It’s early September and the autumn is on the phone: rain and clouds and a chill come through the line. I’m hanging up: call back and leave a voicemail. Surprises have become much less desirable as the summer has worn on. It’s seasonal, and I’m tired of my response. As tired as I’ve been of the zucchini clogging the vegetable drawer, waiting to be spiced into an omelet after the other food runs out. I’m here for the metaphor; watery foods kept a body hydrated during a scorching August. Shall I find my way back onto a well-trodden path? Non-conformity brings out the critical: this path could be straighter, there could be more shade, why should we deal with this traffic? All this without actually walking on it.
Lakes fill up with plant matter throughout the summer, greening and becoming unfriendly to human accompaniment. The cold clarifies and becomes something to commune with breathlessly, particularly when the ice needs to be cut apart to get at it. Mental preparation for winter begins.
I’ve been thinking about the metabolism of society, what it means to be a legitimate blood cell in a world that is infinitely soluble to money and mostly insoluble to everything else. Do you speak my language? That’s nice. That will be four dollars. Status, power, and sophistication are all signaled and created by the basic principle: if the money is flowing, everything else is on the way up. Everyone loves Warren Buffett because he doesn’t have any other values: more money is the goal, full stop. And get this man another Dilly Bar. Jeff Bezos isn’t controversial because of his money; it’s because he is interested in living out childhood Star Trek fantasies and rigorously imposing his principles upon the people who work for him. If it were just about the money, there wouldn’t be so much controversy (or so much graffiti with murderous fantasies involving him). If “get wealthy then stay wealthy” is the simple value, you won’t hear any arguments from American politicians (for whom “get powerful stay powerful” is funded by the winners of the simpler game).
Having been raised into this single-value society, I am an unconscious propagator. If I have money and predictably getting more, all is well. If I have none or if my hoard is decaying, I’m violating the golden rule: “do unto the world as the world would do into your bank account”. Even a sideways path that doesn’t explicitly pursue income is eventually judged by the take in the long run (see: artists). Is this just the water we’re swimming in? Am I being over-conscious of a fact of life, a natural law? I think the answer to both questions is yes. Being relatively irascible from time to time means I’m averse to building systems of consistent exchange (the source of income). I can’t come up with rigorous philosophical arguments against our money-world, but that’s not my mission. Rather, I’m trying to interpret my emotional responses to the world as I experience it to find a way to deal with it well. That might be a most concise statement of the purpose of this book. I can’t avoid the emotional exchanges and I can’t avoid the dollar-denominated transactions in the long-run, I’m willing to accept that. I need the combination of environments and motives to drive me to keep exchanging.
Roman Ryan 