Money Versus People

Real revolutions begin in the heart. It’s too bad more revolutionaries don’t remember that. If they did, they might not batter us with so much angry rhetoric, or squabble so unrelievedly among themselves. A concern for social and economic justice doesn’t require an “ism” to sustain it; indeed, ideologues too often become the worst enemies of the people they start out seeking to help.

That having been said, why are we printing this odd and belligerent piece of writing? It rails, almost shrilly, against capitalism. It is too lofty, and a tad intimidating to read. Yet haunting. And beautiful. A weaving together of a passionately-held ideology and a deeply-felt love of life, it provoked and inspired me in a way such writing rarely does. Happily, it offers no easy explanation, or practical solution, for the problem it describes. Who can say why we’ve turned money into a god? Why do people anywhere shape certain values into “society” and then suffer them, mostly in silence? What I value about these questions is that they lead me back to the heart.

Yet if “Money Versus People” sometimes seems deliberately exaggerated, it’s meant to be. Published last year in an unusual book called The Sandstone Papers, it’s ostensibly one of six different papers on “the crisis of contemporary life” by six different authors. But all the papers in this collection are really the work of one man, Martin Glass, who has remarkably created six alter-egos, each of whom analyzes the world from a different philosophical perspective. They are, he writes, “rather like six views of the same mountain, that mountain being our human condition in its permanent and historical plight.” In his different voices, with their shifting emphases on spiritual or psychological or political values, Glass has shaped a deeply sensitive work. Published by Threshold Books (RD 3, Box 1350, Putney, VT 05346, $9 plus $1 for postage and handling), the book was written by Glass over a period of seven years during which he worked as a night janitor.

We’re thankful for permission to reprint these excerpts from The Sandstone Papers.

— Ed.

Humans Are Difficult To Subdue

When we are intensely at one with our humanity we are intensely at one with the world, and the expression on our faces is fearless. We feel vibrant, open, radiant: like the wind on the mountains, like the burst of wings. In our essence we are fearless, because in our essence we are the universe.

We are meant to live by truths of the spirit. What are truths of the spirit? They are truths for which there is no visible evidence. Those who look for support in the visible world have become frightened.

When we look directly at another, straight in the eyes, we are asking a question.

What is that question?

What is that question in a society where things are more real than people, and people are always hurrying, and everyone is suspicious of everyone else, and all we ever talk about is money?

The Labyrinth

The mind projects values and principles into the world: the world suggests values and principles to the mind. Mind and world are one: humans inhabit a domain of significance. Failure to establish that domain, a human world, is our only true catastrophe.

In our society that catastrophe has occurred for the first time on the planet: money values are not human values. Human beings are not wage-earners, a human shelter is not an investment, the Earth is not real estate, knowledge is not property.

How is the world transformed into money?

Whatever can be sold for money is a form assumed by money. If everything in a society — the people, the things people create, the things found in nature — can be bought and sold, then everything has become money. It’s that simple. Or, even simpler: if labor is sold, then so will its product be sold.

Thus we are uncertain about what is good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or sick, natural or unnatural, meaningful or meaningless, valuable or worthless. We are uncertain about how our own children should be raised. We are uncertain about what we should eat, how we should make love, why we exist.

Our leaders tell us nothing but the cost.

Voyagers

They stand in line, the inventors of ethics and music, fidgeting with their unemployment booklets. The eyes are keen, the eyes have depth. What quickens in them at each breath, then sinks? They who dreamed, who dared to create: what are they doing here?

When they are young the world is vivid; as they age the world becomes profound. The qualities of a whole planet depend upon them. Through their lips the world sings, through their eyes it sees its infinite beauty; in their minds it knows itself, in their hearts it loves and is loved.

They are distracted on the long lines, nervous and worried, glancing suspiciously at each other. They drag themselves to the glass doors, but a part of them never enters.

They are imagination. They are mathematics. They alone suspected that there is more here than meets the eye. They are language conscious purpose, the cultivation of plants. They are drama, the intensification of life.

What have they done to themselves?

All We Need Is A Strategy

The eyes of children stare directly at us, watching what we do; they try to figure out the patterns and principles of our behavior, unaware of the weight of their gaze. The world grows meaningful for the eyes and the mind. Predictability, consistency, relatedness, import, and purpose are some of the initial demands we make in the fabrication of a human world.

