I was tempted to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi as I heard good things about it (and I missed it at the Dryden last month.) But, since I was running a little late, I opted instead to see Jeff, Who Lives at Home and then Bully.

I remembered that Dayna Papaleo gave “Jeff” a lukewarm-positive review in the City Paper so I gave it a shot with relatively low expectations. I found it a bit rough around the edges. As I told a friend later, it tends to really shove hard on suspension of disbelief which did not quite break me out of the movie: my advice is to stick with it and let it flow because there’s a multi-layered story going on that’s worth examining. I’ll also warn that I found Ed Helms acting to be a bit too broad … at least at first: I often suspect that shooting schedules for movies tend to be set up by location, but also loosely in script-order, so his earlier scenes in the film seem like a caricature portrait, but he does improve as the film goes on.

At the surface, the film is about an easily-dismissed stoner, Jeff (Jason Segel) who believes that the underlying nature of the universe is revealed through subtle messages that he believes he is tuning himself to see. Meanwhile, his brother Pat (Ed Helms) leads a much more conventional life, suppressing any belief in a purposeful world by focusing on the minutia of day-to-day life. Jeff lives in their mother Sharon’s (Susan Sarandon) basement — who is struggling to find meaning in her own life as a widow, unsatisfied with her sons. Oh, and it’s designed as a comedy with a lot of really quite funny moments.

But take away the mechanicals of the plot (“a stoner goes on a wacky adventure struggling to complete a simple task”) and what’s left is a painting of the way family is inexorably connected; how they are similar in deep, subtle ways that transcend their outwardly tremendous differences. Without giving away too much, I found it unexpectedly tender when Jeff is sitting the basement watching TV listlessly eating an uncooked PopTart.

With just a short break, I stuck around to see Bully. In case you didn’t know, it’s a documentary about bullying in primary schools in the United States … sort-of. Its candid portrayal of day-to-day school life resonated with me, and made me wonder if I’m repressing some memories of being bullied — I vividly remember moments that echoed Alex’s dialog with his mother and with school administrators. I suspect that some part will resonate with everyone.

By my interpretation, in American society, it is considered normal for kids to establish their individuality by saying cruel things to one another. Most form a callous that protects and strengthens from each cruel remark. But some do not, and the cruelty strikes their heart each time. And because it hurts so very much, it’s not something they wish to inflict on others, so they never become adept at cruelty. And then their unwillingness to be cruel becomes itself another difference that is attacked, and the pain just builds and builds.

The movie paints the picture of this seemingly unavoidable torture and then finds hope in things that parents and children are doing to turn the tide. But in my gut, I knew the speeches, the discussions, and the rallies would handily be derided by any half-clever fourth-grader — and much to the amusement of jeir peers, continuing to feed the cycle.

In one scene, Alex is talking with his assistant principal, he doesn’t believe her actions will help. He cites a previous case where he was bullied by getting stuffed into the seat cushions of the bus and her actions failed to stop the bullying. She has the audacity to bully him to reinforce her belief in the petty authority she holds: she begs the question by asking if that specific circumstance ever happened again, knowing that she’ll be able to steamroll poor Alex who doesn’t have the skills to call her on her bullshit.

That, and the principal of the same school’s reprehensible reaction to Alex’s poor parents led me to think of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. A common criticism of the film is that Ferris is an anti-hero because he fails to respect the authority of Principal Ed Rooney who is played to be a petty dictator — and an incompetent one at that. But watching Bully, I can’t help but believe Rooney’s portrayal may be less of an exaggeration than it seems. As an adult, thinking of the advice given by my own guidance counselors, teachers, principals, and any other “school authority” seems, at best, to be the good-and-bad mix of advice you can get from anybody over the age of 21, and downright buffoonish at worst.

But when I said the film is about bullying “sort of”, I meant that there’s an undercurrent of hope from people doing things they never thought possible. And in a way, the bullying and attempts to stop bullying seem trite compared to the profound personal changes in the lives of people confronting adversity.

