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This came across the old Bluesky feed yesterday. I'm not singling it out. It's as common as waves at a beach. There'll be another one along in a minute. When I hear that the post office lost money, I think this: Good. We paid for it. Why on earth should it make even more money from us? Who would keep the money? Would we see it? Somewhere along the line the idea took hold that every part of public life needs to be efficient, an efficiency exclusively expressed in terms of whether or not it makes money. "Makes money for who, exactly?" is a question that is never asked. If some government service doesn't make money, the notion goes, then it shouldn't exist. It should be shut down or given to somebody else who can make money with it. "Who exactly will give that person the money they make from it, and why should that person get more money for something we've already paid for?" are questions that are not explored, in case you haven't noticed. Cousins: the money the Post Office spent came from us already. It is used to provide an insanely valuable service to us. And we could say that about any number of other things that provide massive value that we already paid for: libraries, schools, parks, fire departments, roads. And it could be true of any number of other things that would provide massive value: health care, housing, colleges, universities, more schools, more parks, more libraries. Why would we not want that? Why would we want to sell all of that off to create profit for somebody else? Meanwhile, I don't know who gets value from a stealth bombers, or from kidnapping and enslavement squads, but I know it isn't you or me or any the rest of us. Government is about the organization of society, and society is just all of us. It's a way of harnessing all of the sustaining and exponentially generative value that we humans create just by living in proximity to one another. Somewhere along the line we let the fool notion take hold that our society is a corporation and everything it does must generate profit for a group of shareholders, and I think this fool notion needs to be demolished forever; the government is us and it is ours. We own it and the services are the profit it generates for us, if we demolish the services somebody else is getting the dough and sure as hell ain't us, and they sure as hell don't have our best interests at heart. Listen to me: Our profit from the post office is the post office. Our profit from a library is the library. Our profit from a school is the school. And our profit from our lives is life. Our life. Ours. Think of how hard we work, and how proud we've made ourselves of working that hard. Think of proudly we proclaim that we've given so much of our precious energy and value to somebody else, and how proudly we announce that we're giving more and more of it for less and less. Think of the ways we've been told to make machines of ourselves, and all the ways we do it as if that's the way it should be. And think of Mark Twain, sitting on the porch. What a damn fool notion, he snorts from beneath the snowy thatch of his magnificent mustache, which he then drenches with a nice long soak in brisk and minty julep. It's time to un-kidnap our minds. It's time to become something other than efficient, which is a wonderful thing for a machine or a system to be, and can be a wonderful tool for a human to harness, but is a terrible and enslaving purpose for a life. It's time to realize that efficiency is a property for humans to use, humans are not for it to use. It's time to realize that human society is not a corporation, and we are not its employees, and that its profits are ours. The question that rises for me is if our purpose isn't efficiency, then what is it? See you next time. |
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