When we are adults the direct gaze often turns inward, lingering on as a symbol: we stare into space, lost in thought, demanding that the inner world also be human.

The growth of each human is the creation of the world again. We are each a focus, an illumination. The miracle of the universe is the light of consciousness, because only in that light is the universe supported: what we see happening on the faces of children, as they grow, is the re-enactment of creation.

The individual evolution is part of a larger evolution, the evolution of humanity itself. The sense of that evolution is partly veiled, a half-revealed secret, a Mystery. Of one thing, however, we are certain: we can go astray. Love, moral standards, and devotion to truth have been our best guides.

In our society, the custodians of the evolution are politicians, executives, and generals — specialists in expediency, finance, and violence.

Unity

We comfort others in the knowledge that comfort cannot be given: we are a harbor where the soul may rest in its pain, we provide the haven where grief may be devoted to itself without having to bother with the details of life. The comforter’s eyes and thoughts are calm and detached, withholding the secret, while the sufferer mistakes the sanctuary for the consolation. The burden of carrying on has temporarily been removed, that’s all; even the simplest things will be done by someone else for a while. What we require is a full experience of the sorrow, without distractions.

The deeper knowledge here is the knowledge that life must go on, that we must be equal to its trials. Comforting also has a cold realism in it, a practical function. We provide respite to each other because we have a collective commitment to the value of the endeavor itself; we must be equal to all this because it has a meaning, it contains our own truth within it. Denial of the given path is denial of ourselves. What has been given must be accepted, not passively but as the terrain upon which we struggle toward our destiny. When we say, “That’s life,” it is not with resignation, but in the spirit of accepting the terms. So, for everyone’s sake, a hand darts out to the one who stumbles.

Now in these dark times we are deeply troubled. Comfort will be demanded and provided, in myriad forms. Each form, degraded or sublime, expresses the one relationship, the one dignity, the one great faith by which the whole world is illuminated and sustained.

The Accumulation Of Capital

The salesman has to make himself appear happy in order to sell successfully. If he weakens or rebels in the face of this demand, he feels that he’s betraying his children. The fundamental responsibility, denial of which is spiritual suicide, keeps him in his place. He sticks with it. Silently screaming, going mad in his mind he sticks with it.

The force or agency which compels the salesman to play this role is clearly hostile to his humanity. On the other hand, and just as clearly, it comprehends the basic truth about his relationship to others in the pursuit of his livelihood: he will not sell if he appears troubled or detached.

This force or agency moves everywhere through our society; we all experience it, and yet there’s nobody here but us.

This is the mystery Marx unraveled.

A Moment Of Weakness Now And Then Is Also Human

It’s the promise, the promise unfulfilled, that tears at the heart: to remember them when they were nothing but the promise, and then to see what becomes of them when they grow up. . . .

But this is weakness. To lament that things are not as they should be is to indulge in paralysis. Sometimes it’s healthy to recall the hardheadedness of Lenin. The recognition of truth is not where our devotion ends: it’s where it begins.

We don’t love the ocean less because it’s polluted, anymore than we love people less because they’re crippled or diseased. Love perceives the wholeness, always: the essence. Whatever is damaged, whatever needs to be healed, is asking for love.

Insurgence reveals its meaning to the love of life, as the meaning of water is revealed to thirst.

Strength

A fifteen-year-old girl was raped and her arms hacked off just below the elbows. How are we supposed to go on being human when this has happened?

The answer is a paradox:

We overcome despair and madness by embracing the very reality which urges us to these defeats. This is the insurgent’s method. We embrace it with our hearts, in solidarity with life, with human evolution. The wisdom here is ancient: whatever the heart embraces becomes a source of strength.

Embracing reality means expanding into the experience of others until we realize that there are no others: that we are all one. Pain by pain, grief by grief, walk toward and through the blinding light. Understand laughter; understand remorse; understand fear; understand pride, hatred, envy, irony, dignity. Everything. Understand everything human.

The face of the girl who was raped and mutilated is the face of your daughter. What you summon up when you look at that face is the strength that has sustained us through it all. We endure. We fall apart and then pull ourselves together. We wait until the time is ripe.

The Force Of Life

When a weed manages to poke through the crack where the sidewalk meets a brick wall at right angles, it always seems a metaphor for a quality of life, the insurgent quality. We identify with the weed. It’s a victory.

We see victory, we see defeat. But the force of life knows only itself: wherever it is, it is complete. Being complete, it is at peace.

We are not at peace. Our hearts are torn. We’re beginning to see strange faces when we look in the mirror. Our children use the word “weird” more and more. Who among us doesn’t feel that everything is falling apart?

But the force of life is at peace, complete, insurgent.

Banking

The checkbook evokes a special seriousness, almost solemnity. We handle it with respect. We scrutinize the computations through narrowed eyes. We review the entries, our brows furrowed, trying to ferret out mistakes, reliving the taut decisions. Sometimes we just stare at the figures. There’s always a faint halo of tension around a checkbook; terrible things can happen here.

In a sequence of numerals, linked by strict addition and subtraction, the checkbook reels off a diary in arithmetic: the latest balance, a very important number, is a description of our lives at that moment. It may be alarming or consoling; it may even be incorrect. Here is the career of the financial identity: our true biography, as far as Capital is concerned — the actual person. In that biography, the form assumed by hopes, plans, dreams and needs, responsibility, generosity and happiness — the human modes of being — is money. These human modes of being can accumulate interest, draw dividends, be loaned or taxed, mortgaged or invested, deposited or withdrawn. They all look the same.

The power that transforms our lives into money is lethal. The whales and redwoods, for example, were gone before the harpoon struck or the ax fell, from the moment they became money. The same with all the fur, plumes, hides, shells, flesh and fiber, the hardwoods and habitats. The same with ideas, memories, history, child care, healing, silence, and peace of mind. Capital looked their way; they became dollars and cents.

Whatever becomes money disappears in that moment: whatever is loved becomes real. Love creates reality. All beings await the vision that loves, because only in that vision are they born: only in that vision can they flourish and rejoice in themselves and each other.

Whenever we talk about our lives in the language of money, it’s really money talking about us.

Embracing reality means expanding into the experience of others until we realize that there are no others: that we are all one. Pain by pain, grief by grief, walk toward and through the blinding light. Understand laughter; understand remorse; understand fear; understand pride, hatred, envy, irony, dignity. Everything. Understand everything human.

Facing Reality

If we lost a child, and were equal to it, a Presence would be revealed that would live with us for the rest of our lives, and be our strength. By that Presence we would know the truth of every moment. We would know what is precious and what is necessary, we would discover patience and eternity, we would be rescued from depravity; we would fulfill our responsibilities without fail. The one Life that is in all would become visible to us, and we would realize that we have never loved anything but that one Life, and that whatever loves or is loved is that one Life. The inner eye that sees the radiance would be opened, bringing peace. What needs to be done would be done.

The condition of humanity in these times, if we can face it, establishes that same Presence among us. As with the death of the child, all we have to do is face reality.

Correct Ideas Don’t Drop From The Sky: They Come From The Heart

Many people no longer kill anything. People who used to step on ants or worms or snails now walk around them. Even the tiniest murders are beginning to seem violent. They summon up images: hydrogen bombs, stupendous continuous explosions, chunks of earth and shattered bodies hurtled, spraying in slow motion through darkened air, filling the whole sky: megatons of ordnance. There’s been enough death, quite enough death. We stare at insects as if seeing them for the first time, watching how they move — little living things.

Regard all life as sacred: this is the ancient law. When we are aware of it, it is obeyed; when it is not obeyed, we become aware of it. All the real laws operate like that. The universe issues warnings before it delivers the sentence.

The universe is Spirit. The laws are spiritual. The warnings are spiritual events. We can hear them because we are capable of oneness with Spirit — the primal staggering truth about human beings. We can hear them, and we can ignore them. They tell us what is at stake.

Where The Stock Market Crashed

We inform ourselves about the busy affairs of money: how much, where it is going, the rise and fall of prices, the budget, taxes, wages, interest, investment, profit and loss. There’s a whole world in which the characters are money in its many forms. All our relationships to each other, as social beings, take place in that feverish, unpredictable, invisible world. We observe it nervously; we’re given reports about it, twenty-four hours around the clock.

This is what Marx meant when he said that Capital is a social relationship. This is the real insight. We are people who carry our relationships to others in our pockets, deposit them in banks, receive them in the mail, transport them in armored cars, store them away in computers in the form of digital impulses. The world of money, obeying the laws of money, is our world. It exists between all of us, but not within us. Individually, in our essence, we are humanity; collectively, in our society, we have become Capital.