I was talking with a friend the other week and we were commenting on how the lilacs seem more fragrant this year, probably because of the stresses of the weather. She commented that stress makes things beautiful. I thought it wasn’t quite right — I’ve seen people who are stressed and they’re not pretty — so I said it’s adapting to stress that is beautiful.

But speaking of strikes, I definitely wanted to see Salt of the Earth at The Flying Squirrel Community Space (285 Clarissa St. Just recently, I read somewhere that it was banned in the U.S., fueling more curiosity. It’s based on the real Empire Zinc Mine strike in New Mexico, and employs many people involved in the strike as actors. The reason it was banned is it was made during the time when Joseph McCarthy was performing what can only be described as witch-trials, and made by blacklisted people in Hollywood.

It’s a powerful and moving account of the desperate need for unions. But the thing I found more intriguing was that it was realistic about what it takes to actually start a strike. Most fictionalized accounts focus on the outward conflict and its resolution. But this spent almost all its time with the people who, by striking, lost their livelihood and had to rely on handouts. To me, it’s quite unfathomable: to decide that spending whatever savings I had, and then being at the mercy of the kindness of strangers is preferable to my working conditions is not a situation I’ve experienced. This is the decision Ramon must make when facing a wife and two children (with a third on the way) who rely on him as the sole breadwinner. They have nothing without him — literally, as the company also owns their home.

Their demand?: that Mexican-Americans be treated equally to Anglo-Americans.

1950. In America. And there are some who regard that decade as the most wonderful. Amazing.

Of course, it’s not like today is necessarily any better: there are still millions of people who are working but either don’t earn enough to survive, or their working conditions are dangerous or otherwise inhumane. Unions — and the legal protections for unions — are critical to the survival of the American people.

It is a monologue written by Mike Daisey and performed/read by Spencer T. Christiano which is a first-person account of how a fan of technology (and especially products of Apple) became disillusioned by visiting a factory in China. Christiano did a fantastic job voicing Daisey, who interweaves three tales: one is his own, personal relationship with technology, the second is the story of Apple, and the third is the story of his visit to Shenzhen, China. I found his style fantastically conversational and personal. The way he writes about technology demonstrates a deep understanding, and he genuinely seems like an eyes-wide-open kind of guy who is willing to lay any judgmental views right in the open.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: you can go to his site and download the whole monologue as a PDF and read it for yourself (it’s licensed with his unique open-source-like agreement).

I was drawn in to the story quickly. I grok the lust for technology, and his description of that experience fits with my own (for an example, one of the things he loved about his first computer — an Apple IIc — was that the keyboard was in Garamond; if that makes no sense to you, then you might not fully appreciate his geekery.) I have a fairly good understanding of the origins of Apple, and Daisey’s details fully corroborated my own. And when he began describing the “retail” side of Shenzen, it fit with what I had heard, such as when SparkFun visited there (although I far more appreciate his description, “Shenzhen looks like Blade Runner threw up on itself. LEDs, neon, and fifteen-story-high video walls covered in shitty Chinese advertising: it’s everything they promised us the future would be.”)

So when he started talking about what the “manufacturing” side of Shenzen was like, I could only assume it was just as accurate. I realize it’s a logical fallacy — a twist on the “ad hominem” fallacy — where I believe a fact to be true solely because I found other facts true.

He then outlined the conditions in the factories which were different from, and, by my gauge, worse than what I had envisioned. I had an impression of workers on an assembly-line putting together and testing electronics.

But I didn’t expect it to be in gigantic rooms where absolute silence is enforced. I didn’t expect such a lack of machinery (it’s cheaper to pay a Chinese worker to install a screw than to make a machine to do it, presumably until some astonishingly large scale.) I didn’t expect there to be suicide nets on the outside of the building. I didn’t expect regular working hours to be so extreme (although the government-approved union-busting and blacklisting would naturally make that so). I certainly didn’t expect these factories to employ the “best and the brightest” — a college education in China gets you a job assembling iPhones.

