We talk so much about killing the cop in your head that we neglect the one who gives it and relies on its power.
People will talk all day about how the system is flawed, how some make billions while others struggle to scrape up pennies, about how there's no safety net for the poor and needy and no valuation of creativity and kindness and mirth despite its necessity to human life. Ceaselessly we outline and deliberate the unfairness of labor practices, how two people working the same job with the same proficiency can make wildly differing amounts based on race or sex or gender or location or date of hire or any fucking thing. The system is broken and useless and arbitrary and random; it's not even a meritocracy or allotment by demographic on an individual scale.
And yet, I see dozens of self-avowed socialists and communists and anticapitalists of all stripes, all in need of money to get by under this system, look me dead in the eyes and say,
"I don't want to be a burden."
"I shouldn't need help."
"I don't want to be a taker, I want to be a giver."
Who do you think this helps?
Not yourself, clearly; if you could support yourself by your own bootstraps, you'd already be doing so. You all want to do so!
Not your friends, who want to be able to stop worrying about whether or not you'll be evicted, and especially not the ones with money to spare. There are few worse feelings in the world than having plenty while a friend starves, and one of those worse feelings is you refusing their help on the basis that they have earned their money and you have not.
That is the word of Ayn Rand defending yourself against a friend's freely given aid.
"But I must work for my friend's money! I won't feel right otherwise!" they say, then refuse aid when they can manage labor no more, so callused are their hands and so fried are their minds.
They, themselves, would give and ask nothing in return, and yet for them alone the world is a meritocracy giving them exactly what their efforts have earned.
Kill the capitalist in your minds, friends. We cannot all help each other if you refuse it when you need it. For there to be givers, there must be those with outstretched hands. Otherwise, all we are doing is dreaming of a better world while we hold fast to the nightmare.