So we carry on, under these strange circumstances: as a matter of fact, these are the very circumstances we continually refer to when we say, “We’re doing our best under the circumstances”; two worlds which are yet one. What happens in the world of money happens in our lives.

For example, there was nothing unusual in the world of life on the night of October 24, 1929. Some slept soundly, others wakened fitfully, some dreamed about childhood friends. Some made love late into the night, some wished they’d had the strength. Mothers got up at four a.m. to nurse babies; children kicked their blankets off and were covered again. In the kitchens the dinner dishes dried, the hearth fires sank to embers. People smoked cigarettes in dark, silent rooms, or plucked aimlessly on guitar strings; some leaned on the windowsill to stare thoughtfully one last time at the bare autumn branches etched against the fading sky, before they sighed and climbed the stairs with a heavy tread. The infinite life of the Earth quietly celebrated, as always, its immemorial harmony. The relationships of the day just ended hung suspended, like smoke, defining the terrain of fears and hopes for the day about to dawn.

But that night, while everyone slept, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. It was eleven years until we entered the war and finally got the economy back on its feet again.

Through Wage Labor People Became Capital . . . But Never Completely

Think of this:

The elders among us are maintained just a hair — a penny would be more apt; we are referring here to a calculation — above the level where their visible abandonment and degradation would cause public dismay. They crumple just after they’ve closed the door behind them; the shameful testimony has always just been snatched out of sight. There is a satanic intimacy in our very midst.

Now think of this:

When we see the slightly damaged humans among us, those called retarded — playing awkwardly and excitedly in the parks, showing childlike vexation on their faces when their aides urge them along, smiling shyly or not at all when we catch their eyes — we feel the presence of humanity very intensely. We see the tiny but incredibly crucial gap, the exquisite delicacy of the human balance: a nerve, a milligram. These also are maintained among us, like the elders. The resources are available and allocated.

Money has to reckon with people.

The Ecosphere

Loneliness is life starved for life. Its pain increases as the level of life sinks and access to life diminishes. Widespread loneliness is a warning that the ecosystem is dying, that the level of life is falling dangerously low. Loneliness, in other words, is a condition of the Earth: the Earth’s experience of the pain of dying. Its opposite is the joy of growing.

The suffering of loneliness is very great, sometimes unendurable. We panic, huddling into ourselves in fear of death. We writhe and wail, we become frenzied; we subside into whimpers, the whole world reduced to a soundless, utterly indifferent desolation. We drink, we become eccentric, we go mad, we jump from bridges, we giggle hysterically. We become the weird people in the neighborhood, never seen without a dog, always wearing the same clothing, wary and secretive out of a terrible vulnerability. Some of us live out an entire lifetime in loneliness, saved only by responsibility, or consciousness of dignity, or the simple, stubborn tenacity of life.

When the immigrants arrived in this country, uprooted, compelled by remote inscrutable decisions to leave the world of life (soil and stock, seasons and weathers, the feel of sun and rain) for the world of money (factories, machinery and stifling tenements, the stupendous dynamo of industrial capitalism) the one thing they knew for certain was that they were lonely.

Evolution

We get scared that maybe we’re going crazy. This is an error, because it’s actually the society which is crazy. The perception is correct — our lives here are truly insane — but we misplace the blame. The human fulfillment in meaning, balance, and harmony is coextensive with the universe, so fundamental that its absence drives us to challenge even the integrity of our own souls. Meaninglessness, imbalance, and disharmony, however, can be addressed only when they are understood as political problems. We blame ourselves only because we are disorganized.

The response, on its level, is valid.

We become frustrated and furious, mad at our own lives. We do what we’re supposed to do and still everything goes wrong, we still get screwed, we’re still miserable. So we lash out at whomever is closest; then we suffer remorse. Again the focus is turned inward rather than outward, and for the same reason. Our lives are maddening because we have accepted a bad bargain in good faith. Rage is legitimate in a crooked society.

The response, on its level, is valid.

We feel invisible and conclude in desperation that something is lacking or undeveloped within us. We try to make ourselves interesting or attractive by purchasing accessories eagerly presented to us as exactly what we need. Invariably we are deceived, and this is as intended: our perpetual hopeful return to the marketplace is essential to the circulation of commodities, and the circulation of commodities is what it’s all about. Capitalism’s blindness to anything human is what makes us feel invisible.

The response, on its level, is valid.

