flag at Iwo Jima in that famous picture and died drunk face down in a ditch lying in his own vomit and blood a number of years later.
The currency of honor does not buy a means to the pursuit of happiness. Rather, it further indebts you to your owners—the CEO, the senator, the judges and cops and prison guards. And they’ve shown—from their inability to take care of the heroes at Iwo Jima or the heroes of 9/1116—that no matter how much you give them, they won’t give anything back.
The people are told to be selfless while the politicians, justice system officials and corporate cocksuckers are free to be selfish. You’re told to not pursue your happiness, while they whip
16 http://www.firerescue1.com/news/233790/
Excerpt: “About 40,000 people — law-enforcement officers, firefighters, transit workers and others, many of whom were volunteers — converged on southern Manhattan five years ago to help in the rescue and recovery efforts after the attack on the World Trade Center. A study by Mount Sinai Medical Center shows 70 percent of those workers have respiratory problems.”
The government has refused to pay for healthcare for these men and women, many of whom were volunteers. You give to America and America gives nothing back other than vague allusions to the concept of freedom that mean nothing upon even the most rudimentary examination.
your backs bloody and sustain themselves on your blood like the vampiric assholes they are.
And if you complain about your lot in life and demand your fair share of the pie, they start whining about their rights. They talk about the fruits of their labor, while you’re the one working in the factory and they’re the ones shuffling papers in an air-conditioned office making huge salaries. They call you a socialist, as if the word itself were an instant argument winner because they’ve imagined and sold you a consensus that says “socialism is bad” and socialism means whatever they want it to mean. They know that you don’t know what it means and use your ignorance to control you.