"It is enough," Part II

There is a second and more personal thing that the statement "It is enough" meant to me. (Please see the last two posts for context if you're confused).

Experiencing Jenny's life and death changed how I felt about life, and about being alive.

Previously, my life was — perhaps— like that of many other shy suburban teenagers. Sure there were good moments, mostly when laughing or being silly with friends — moments of joy and even connection. But in order to get to those moments, it felt like I had to grind through much that was grey, kind of empty, and rather boring.

There was nothing particularly 'wrong' with my life, I was comfortably looked after, and my life was devoid of any real suffering. I was a child of priveledge, if not compared to many of my suburban peers, than to most of the people in the world. I had nothing to complain about.

Except a vague emptiness, a certain lack of meaning, and connection. There was no one to share what I was really thinking and feeling, deep down. I had no idea how to start such conversations, and maybe not even the knowledge that it was possible to have relationships and conversations where such sharing could take place.

In the context of all the suffering, injustice, and unmet needs present in the world, to speak of this lack  seems obscene. But that doesn't make it unreal.

Maybe my lack just boiled down to being socially awkward and introverted. But I'm starting to think there is something more systemic about it. I also suspect that lack of emptiness, lack of meaning and connection goes deeper than just a 'lack of intimate friends' — even if that's how I tended to think of it at the time.

This train of thought reminds of something I saw in Geez magazine a few years ago. "Help end affluence — sponsor a comfortable Western kid!"

(The fine print is both funny and pointed, so I would encourage you to click on the image and read it).

Anyways, to end this political rant over and get back to the 'real' topic at hand, let me just say this. While walking out of of the cemetery after I had visited my friend's grave for the first time, I broke down and started crying — for the first time since hearing the news of her death a month earlier.

I truly appreciated those times I had had with her, and I was glad I had got a chance to know her. Those rather brief moments — and other moments, with others still alive — now "were enough" to make life seem worthwhile, to make wading through all that grey feel worth it.

Undoubtedly, this will sound cheesy to any outsider. But that realization unblocked a lot in me, and opened my life up to so much, both in that moment, and yet to come.

"It is enough"

I'm going to tell a story or two about (or maybe better said, behind) the song I posted in my last entry. So if hearing such stories takes the mystery/goodness out of music for you, or if the song doesn't do much for you, feel free to move along.

Like the title of that entry said, it's an old song for a friend that died several years ago — though the similarly unexpected death of a friend's younger brother over Christmas has brought it back to mind in a powerful way. Anyways...

Jenny was a lifeguard, but the summer after graduating high school she drowned while swimming in a lake, because of a fit of her just-diagnosed epilepsy. She and I weren't the closest of friends, but we were in music class and "concert band" together, and our senses of humour clicked. Having fun and feeling happy while being at school was an unusual thing for me, nerdy introvert that I was. Not to get too sentimental or philosophic about it (though of course these are the thoughts you think after someone dies), but it seemed like she brought out a 'me' that was fun and funny — a 'me' that rarely saw the light of day. And I think she brought a lot of light and life to many people's lives.

One of the striking things at her funeral was the difference between how the "adults" and the "kids" in her life spoke about her. The adults seemed to have a hard time getting over the lost potential that her death represented, all the things she didn't do: she didn't get to go to university, to become a french teacher like she planned, to become a wife, a mother. Etc. Her peers, other the other hand were content to speak about what she'd done and been, and would continue to be in their hearts and memories.

Some of that, I'm sure, is that we ourselves hadn't had many of those 'adult' experiences yet. But as I thought and felt about it afterward, it seemed to run deeper than that. We didn't see her life in terms of lost potential, or things she didn't get a chance to do. Yes, it was monstrous, unimaginable, and so... so...unfair... that her life was cut short. Especially because she was so special, so well-loved, so full of light and life. But precisely because she was that way, it also was enough. To think otherwise would diminish all she gave. "It is enough" that we knew her for that all-too short time, because we had been given so much in that time.

At least, that's what I thought (and felt, much more importantly).

An old song for a friend who died

i don't miss cuddling with you
i don't miss your kisses
philosphizing or emotionalizing
(we never did those things)

what i miss is goofing around
collapsing in fits of gigles
attacks of silliness
belonging when i'm with you

good-bye
good-bye, for now
good-bye — pirouette through light
good-bye, for now
good-bye: it is enough.

This is scary-good

Hopefully it's not too late for one last Christmas song, a spine-tingling and subversive version of Silent Night. Be patient and wait for the new lyrics to show up.

It's not Christmas without Optimus Prime

These are the sorts of thing me and my brother get up to on Christmas.

Am I an anarchist?

Building on my characterization of anarchism involving 'a radical rejection of coercion,' last post I tried to show that capitalism functions coercively, in that it tends to be hierarchically-organized. (Not to mention the fact that the ideology of capitalism says that it is a good idea to subject people to the tyranny of efficiency, calculation, and market forces — that this will 'really' be best for them, and society, in the long run).

That said,  feudalism and slave-economies are more coercive — and much worse — than capitalism. As that comparison should make clear, coercion comes in many gradations, from the blatant and horrifying, to the incredibly subtle.  For another, perhaps overly blunt example, think of the difference between a woman who is forcibly tied up and raped, and one who gives in to a husband, boyfriend, or date because 'he's a man, and they have needs.'

The subtle shades that coercion comes in means that it's probably impossible to rid every interaction, relation, and decision of it. (But that doesn't mean this isn't an ideal worth striving for! In fact, I'm tempted to say the only ideals worth having are impossible ones.)

But anarchism is an impossible ideal, then.

On top of the fact that the word means different things to different people, that's one of the reasons I still hesitate to describe myself as an anarchist — there are so many ways coercion is embedded in many of the institutions, relations, decisions, cultures, and thought-processes that I participate in. Alongside and in spite my best efforts to disentangle myself from coercion, I often compromise, and make my peace with these things. I settle. And will I ever truly stop?

So anarchist? I don't know. But anarchy, anarchism, the never-ending rejection of that coercion, yeah, I believe in that.

Anarchism and Capitalism

In the last post, I characterized anarchism as involving a radical rejection of coercion. More fully, "Anarchism, as I understand it, says that all our collective interactions, relations, and decision-making should be free of coercion. Or to state it positively, they should be co-operative and voluntary — and I believe by extension, personal and small-scale."

An ideal like this make capitalism... problematic. After all, capitalism — along with most other institutions in our society — is hierarchically-organized. People at the top dictate what people at the bottom do. Most fundamentally, workers sell themselves for 8 hours a day, doing what the owners and bosses want them to do. Not only is this coercive, it is also alienating. People are alienated from their work — they exercise no ownership over it, they are not invested in it, they put little into it because they get little out of it. Since they are alienated from that which they spend the biggest chunk of their lives, time, and energy on, they are alienated from themselves.

Everyone hates work, complains about it, and can't wait until the workday ends and the weekend comes... not because they are lazy, but because 'work' in our culture generally involves doing something you don't want to do, but that you nevertheless feel forced to do.

(And at the same time, strong cultural forces pressure us to be happy with our lot... unhappy people bog down the system... if you're not happy there must be something wrong with you... probably chemically... and we have drugs for that! ... but maybe you're just a failure. When it comes to depression or unhappiness, the collective is never at fault, only the individual. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the alienating society we live in).

Because we can do different kinds of alienating work, there is the illusion of choice and freedom. But it is difficult to avoid the basic equation of 'work = boring, dissatisfying, alienating.' Even people who are lucky enough to end up 'doing what they love' or at least 'doing something worthwhile' (e.g. musicians, social workers, teachers...?) often end up hating their jobs because the institutions involved are coercively-organized. They get forced to do what they love in a way that they would never choose. And there are so many 'extra' things that they have to do, things they don't want to do, that it feels like they never get to the things that they love, the things which attracted them to the profession in the first place.

All this said, exchange need not be coercive. If I make something, or grow it, and you make something, or maybe are willing to offer a service, and we want to trade with one another... then, that's fine! If a group of me and my friends get together, make something, and are willing to exchange it (and if we formalize this, this is called a co-op, a nice alternative to the corporation) then that's fine. If we want to use money to mediate our exchanges... well, that can be fine.

The thing with money is that it is a numerical technology. Like all technology, it might be designed to help us and make our lives easier, but it can easily take control. All too often money subjects humans to the tyranny of numbers and their logic. Instead of humans making choices, numbers do, a mathematic operation does. "What is the lowest number (i.e. what is cheapest)?" The answer to that question determines so many of our decisions. 

But we don't have to be determined by the numbers. We can choose to consider more than just economics when we make decisions – we can consider things that can't be measured, things like the environment, social justice, and aesthetics. This is a human way to make choices: to consider multiple factors when making a decision, rather than just one, rather than just money. The problem is that our culture – unlike almost every other culture that has ever existed — tends to value the numbers above all else, and teaches and encourages us to be determined by them. We worship  efficiency, economic growth, and the free market. The thing is, in order for the market to be free, we must enslave ourselves.

So while exchange isn't inherently coercive, it nonetheless tends to be coercively-organized in our society. Capitalism, which involves workers selling themselves for part of the day, amounts to what I'm tempted to call 'semi-voluntary and somewhat-limited slavery.' Worse systems could be imagined — feudalism, and race-based slavery please stand up! — but better ones could be too.