A million years of victory have gone into the fashioning of each one of us. A million trophies hang in every heart. We are the humans.

The power that transforms our lives into money is lethal. The whales and redwoods, for example, were gone before the harpoon struck or the ax fell, from the moment they became money. The same with all the fur, plumes, hides, shells, flesh and fiber, the hardwoods and habitats. The same with ideas, memories, history, child care, healing, silence, and peace of mind. Capital looked their way; they became dollars and cents.

Money Talks

Money, in the form of advertising jingles, sometimes bounces maddeningly in our brains for weeks. The ingenuity of the composers and performers was purchased with this precise goal in mind. We know what kinds of music will stick in our heads. Through wage labor our own ingenuity is harnessed to the strategies of Capital. This is why the things that are done to us often seem absolutely fiendish.

Whenever we buy something, receive a paycheck, pay a bill, deposit our earnings in a bank, apply for a loan — any of a thousand transactions — it’s really money relating to itself. We’re merely the agents; the real characters are sums of money. In the millions of forms we fill out, money is ascertaining information about itself. Our daily lives are the pipes through which money circulates. This is why we often feel unreal or dead.

Because money is a relationship between people transformed into a thing, every nickel we have is really a symbol of all we don’t have: the infinite richness waiting to spring to life in each face-to-face human encounter. This is why our hearts often feel empty.

We save for a rainy day and invest in our future. When we’re healthy we look like a million bucks, when we’re sick we get the best doctor money can buy, when we die we cash in our chips. We worry about the cost of living. We pay our own way.

It’s everywhere. It’s the language of nations, it’s war and peace, it’s the measure of time and space. How will we break its hold on us? Where would we begin? Who has any ideas? The asking of these questions was the destiny of protoplasm all along — the warm ooze that learned to crawl and mate, that became flowers and eagles and laughter.

Seasons

Mortality is the spirit’s method on this planet. Birth and death are the organic intervals through which the force of life evolves its ever-changing forms, pursuing the unknowable goal. Perpetual rebirth, therefore, can be considered one of our weapons. We move through a sequence of selves. When we feel our humanity dying in an old self, we abandon it and are reborn in a new one. This is one way of understanding history.

The old self dies because it can’t face death. It refuses to face the fact that reality is the scene of its death. Therefore it loses its creativity: its life is pretense and its essence is fear. The new self faces reality: it accepts death, dies, and is reborn. It is humanity again, its own reality, and therefore fearless. Its essence is creative love, the supreme power of the human race, the only power that can defeat Capital.

Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, the mortal seed, the immortal spirit. Lenin insisted it could be accomplished by a vanguard party; Mao proclaimed “Bombard the headquarters!” The people working swing shift and graveyard, their minds a million miles away, slam the forklifts into gear; teenagers shamble to the fast-food parking lots, passing a joint. In fleeting moments we catch each other’s eyes for an instant, stare intently, then quickly turn away, feeling puzzled and thinking wild thoughts.

Some of us announce, with measured emphasis, “I want to get it all out of my system.” Others say, grinning mischievously, “I’m for real!” As we grow older, understanding life more deeply every year, and our children grow taller, gradually facing and becoming the future, we fall in love with them over and over again.

Zeroing In

When we ask each other how we’re doing these days, we often answer in terms of survival: “Oh, I guess I’ll survive!” Or, “Just trying to survive, that’s all!” Or simply, “Surviving!” And we accompany the words with a significant glance, grim determination coupled with helpless amazement at the madness of everything.

Obviously this is one of those little glimpses into history. The same fleeting exchange, the same word and glance, repeated a million times a day.

Survival.

We’ll have to learn how to speak from the heart again, how to trust each other, how to recognize a failure of nerve.

Survival.

The plow, the loom, the potter’s wheel and the sailboat. The barrel, the windlass, the wagon and the lathe, the hoe and the broom, the ax and the net, the water-wheel, the harness and the cradle. Simple and brilliant. Our favorite style.

Survival.

Gas a dollar a gallon. Rents unbelievable. Even with husband and wife both working we can barely make it.

Most of us just live from day to day, hoping our leaders will somehow bring us safely through the crisis, although we don’t have much confidence in them, and we’re slowly losing the ability to care about it all. The teenagers smoke dope and listen to amplified rock; the students, we are told, have become conservative. The socialists, in dwindling numbers, still plug away in the crevices conceded to them by the ruling class. The remnants of the black, feminist, and hippie militants, hardly even pausing for nostalgia, have redefined their lives. The trade union movement is just another computerized bureaucracy, contesting distribution of the surplus. Some people say the nuclear power and weapons protest has the potential to become a national movement. That would be promising, because the real issue is life itself.

