Is this not tyranny? The label of cynic or pessimist or paranoid I am bound to receive are the retorts of the oppressed, of a Nietzschean slavish morality. I too am oppressed, but I am refusing the ideology of a slave, and am instead advocating for Nietzsche’s overcoming: the will to self-flourishing. Any collective entity is going to be at odds with individual whims, I get this. There is no way around this one, it seems. But, here, where I reside, in a mountain state of the United States, to reiterate, I am beginning to feel uneasy with everything, feeling stuck in an eco-anxiety (due to Environmental Ethics’ lifting the veil of ignorance in the Fall of 2009) that has widened into a society-anxiety.
Let’s get down and dirty with what I am alluding to in vague, sweeping statements by investigating my concrete forms of realization. First, an easy instruction almost no one questions, something I never questioned until I questioned everything in the era of society-anxiety. Banking. Who doesn’t have a bank account? The only one I can find still alive is Daniel Suelo (see “Blogs I follow”). Seems every hint of conspiracy has some lone advocate, assuring me I am not paranoid, that there is truth to the unsettledness I feel in our deeply engrained, common, unquestioned practices. We are taught, early on with astonishing, exponentially-eye-popping graphs of equations, to save money. This, according to the diffuse panel of experts spread in and out popular culture, is a responsible thing to do. A practice for our interests, both generally and fiscally. But not under covert mattress corners. Not in piggy banks. No, we are told we must save money at a bank, whose service is to store money in safekeeping, really that alone.
A bank’s veneer as a benign and necessary social institution, existing as a basic service for the people, is simply a cover-up, or a pervasive misunderstanding, for what it is and why it does so. How could a megacorporate entity convince the populace to willingly and warmheartedly hand over the entirety of its money? Let’s back up for I am 
perpetuating more misperception- banks are not this ‘it’ I keep referring to. Banks are collections of people. Powerful people. In the terms of basic economics, money is capital, captured and frozen, a storeable product of labor. Within this system, more money can be accumulated with more labor, real-time production of money, or far less back-breakingly, through interest, money “working for you”. I know this firsthand via my budget strategy for this year-off income thing. I saved and now I withdraw from my stash. In yesteryear I commuted weekly 15 hours, waited up to a half hour in rain, snow, sleet for my vehicle of mass transit to escort me, endured mind-numbing data entry for hours at a time with others, well, frankly I despised. Now I extract the excess of this labor, with the help of its power to generate itself, in the interest percent I agreed upon when I locked it up at the bank. Sounds great, huh?
perpetuating more misperception- banks are not this ‘it’ I keep referring to. Banks are collections of people. Powerful people. In the terms of basic economics, money is capital, captured and frozen, a storeable product of labor. Within this system, more money can be accumulated with more labor, real-time production of money, or far less back-breakingly, through interest, money “working for you”. I know this firsthand via my budget strategy for this year-off income thing. I saved and now I withdraw from my stash. In yesteryear I commuted weekly 15 hours, waited up to a half hour in rain, snow, sleet for my vehicle of mass transit to escort me, endured mind-numbing data entry for hours at a time with others, well, frankly I despised. Now I extract the excess of this labor, with the help of its power to generate itself, in the interest percent I agreed upon when I locked it up at the bank. Sounds great, huh? Capital earns more capital, through a process that continues to elude me (Blog readers, please help me out in edification through commentary, if you can). Here’s a shot: capital is reinvested in the economic system, used in productive avenues, loaned and won back at a higher price with ensuing interest rates (or, created out of thin air by banks at the request of a loan by an individual. Think not? Check out “Money as Debt“ on Youtube). The banks just have to sit back with a nation’s worth, generated through real labor, with their hands clasped, gluttonously smiling, as it uses this enormous power to enlarge itself. Banks are the most powerful institutions of the world. My father finds it difficult to conceive that all of his blue-collared allies, the people who actually produce real goods of real value are all indebted to bankers, who just abstractly “manage” and who couldn’t probably, say, milk a cow, or build a desk, or bake bread from scratch. How did this happen?