But then, like I say, you can read all about this yourself in a far more engaging and entertaining form.

So stepping out of the writing, and stepping out of the monologue and the performance, there’s an interesting twist to the story. NPR radio show This American Life had Daisey perform an abbreviated form of the monologue for the January 6, 2012 show. But then they did something unprecedented: on their March 16, 2012 show, they retracted the episode, claiming that Daisey lied.

Now this is unique, first because it’s the first time This American Life actually retracted an episode. But more important, it’s not a retraction because the facts of the account are false, it’s because they didn’t happen to Daisey personally as he had claimed. According to the after-performance discussion with Spencer T. Christiano, producer John W. Borek, and director Kelly Webster, Daisey does not dispute the fabrications and says it is a work of theater, not journalism. On the Star Wars Modern blog titled What Mike Daisey Did Wasn’t Fair – It Was Right., John Powers puts it better than I can: “when did Ira Glass graduate from being a talk radio Casey Kasem to NPR’s Dan Rather?”

I’ll briefly mention that there’s a flurry of activity about this. My take [I'd add, "as if you care", but you, dear reader, are indeed reading this, so I'll meta-self-referentially say it parenthetically] is that journalists like to believe the rules of journalism produce a work that is closest to reality. The truth is, no writing is remotely close to the truth. No account of any event — be it written, photographed, filmed, or recorded — has ever been an adequate substitute for reality. However, it is a new truth, just as this blog entry is a new essay that’s about a new performance of a new monologue by Mike Daisey which is a new transcript based on new performances of Daisey which is a new account … umm … etcetera.

But what I think is so valuable about The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the way it paints a picture of the hierarchy that exists. A journalist could play by-the-book and quote a business person, and a worker, and a technology geek, and a Foxconn liaison, and Steve Jobs — and they could never manage to put it together to describe the chain of events. For instance, here’s an attempt to explain the hierarchy I’m talking about:

• An evangelical Apple geek eagerly awaits the newest product from (although having never met the man)
• … Steve Jobs whose staff designs a new version of their latest product and sends a representative to Foxconn in Shenzen, China to meet (a group of strangers, both in relation and in culture)
• … the representatives at Foxconn and they all go to dinner and mingle and go to the shiny factory meeting room and discuss the product when the Apple representative asks to see the factory floor, so the Foxconn people make a call to (knowing they should show an idealized version)
• … the factory manager who sets up (not wanting to lose work and get fired)
• … a mock factory — well, a real factory floor with real products, but with the child labor replaced by their oldest workers who (desperate for employment)
• … go along with the charade and work hard and say all the right things so the representative can report back about the great working conditions (all the while wondering why American workers can’t be so happy for work).

So go back in that list and find the bad guy — find the person who caused the dangerous working conditions, or the child labor. This is where journalism falls down: there is no person who is at fault.

Those parenthetical phrases are key: they describe the gaps that are filled in by the systems we have. Ergo, it is the system itself that is the problem. The system rewards people for making small lies to preserve its own profitability and we humans have created this new life form.

Chappell grew up being taught that world peace is a “naïve idea”. Central to the argument is that human beings are naturally violent. But is that true?

According to him, the greatest problem of every army is getting soldiers to be willing to die, and it’s even hard to get people to fight. An effective technique is to instill the notion of a “band of brothers” so everything becomes self-defense. For instance, West Point teaches to treat your fellow soldiers as your family.

Second, no war has ever been fought for money or oil — at least not officially. In fact, people desire peace so much that every leader claims to be “fighting for peace”. War is traumatizing because people are naturally peaceful.

An army study conducted in World War II (specifically Combat Neuroses: Development of Combat Exhaustion by Roy L. Swank, M.D.; Walter E. Marchand, M.D.) showed that after 60 days of sustained day and night combat, 98% of soldiers become psychiatric casualties (the 2% that can go on indefinitely already aggressive sociopaths).

Chappell spoke about how reading On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society gave him new hope for peace. Like other animals, humans have an innate aversion to killing one’s own kind. All of military history supports this and uses three techniques to thwart this instinct:

1. Create psychological distance such as derogatory name-calling — everything from “barbarian” (which comes from Greek interpretation of foreign language sounding like “bar bar bar”) to a more subtle term like “illegal alien”.
2. Create a moral distance by declaring your enemy to be evil.
3. Create mechanical distance (physical distance). For instance, the Nazis switched to gas chambers because shooting was too traumatic for the soldiers — they were protecting the executioner from psychological damage.

Chappell asks, “why would this be necessary if humans were naturally violent? If we are not naturally violent, why is there so much war?”

We’re told we need war to stop war, violence to stop violence violence. Most soldiers want peace but that is not the means they are taught to use.

Chappell notes that at West Point he learned that the nature of war is drastically changing. It’s now about “winning hearts and changing minds”. This leads most directly from media coverage, since “collateral damage” is no longer acceptable: you can’t kill any civilians. Yet, historically, the most people killed in past war were civilians.

So how do you win hearts and change minds? The masters of this were peaceful like Ghandi: someone able to transform an enemy into a friend; someone actively waging peace. This includes peace marches such as were used for civil rights or for attaining voting rights. (From Chappell’s example, consider that prior to the 1830′s, only a small percentage of tax paying people could actually vote, and it was through peaceful protest that we now take for granted that “no taxation without representation” is the bedrock of our country.) These peace movements of our country should be taught in schools as being at least as important as the wars.

Waging war or waging peace share many needs: people, strategy, unity, tactics, and winning hearts and changing minds. However, Chappell points out that there are tremendous differences as well:

• Peace has truth on its side, war has myth.
• War is about killing people versus peace which is about making a friend.
• All war is based on deception. (He pointed out that in all cultures, the fundamental behavior of the “devil” is that of a deceiver.)
• The people who perpetuate war control lots of wealth and power — just as the enemies of the civil rights did.

So what does being “pro-military but against war” look like? Well, pretty much like Star Trek in a lot of ways. For instance, what if the army was chartered with disaster relief and we had the worldwide reputation of arriving to help then leaving?

Chappell said that Eisenhower was the first to ask why the Middle East dislikes the U.S. He found it was because our policies block democracy and instead support or install dictatorships — they are angry that we don’t live up to our ideals. As such, we need to hold our politicians accountable to change foreign policy so it is in line with the ideals we profess.

Chappell concluded by saying that war is not inevitable, and world peace is possible. Consider that 200 years ago, the only democracy in the world was America and even it was only fractionally so. And we don’t need to convince everyone — for instance, the Civil Rights movement succeeded with only 1% of the population actively participating.

During the question-and-answer, some evocative questions were asked.

First off, can the world be united? Chappell noted that in the United States, we have moved from state-identity to national-identity. And consider Europe: can you imagine Germany declaring war on France today? This progress can be expanded to all nations.

I asked about how, prior to the Iraq war, 250,000 people marched to protest it yet it happened anyway, so is protesting dead? He said that people romanticized the past: while the Vietnam War was being debated, it was not uncommon for students to try and attack peace protesters. To my specific example, he said that the government learned how to defuse protest from what happened in Vietnam: to avoid risk of a draft, they censor the media by embedding journalists in military units, privatize the military, and by propagandizing “if you don’t support the war you don’t support the troops”. As such, protest needs to evolve too.

In a later question, Chappell was asked what techniques should we use? He said we have lost our way to positive change. Consider how the Tea Party movement called attention to issues that were the same everyone cares about, but liberals were too busy calling them stupid. Remember to never demonize your opponent: identify with your opponent. In many cases the problem will boil down to hatred and ignorance. Remember that the government retains control of people by dividing them. So start with common ground and don’t reinforce divisiveness.

In another question, someone asked, given that peace is an active task, what would non-violent passion look like? Chappell said it’s easy today to isolate yourself today in peer groups and reinforce demonization of others. To be passionate is to defeat ignorance and to defeat hatred.

Another question had to do with conscientious objection: that by paying taxes, we are actively participating in and supporting war. To that, he said we should focus on how war makes us less safe, and how preparation for war is economically destructive. Consider Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” speech where, in the central argument against “the way of fear and force”, and what would be the worst- and best-case scenarios, he says:

The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms in not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Chappell echoed this, reiterating that our infrastructure is hurting because of war. He suggested we seek out the works of Douglas MacArthur and President Eisenhower as he had.

The concluding question asked if peace is based in truth, yet battle and conflict is a fact of nature, how can we be truthful? Chappell said the language of “waging peace” is accurate. We are trying to defeat ignorance and hatred, but the person is not the enemy. So ask yourself: how can I most effectively attack ignorance and hatred without hurting the person?

I knew it was trouble before I turned around, and as I had expected, the man was lying in the road.

I was calling 911 (although I almost called 9111 in my panic) before the driver even got out of the truck. I think my initial assumption was incorrect — the man wasn’t run over, but run into. Thankfully the driver was going relatively slowly, but he didn’t see the man and didn’t react, so the truck hit with full force. A firetruck, ambulance, and two police cars arrived within a couple minutes. They got the man on a backboard and into the ambulance — he didn’t appear to have a broken back or other severe injury, so I hope the worst he could suffer would be a broken bone or two.

I always wonder how most people think this is okay — as if it’s just a fact of life that these kinds of car accidents happen. It was certainly preventable. Why aren’t cars equipped with brakes that engage automatically when they detect something? For that matter, why aren’t the sidewalks cleared to the same standard as the street? I could blame the driver, but humans are wholly unequipped to drive the same route without incident and be expected to handle a random, unusual circumstance, proven again and again by psychology and anthropology.

It’s really too bad we can’t use science to guide our collective decision-making.

I’ll start with Margin Call and say just a little: it’s the story of the 2008 financial meltdown convincingly told with a sympathetic eye to the people closest to the problem. It really only served to reinforce my opinion that the stock market is nothing more than gambling with no relevance to any real value in the world. It was good, solid entertainment.

Martha Marcy May Marlene plays out largely in flashback: the tale of a woman indoctrinated into a rural cult. I think most people watch the film as a sort of horror/thriller, exposing the layers of lies, power, and brainwashing that get an otherwise reasonable person to embrace completely absurd notions. But I guess I come from a weird perspective, and saw it as a tale that compares two cults: one at a rural farm, and the other, American industrialized society. When Martha (a.k.a. Marcy May as named by the cult leaders, or Marlene when any of the women answered the phone) is reacquainted with her sister Lucy, she returns to Lucy and her husband Ted’s summer home (none of who utters reference to a “cult” as none either knows or believes it). She first showers and when she rejoins Lucy on a bed, Lucy says, “oh, you’re dripping”, referring to Martha’s wet hair. Particularly given the more important things going on, why is this even remotely important?: it is the Lucy/Ted/American culture’s set of arbitrary and irrelevant rules.

Like Kynodontas (Dogtooth) (which I saw at the Dryden), the film acts as a mirror to our own society. My culture’s foundation is violence: if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, society responds with force (which may sound familiar, taken from Derrick Jensen‘s philosophy). For instance, if I decide that the house I have been living in (exclusively, for the last 12 years, and no other person has come by to claim it is theirs) is mine and I decide to no longer pay my mortgage, eventually someone will come with a gun and tell me I have to leave. That is the incentive for paying my mortgage. Of course, it’s conditioned from an early age, so it doesn’t seem like that’s the reason, but it ultimately is.