Survival.

After the sun has set behind the ridge, a few hills on the coastal range still catch the strong, warm, yellow glow. On the other side, invisible, the Pacific is shimmering like a trillion jewels. We trudge back, thinking with the Earth.

Night. The star-studded heavens, infinity of stars, the brain of God. Dark surf breaking on the dark beach. The murmuring Earth, realm of life, source of music. The humans, dreaming.

Worrying And Solidarity

In capitalist society, the form assumed by communal life is buying and selling: the existence of the community is purchased. Food, clothing and shelter, excitement, information, inspiration, reassurance and instruction, musicians, healers and leaders, heat and light, assistance of all kinds, instruments of communication — all are bought and sold.

The amount of community we can purchase depends upon how much money we have. Because that amount is determined by inhuman considerations, remote or unjust, we worry a lot.

When we worry about money we lie awake at night, our minds tilted from fatigue, trying to think of schemes, reviewing the same dubious alternatives over and over again hoping they’ll reveal some new angle. We quarrel over nickels and dimes, accusing each other of irresponsibility or stupidity or deliberate sabotage. Every need or preference, every plan or suggestion, the sight of the children or the car or a crack in the plaster, reminds us suddenly of money; income is not keeping pace with expenses. We harbor a terrified anticipation of public shame.

Money troubles make us aware of how alone we all are: aware that the money community possesses no more human content than a chunk of ice adrift in space, and is as utterly indifferent to the spectacle of human need as the eye of a dead fish. We have friends, of course, who lend us money, no questions asked. They say, “Pay me back whenever you can, don’t worry about it.”

Loneliness is life starved for life. Its pain increases as the level of life sinks and access to life diminishes. Widespread loneliness is a warning that the ecosystem is dying, that the level of life is falling dangerously low. Loneliness, in other words, is a condition of the Earth: the Earth’s experience of the pain of dying. Its opposite is the joy of growing.

The Basic Lesson Of Capitalist Society

We tell them: “You’re going to have to learn the value of money!” It comes across as a warning. Our voices are harsh. Are we talking about responsibility or surrender?

We’re talking about both, and the warning tone is appropriate. We want them to survive, meaning get serious about money. Capital wants them to submit, meaning the same thing.

So we pounce on them, exasperated and fed up, and they bluster and mutter sullen excuses; we watch carefully for the precise moment to end the harangue and begin the advice, and they toy with silverware, every now and then suddenly meeting us eye to eye to see if we’ll look away — a thousand nuances in ten minutes flat.

Capital and humanity, center stage, command performance.

The Retirement Years

When the woman in her eighties unexpectedly declared to a man half her age — not exactly with gladness but with a kind of solemn conviction, like a profession of faith — “It’s a beautiful day!” he immediately had a revelation of the Earth as a realm of life: the place where we are alive, the only place we’ll ever be alive, our one chance: every moment infinitely precious. In the sound of her voice, the routine details of the urban scene withdraw into themselves like worshippers lowering their eyes before the passing of a holy image, acknowledging the arrival of the grandeur that sustains and contains them: the living Earth. The beautiful days remaining to her are numbered. Illuminated by her mortality, they became for him what they really are, sacred not only in themselves, but above all for what they reveal beyond them. This entire drama occurred in the human soul, the one soul in both of them, and in all of us.

We cannot unveil a certain deep reality of things by our own effort. It requires the actual presence of old people. We don’t see very much of old people, however. Because Capital can no longer extract surplus value from their labor, they have no role in the society; they become invisible.

The enrichment old people can donate to our lives has all but disappeared from our experience. To that degree we are diminished, held back from entering the infinite miracle our creativity discovers. They’re afraid to walk outdoors now, because teenagers might attack them. There are articles in the papers every day about how they’re beaten, raped, and murdered. The teenagers, of course, are not to blame: they’re only products of capitalist society, the society which has nothing human to teach them and awaits only their maturation into labor power; till then they can roam the streets. In nursing homes old human beings are drugged, propped up in front of television sets and left there, fretting and drooling, all day long. Many of them eat dog food. From the point of view of Capital they’re just a drain on the investment process.

Responsibility