Social Wealth
I’m rarely cranky with people for longer than a few seconds at a time. I’ve learned to switch off. I have seen in dreams that cranky people come in only two kinds: broken clocks and seducers. I cannot get anything I actually want by engagement. This has been one of the major illuminations of my life.
Today I had a minor illumination, pursuant to the major illumination. When I am bored, restless, angsty, dissatisfied, I seek out contact with others, but what I do not realise is that the same imbalances are driving them into the public sphere. It becomes some weird celebration of personal imbalance.
Once I get to the internet, I find people who are posting things that are interesting, but only in the sense that those things play on imbalance: insecurities, fears, offense, and incompleteness. In the 1950s, I would have gone to the pub or to the church, but the phenomenon is the same: social events are designed to promote future social events. They promote imbalance and imbalance celebrates itself where it cannot justify itself.
The opposite of social events is not isolation. It is world-building: working collectively, where possible, to develop aspects of the environment that the collective wants.
I dreamt of people who never had social events, but were most often together. They were together for a purpose, and that purpose was either building the world they wanted, or conducting some training program that would facilitate world-building. Whether these people liked each other was not obvious, but it was easy to see that they enjoyed working together on their common goals.
When I think about the waking world, it is obvious that this is the single thing missing. We ought to work together to create aspects of the world we want. If you are in a village without potable water and your only potential collaborators are people you dislike, you dig the well with people you dislike. Your opinions about them are quite irrelevant when it comes to world-building.
In the waking world, we refuse to work with people we dislike because there is always an alternative: buying whatever capitalists offer. But bear in mind, capitalists dislike each other. They consider each other rivals. Try to think of two capitalists who like each other and yet have no business ties. The strength of capitalism lies in markets: the ability to exchange goods and services regardless of personal enmity.
We are living in a dystopian future in which social wealth comes at the expense of mental wealth. We refuse to defend our common interests if it involves people we dislike. We cannot protect our interests. We are dying.
Of all the dystopian future novels I can imagine, this is the least believable.
Footnotes: