Words&Dirt

“‘It has always seemed strange to me,’ said Doc.  ‘The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system.  And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.  And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.’

‘Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?’ said Richard Frost.

‘Oh, it isn’t a matter of hunger.  It’s something quite different.  The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous––but not quite.  Everywhere in the world there are Mack and the boys.  I’ve seen them in an ice-cream seller in Mexico and in an Aleut in Alaska.  You know how they tried to give me a party and something went wrong.  But they wanted to give me a party.  That was their impulse.'”

––Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, loc. 1635-44

“I have referred to several possible memes in the course of this book, such as the cyber libertarian insurrection fantasy discussed in the previous section.  Some of these contagious notions manifest as simplistic but widely held ideologies––such as the models of Marx, or Freud, or Ayn Rand––that describe humans as far less sapient than we are clearly capable of being.

An entire class of these pesky notions are what I call the devil’s own dichotomies.  These insidiously simple social models basically assert the same thing: that people are forever constrained by pairs of polar (and often equally vile) opposites, forcing humanity always to sail between some dreadful Scylla and its equally loathsome Charybdis.

The ‘Singapore Question,’ which proclaims that we must either be protected slaves or else liberated savages, is one example of such a dichotomy.  So is the atrocious concept that freedom is somehow at odds with competent government, or that eccentrics can survive only if protected by antisocial masks, or that liberty and efficiency must each suffer in order for both to eke along.

It is the odious worldview of those who believe in zero sum games, the dour theory that each win must be balanced by a loss, and therefore the best one can hope for in life is a tenuous, break-even.

Well, I do not accept it, and neither should you.  This conviction that we are all engaged in an endless, tense balancing act, a dangerous dance down a narrow knife edge between chaos and dictatorship, is enticingly melodramatic.  But it is also an exhausting and ultimately futile image.  One that says, ‘Sooner or later, you will all take one wrong step and tumble off the tightrope, left or right.  Then, zap!  It will be over.  Chaos or dictatorship will follow, for you and all of your posterity.’

It is a ridiculous notion, unfitting for a civilization filled with ambitious, proud, and compassionate people who have spent most of their lives having their cake, eating it, and sharing it, too!  People who have dined at a fine table, grown up with liberty, seen the dawn of both science and ecological sensitivity, filled their minds with ripening knowledge that took millennia to germinate, and yet now find themselves coaxed to accept awful, pessimistic models of human nature that bear no relation whatsoever to the wondrous civilization that surrounds them.

Excuse me for being greedy, but I want freedom and good government.

Both a flourishing economy and a well-cared-for earth.

A society that is diverse and communal…

…that offers both privacy and accountability.

One that can afford a big conscience, along with lots of neat toys.”

––The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, by David Brin, pg. 225-6