I of course know the differences between my culture and the cult, but the lines were pretty severely blurred by the end of the film. It’s kind of a “choose your own poison” kind of tale. Martha is a pawn in the game where she’s either enslaved to pay for her existence, or, well, enslaved to pay for her existence. There’s happiness and misery to be found in both places only at different times and in different forms. But ultimately she’s asking the right questions: why do I have to?

The movie was extremely impressive. From the introduction, I gathered it was not intended so much as a condemnation of industrialized society, but rather a portrait of its beauty. It does so, however, by showing industrialization as boldly and plainly as possible. The protagonist — the wife of a high-level manager at a chemical plant — is set against this landscape as a way to demonstrate it. Her world is shifting beneath her, but the hard gray of industrialization stands sturdily.

I think most people naturally gravitate to her plight, and as such, see it as a rather bleak movie. Given my mood at the outset, I was ready to let it all wash over me in that way. But I also understand that the industrialized facets were just as central — and if you can believe that the man-made structures are the protagonist, the whole thing seems pretty uplifting.

When I left, I decided to just walk straight home. I was still in a funk, but was also affected by the film. I kept looking at the world in odd ways — looking at things that I would ordinarily ignore.

My mood got particularly bleak when I (walking home alone once again … as usual) decided that this was all there was; that my best years were behind me and solitude and ever-weighing loneliness was all I had to look forward to. From here on out, there would be no surprises and I’d just trudge through day-by-day, step-by-step.

All of a sudden, a cat raced past me, startling me. It ran ahead of me and plopped on the ground begging to be petted. I declined its advances, but it reminded me things aren’t always the same.

I amused myself during the flight by using the in-flight locator channel (on the seat-back video) to identify interstates I had travelled on my way to and from Burning Man, barely able to recognize the moving semis from 7 miles above. Anyway, we did arrive late enough that I missed the Friday night show my brother was attending (for the second time in my life, I was delayed to change a tire on the plane, an occurrence I calculate must happen about 20% of the time.) Nonetheless, I got checked in to The Excalibur Hotel and Casino (3850 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV) and settled in. My brother gambles enough that his mLife card (tied to all the MGM properties) gained him free hotel rooms for himself and for me. The room was unfortunately not as luxurious as I had come to expect, but it was nonetheless comfortable (akin to a Holiday Inn room with no coffee maker) and it had an excellent view of the strip. When I got together with him and his friends, we headed out and stopped at Diablo’s Mexican Cantina at the Monte Carlo (3770 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV) for some drinks and so I could get something to eat. Food cost about twice as much as it does in Rochester, but any at that price was consistently very good, and I stuck to drinking non-alcoholic beer which hovered around $6 with tip per bottle.

Saturday was my brother’s birthday and we had sushi for lunch. Three of us did one of the green-screen lipsynch videos at a kiosk which ended up looking quite amusing.  That night we saw Zumanity in The New York New York Hotel and Casino (3790 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV) — an adult-themed Cirque du Soleil show. It was fantastic. Although for the most part I was mesmerized by beautiful bodies (mostly exposed if you must ask) performing astounding feats, I was enchanted by the story in the “Tissus” segment with a man swinging on silky ribbons attempting to catch the attention of his muse. At the climax when they both go flying off I inexplicably teared-up, finding the whole thing wonderful.

Once we got done with the show we headed to one of the newest casinos on the strip and selected a place to eat: Scarpetta at The Cosmopolitan (3708 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV). As it was very expensive and fancy, I opted to have a dish I didn’t recognize: “moist-roasted capretto” described only as “rapini, pancetta & potatoes”. For my fellow philistines, it’s goat (presumably baby goat, as Google Language Tools kindly translates the phrase “moist-roasted kid”) in a zesty sauce not unlike a brown gravy. (It was further refreshing to worry not about bones as I usually do eating such animals at Indian restaurants.)