I am beginning to see that the recommendations of this, our, age exist to perpetuate the powerful behind the societal oughts. These recommendations benefit the few greatly. In this case of banking, individuals are seldom harmed , in fact we get rewarded - but this fact merely makes banking more insidious and less likely to be challenged. Just think of how hard credit card companies press in junk mail and advertisement. They’re nicely proposing to give me a 1% return as a “customer appreciation”, and yet they send vast onslaughts of applications. They want to drain me and as a token thank-you, they’ll give me a droplet of my own blood back. I merely point out that by participating in this practice, we fuel the very accelerating divide in power we first learned about in Introduction to Sociology. And by this point we face such a power divide that I feel helpless under the weight of such things such as our corrupt political system, that under my scrutiny IS the bank, is the megacorporate entity, they are fused, no distinction need be made. This is the problem of powerlessness, of society being imposed on selves. We live in a pseudo-democracy.
Newt Gingrich said “If you have government this big, it’s going to be really dumb, it’s going to have large sections of corruption, it’s going to waste a lot of money, and it’s going to be a threat to your freedom…as a citizen, you better be actively involved in running your own community, because that’s the only way to preserve freedom.” Of course, he has his own political agenda and I am unconcerned with party politics. But he paves an idea I have latched onto like a desperate anchor in a hopeless void, at least in principle: we’re going to have to stop feeding the monstrous beast if ever we are to be free. The power has always been in community, even if now it is leeched from us. Remember, we are the ones who milk, construct, and bake. Yes, we are tangled in a complexity that makes it difficult to see how much resides in us. We must pierce. Otherwise, accept the “free” plight of taking at least thirty years of your life and handing it over to employment (see “To Be Employed“ written in December 2009), the heft of one’s peak productive years, simply to own a place of dwelling. How can we claim we are free? Our hearth and bed in our caves have become shackles. And, the looming part about all of this is that it isn’t just about banks, if that weren’t broad enough. I buy Kashi products regularly because they, too, seemed like some kind of benign social institution, providing wholesome foods for the public. Yah, I understood Kashi as corporation, but I always had envisioned some mom-and-pop, yes expanding, but retaining some original vision of supplying the supermarkets with an alternative to high fructose corn syrups and hydrogenated oils, not to mention TBHQ and ammonium phosphatides. What has been appealing is that I don’t have to laboriously read the Kashi nutritional content and ingredient labeling - I trust they’ve complied a granola bar or frozen pizza well. Then I learn that Kashi is Kelloggs, a moment when the grocery store gained a possibly sinister, definitely questionable, status. Not that Kelloggs is the heart of the matter. The veneer, again, the veneer. Kashi is not in the business of selling wholesome, nutritious food products. Kashi is in the business of appearing to the consumer in whatever way the consumer seems to desire in the trendy moment. All that matters is the veneer. It protects market share, its existence there solely for monetary gain, and will dupe, deceive, and mislead, all if these qualities generate the bottom line. As depicted in “The Corporation”, corporate entities, even Kashi - the last of the trustworthy, display the traits of a psychopath. And I don’t trust psychopaths.
&*^%, I’ve got to grow a garden and just do it all myself, I resign, take back the city tonight. But I can’t grow mp3 players and I infinitely enjoy my (beat up, old-school) one. Rush of society-anxiety. I will leave you with more to ponder, and as always, generously comment, this is my favorite part, the virtual gathering.
1. “Having served its original purpose in announcing independence, the text of the Declaration was initially ignored after the American Revolution
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSanIAROSc0
An aside: It was a joyous opening and immediate recognition of “The Patriot” score (John Williams) - how fitting!
An aside: It was a joyous opening and immediate recognition of “The Patriot” score (John Williams) - how fitting!
