Rob ruminates, in part:
......................
> It occurs that not a lot of Indonesians are currently enjoying their sudden
> involuntary simplicity.
No, not when it means a return to one real meal per day.
> That said, and without sinking into the quasi-malthusian asceticism
> possibly evident in our new chum's musings, I would like to know why it is
> I can't stop buying books I KNOW I'll never have the time to read. What is
> it about BUYING, eh?
You're propitiating the stern god Publishorperish on behalf of others;
very noble.
> I reckon we (the likes of those assembled here in the faculty lounge, I
> mean) do need less, and would find out quite quickly we wouldn't want this
> stuff if we had to do without it for a while ('cept for ciggies, of
> course).
Books, cigarettes... will the list grow if I just remain silent awhile?
> And I also have a few traces of Hayek left in me. And I do reckon
> socialists would have to admit the possibility of constraints on production
> in a socialised economy. ..........................
That's the stool's weakest leg: never leaned on, yet never replaced.
Though oodles of Americans are privately ready to barf over the wretched
excess of consumerist wonderland, there's nothing to take its place
for thrills & chills and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of a big mall
tarted up to kill. I'll tell you a secret, too: for a majority of
the American majority (i.e. whites, right-handed, with two eyes)
socialism ultimately means Livin' With Niggers and nothing else:
the bottom-line nightmare of being unable to Make It in a racist culture.
There, I said it, now everyone else can demonstrate just how few beers
they've had with actually existing workers in the past x years!
The ruling class needs no troops where there's contrast of pigment.
> Begging all kinds of questions we rarely seem to address ...
>
> Like what is it about Hawaiian rosewood seeds that makes them good for
> having sex upon?
Personally I'm not sure; tried them only once and forgot about _her_
entirely. Others swore by them, however (and could afford them, too).
> >So don't waste your time (and risk your neck) pissing off people who
> >rightly feel impoverished and are dead sure that a new set of wheels
> >or the latest doodad will make all the difference, because their
> >subjective reality is no less real than yours.
>
> So what would you say to these people, Valis? Heaps of doodads (including,
> I suspect, a great number of private cars) would disappear in a socialised
> economy, wouldn't they?
What can work a mammoth change in social values this side of some
truly apocalyptic crises is beyond me. I only know what's necessary,
not how to get there. As cynical New York writer Will Weston graciously
shares his internal dialogue with us in the '70s fiction classic Ecotopia,
however, it does seem like armed secession by the prematurely hip is the
ticket, including the strategic nuclear mining of New York and DC
just to even up the odds. Any takers?
...................
> > "The more I see of humanity, the better I love my dog."
(Must have been Dostoyevski)
valis