My brother’s and my regular haunt was Dick’s Last Resort at the Excalibur (3850 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV). They were generally okay, and (as the Excalibur was among the cheapest hotels on the strip) the crowd was plentiful and rowdy. In any case, once it was just my brother and I, we did a tour of the strip, starting at The Wynn Hotel and Casino (3131 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, NV) — an astoundingly decorated place — where we got breakfast at The Pizza Place there. I had an excellent oatmeal (a refreshing change) and my brother had a perfectly prepared egg/bacon/cheese breakfast sandwich on a giant croissant. On our way back, we got to see a short but impressive show of the famous fountains at The Bellagio Hotel and Casino (3600 Las Vegas Blvd South, Las Vegas, NV).

My brother left mid-day on Tuesday, and I was there until late at night for the red-eye back to New York. Although everything we saw and did was flashy and impressive, it was solely done for the love of money. I was pretty okay for the first couple days, but the whole soullessness of it all drove me nearly mad by the middle of Tuesday. I was biding my time trying not to gamble (I lost about $50 in all, so not too bad, I guess) by sitting out in the warm weather and reading Great Expectations (for the first time as an adult not for any school). I talked with this guy for a bit on the street and he claimed to be England’s first rapper — one Raymond Witter (also an author on LuLu) and he was one of a few who wasn’t outright selling something.

Earlier in the week, I met a woman who seemed friendly enough, but I was led away from her on suspicion that she was actually a prostitute. I didn’t believe it, but on the last day, I met another woman at another casino and after a too-brief chat, she offered to “go upstairs”. It was so sad to not be able to make any human connection (save for other vacationers and a few chatty bartenders) … except, presumably, for money. The “alluring façade over emptiness” theme is echoed right down to the thin veneer of the Las Vegas strip over a burnt-out city (which I explored a little of on a morning run on Monday) that only supports the constant construction of its appearance and, apparently, the numerous office furniture stores needed to accomplish that end.

But you know, I’m beginning to think it’s about as useful as using dynamite to go fishing. Sure it’s the fastest way to get all the fish, but aside from that, no good comes from it. So now I declare capitalism a complete failure.

Here’s why.

Let’s move aside from any system and talk about what kind of standards would define a good system. Kind of like a scientific-ish way of looking at it — to look at how we would measure what makes a great system, or a great society.

My first take would be “everyone is genuinely happy all the time”. That’s the ideal target which isn’t actually possible. So what would be acceptable? I’d lean toward “everyone is genuinely happy most of the time” more than “most people are genuinely happy all the time” — in other words, everyone in the society gets to be happy sometimes is better than some people never get to be happy. I’d further say that it be pretty balanced, so there isn’t a group of people who are happy one day a year and another group that are happy 364 days a year.

So what’s happy? I’m kind of a fan of Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. I learned about in an intro to psychology class in college and it’s always stuck with me. The gist is that each human being must first have jeir “Basic needs or Physiological needs” met before jee can be content in having jeir “Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability” met before jeir need for “Love and Belonging” before jeir need for “Esteem” (feeling successful in life to yourself and others), and all that before jeir “Need for Self-actualization”.

For reference, I’ll quote the Wikipedia’s chart of needs to identify the specific examples that Maslow defined, adding my own interpretation/clarification where applicable:

• Physiological — breathing, food, water, sex [physiological sexual release], sleep, homeostasis [rudimentary nutrition and shelter; e.g. letting the body heal itself and not freezing to death], excretion
• Safety — Security of: body, employment, resources, morality, the family, health, property
• Love/belonging — friendship, family, sexual intimacy
• Esteem — self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others
• Self-actualization — morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, accepting of facts

I claim this is the path to genuine happiness as it fits with my own life experience. For instance, I find it terribly difficult to have high self-esteem when I feel my life is unstable. I can’t say whether the highest layers apply to everyone, in part because they’re a bit more nebulous (e.g. everyone needs water, but what fosters “esteem” in one person may do nothing for someone else.) This is also because the “lower” needs are more primitive to a being, and the “higher” ones are more refined by intelligence.

I guess when I talk about being “everyone is genuinely happy most of the time” I mean more specifically that every citizen has a minimal baseline of needs that are consistently met, and that any individual’s level of needs that are met does not radically change from day-to-day.

What a society should do, at a minimum, is to not prevent an individual from tending to jeir needs, then to protect each individual’s ability to tend to jeir needs from interference by others, and finally that it provide for the needs of all individuals.

But because the needs of an individual are hierarchical, it’s the permission, protection, or providing at the lowest level that counts. In other words, if an arbitrarily foolish society does not prevent anyone from having esteem, but does prevent them from having water, then it is only as good as any society that prevents individuals from having water.

I’m going to attempt this line of logic: the minimal society is no structure at all which does nothing to prevent self-fulfillment of needs, but also does nothing to protect individuals from one another, and does nothing to provide. So any society that actively prevents the fulfillment of any need is necessarily worse than the minimal society. Thus, all societies worth considering must not prevent self-fulfillment of any need at any level.

Next, better societies protect a higher level of tending to needs from prevention by others. For instance, a society that protects individuals right to tend to all their basic needs from intrusion by others is better than one that fails to protect an individual’s ability to tend to the need for food, even if (because of the hierarchical nature of needs) it protects individuals tending to the needs of safety.

And finally, the idyllic society would technically fulfill all needs, but that is necessarily impossible as some needs are met through introspection, (which curiously, by my read the definition of Christian “heaven” seems to be a society that fulfills all needs in exactly that way). Thus the idyllic achievable society is limited to providing all externally achievable needs (idyllic in that it is unachievable, but intended as a goal to aspire toward).

So now I can finally start comparing systems.

Pure capitalism — pure competition — actively prevents no person’s ability to tend to jeir needs, but it provides no protection and fulfills no needs. It is essentially a system predicated on the wild state, and therefore indistinguishable from no system at all.

More realistically, there is the United States flavor of capitalism which, as it stands today, has some socialist elements. In general, it does not prevent tending to needs (although by taxing people who earn less than a minimal living wage, I could argue that it prevents those people from tending to their basic needs.) The laws we have protect individuals tending to most of their basic needs, and a few needs of safety from prevention by others. It provides a bit of a safety net and provides for breathing, food, and water in the form of welfare. On the standard of “everyone is genuinely happy most of the time”, it’s limited to the most rudimentary basic needs — ergo, “everyone” is guaranteed not to starve to death, although you might freeze to death. By these standards, on the scale of how good things could be, it’s pretty lousy.

To try and stay concrete, I’ll turn to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. It’s a document that outlines a more substantial set of rights for individuals that includes fulfillment of essentially all the basic needs, and nearly all of the safety needs. On brief assessment, I see it as a far superior system, and something worth working towards.

My fundamental argument pivots on belief in Maslow’s hierarchy, and that is the nature of humans to constantly attempt to attain their needs. When all the needs on a particular level are fulfilled, it is in our nature to strive to fulfill the needs at a higher level. And by depriving individuals of fulfilling the needs at a particular level, it is impossible to fulfill needs at a higher level (at least in any sustainable, genuine way). Look to your own life and comment if you can provide a counterexample — specifically that you have not fulfilled your needs on one level yet feel it would make no difference to do so to improve your ability to fulfill your needs at a higher level.

My point is that even if there are some people who will not strive to fulfill needs at a higher level, it is worth it to offer as much opportunity to everyone else who will. That is what makes a society great.

And once again, they say, “Patrons may not bring food or beverages (with the exception of one sealed bottle of water) into the concerts.” This is because they know they want to encourage people to buy beverages from the vendors, and by making artificial scarcity, they can make more money which is what this is all about. But more sinister is that it encourages people to rely on bottled water. That way, when hydrofracking companies pollute our water supplies, people will already be accustomed to drinking bottled water and not care. Folks already believe marketing hype from bottled water and water-filter companies and no longer believe that tap water is the safest drinking water in the world (it’s held to far higher standards than bottled water or other soft drinks).

Ok, I’m done ranting for now … enjoy yer day.