I hate politics.
"So don't talk about politics."
No, you don't understand, I want to destroy the power structures that allow politics as we know them to exist.
The simple fact of it is, 99% of us who talk politics or get involved don't want to, we have to. Any number of us wish we didn't have to worry, could live a life uninvolved, to just go about every day of a normal life. We do it because it's a matter of survival and there is no other choice. We have to dismantle the machine that seeks to destroy us.
Paraphrasing: "Money is, as it exists in the impersonal cash-credit form we know today, valuable because of the universal threat of violently denying food and shelter to anyone who doesn't have it. Moreover, it is built on the near universal belief that this universal threat is just and right, that starving people still owe the price of bread to the grocery stores whose owners keep jacking up prices and blaming magical inflation fairies. That governments are right to employ men with sticks to beat people, often to death, for stealing that bread." Obviously that belief has been strongly selected against on this website. But we are not a majority.
It is through this kind of belief, grown in communities acclimatized to enormous violence by our governments to the point that we have trouble thinking of it as violence if we've not spent a lot of effort relearning how the world works, that every human thought and action and feeling is outsourced. Call center employees are employed to be sorry on behalf of the rich. Sex workers are employed to absorb other emotions, though more for the guard classes than the rich themselves. All that on top of the way one works at any random job a wealthy person pays for in order to afford to eat and have a home and maybe enjoy a little leisure sometimes.
Generation after generation, we have been conditioned more and more to fear, hate, and distrust our neighbors. Because if we grew to know, like, and trust them, we could never be convinced they deserved to freeze or starve.
I've been thinking lately about how one of the fundamental, philosophical evils of currency is that it allows for the precise quantification of labor value. When you have such exacting math and your disposal, it becomes increasingly difficult to say "Oh yeah, he's frequently drunk and a bit dumb and smells funny, but he helps out around town here and there so whatever, we feed and house him and take him to the wise woman if he gets sick". No, you end up applying an impersonal measuring stick to the value of his labor, and if he doesn't produce as much as it costs to provide for him, at least part of you is going to start feeling like he's stealing from you, and rationalize why he shouldn't have the things he needs.
A species that had invented economics right out of the gate wouldn't have paleolithic examples of members having survived debilitating injury thanks to the community taking care of them, because they'd have "done the math" and decided it wasn't worth it. Just like our entire society has been engineered to think today.
Yeah, the fact that everyone is measured by the same yardstick does not allow for one's contribution to be considered on a case by case basis and only allows for the consideration of how wealthy one makes one's capitalist overlord. This leads to horrible ableism in society as well as an unwillingness to acknowledge the value of any labor that does not generate monetary value.
it's not just people who are reduced to mere monetary transactions and "net worth", but all things. abstract quantities are equated to sums of money. Very Serious People "debate" over whether freedom or justice are simply too expensive, luxuries that we ought to do away with in the name of "efficiency" (i.e. maximal cash flow). it's deeply pathological. ~Chara
