THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “So you're an anarchist?”

  “Anarchy,” he laughs. “I'm not one to profess that type of radicalism, but I do feel that Horace was partially correct in asserting that Fear bore Law. Oh, and then there’s that one Pat told me—Macrobius, I think: Good laws derive from bad habits.

  “Look, the truth of the matter is that a myriad of cultures existed for a long time without law. This leaves you with the conclusion that either no fear existed, or that fear in-itself is not sufficient for the creation of law. I believe the latter to be far more probable. Fear existed, certainly not the type that exists between classes in modern times or even the fear that existed between the plebeians and the patricians of Rome, but fear nonetheless. Still, there was order. Order was kept by a shared ethos that was primitive, true, but entrenched to such a degree that there was no need for law. So, because of this, I will concede that anarchy is possible.

  “However, I believe that there is a component in the very dynamic of any culture that demands order, that demands a potentially innocuous, also a potentially pernicious, inequity between those who give the orders, and those who only follow. Anarchy is when this disparity is at its most innocuous, essentially nonexistent; Totalitarianism, either the Fascist or the Stalinist variety, is when the disparity is at its most pernicious. But, to go back for a second, it seems that fear is not entirely sufficient for law; this fear has to be of a certain magnitude, which cannot be reached without the existence of property. Therefore, it's not fear that is sufficient for law; rather, the conjunction of property and fear suffice for law. Then again, once law has been established, I don't think you can return to life without it. Even if you abolish property, law will not necessarily disappear. It may be somewhat superfluous, but law has become a component within our society's sittlichkeit, thereby making it very difficult, if not impossible, to excise from the minds of citizens.

  “But I don't think there's any possibility of property being abolished without horrible, horrible consequences. Perhaps if there's a nuclear war or an epidemic, it may be possible to establish small anarchist communities, sure, but until some great cataclysm occurs, there will continue to be a disproportionate balance of power and wealth between individuals and between communities. We can hope for a bloodless revolution to minimize these disproportions, but that's about it. If you ask me, real revolution is seeming less and less likely. Or even desirable, for that matter.”

  “Patrick depicted you as a revolutionary.”

  “Patrick took what I said to fit his own context. He's a Romantic, plain and simple—a Modernist still of the belief that the system can be vanquished by a some Messianic revolutionary-artist.”

  “I see.”

  “Look, revolutions don't happen without political leaders, and political leaders will always wrestle for power whenever there is an opportunity to monopolize it. The sad truth is that there will always be leaders, there will always be disparities in power, there will always be a State so long as people are organized into large communities.” He pauses. “And, to clarify, by large I mean in the hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, etcetera. So we have to reassess the role that leaders should play. Any theorist who claims to be a “Post” whatever will probably say that I'm acting as an agent of the hegemonic forces, but, seriously, all of this “Post” shit calls autonomy and integrity bourgeois illusions; all communal institutions, meanwhile, are tyrannical. So what are you left with? Personal autonomy doesn't exist because it's governed and maintained by social institutions; all social institutions are necessarily tyrannical because it is inherent within their nature to impose themselves upon the particulates of the social system through language and the ideology entailed within the language. So where can you go from there? You obviously can't be in support of a truly pluralistic community because it's essentially a contradiction. Without some form of meta-institution, which will be rejected because it will be considered just a hegemonic extension of the most powerful sect within the confederacy, the confederacy will succumb to entropy, the pluralities will break off one by one, and you'll just end up with a bunch of tiny, autonomous communities. Maybe they'll have some type of interaction with one another, via trade or during a war…whatever. But this pluralistic delusion, carried to its most extreme, gives you nothing more than futuristic tribalism. And this is not desirable because some of these tribes will become aggressive due to a lack of natural resources or a desire for just plain more of them—this is just how humanity works.

  “Personally, I believe that we should strive to have the interests of the leaders be as close as possible to the interests of the people they represent. I'm not talking about having a president who's as smart as an average American, mind you, nor am I promoting that type of provincialism that plagues the floor of the House and the Senate with parochial programs and projects that these politicians champion for the sake of securing a victory in the coming election.

  “The problem with our country, I think, is that the power granted to the nation-state has been more or less usurped by corporations, and these corporations—be they industrial, military-industrial, media-oriented, commercial, or financial, you know, banking and whatnot—have no allegiance to anything besides the growth of their own profit margins. And not just profit margins in a sustained and extended sense, but in a very immediate sense, which is an abominable way to operate. As Horace said, Vis consili expers mole ruit sua.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Brute force, without wisdom, will collapse under its own weight. Or perhaps Kis’ view would be more appropriate: Ambition and stupidity are far more dangerous than insanity.”

  “I see.”

  “Regardless, maybe it's not brute force or stupidity or ambition. Maybe it's just blind greed. Avarice,” he adds quickly. “Because I don't think mankind is evil. In fact, I don't even believe authority and structure to be necessarily evil. When honest people control the power structure, when people of integrity fill the posts of a representational democracy, I believe that the system is almost always good. Call it bourgeois if you will, but that's what I've come to accept in my old age. Still, I'm cynical. I know it's a rather rare, if not unattainable, scenario. Moreover, I know our country does not strive to follow this model. The majority of the policies that are enacted by the State, be they foreign or domestic policies, are not in our interest. We have no control over the genesis of legislation, let alone any control in the argument for or against certain amendments that find their way into the text. We may elect the representatives, but that's about the only power we have as citizens. Lobbyists, however, do have the power not only to influence, but to essentially write legislation. They also have the power to get these pieces of legislation passed. And guess whom most of the lobbyists represent? Corporations or Think Tanks or whatever…they are all consolidations of power.

  “It is almost irrelevant who we elect because the pool of representatives from which we may choose has been reduced to essentially two types of people: those who support the corporate world, and those who support the working class, but concede virtually everything besides their hollow rhetoric to the corporate world. There is a filtering process when it comes to our elected officials. Those who are uncorrupted by and openly critical of the corporate elite are the first to go. Their tenets are labeled socialist or communist or detrimental to small businesses. And once these types of words and accusations get thrown out, even if they are untrue, the people come to recognize the individual as a communist, a socialist, or an elitist—it's like the story of good old Silky Silk.”

  “I love that book.”

  “Me too. But you see what I'm saying, right? The media will convey any attempt to deny the claim as an attempt to cover up the truth because the media is really just the PR department of the corporate oligarchy. Even if the allegations are completely false, they will tarnish the character of the individual. The charges don't even have to dominate public opinion. The fact of the matter is that that individual will never be fully
trusted by the majority of Americans because that person will always be on the defensive—and, consequently, this will make him seem to be guilty.”

  Nod.

  “Look, I used to be of the opinion that libertarians have something useful to offer to discourse, but I quickly realized that their beliefs are…well, stupid. Perhaps naive. For one, they are typically the first to point out that public workers—city employees and such—are incredibly stupid, lazy, and horribly incompetent. They say we should privatize. Are you going to tell me that suddenly these people will become adept and helpful? You've been to Rite-Aid—it's a private company with a privatized workforce. Are the people there more astute, more proactive?” He grunts. “If you want to make the argument that they are, be my guest, but I'll be the first one, and certainly not the last one, to tell you that…I don't really know. I was trying to think of something witty, and my mind just went totally blank.”

  “It's okay; I get where you were going.”

  “Okay, look, the point here is that it's not public work that makes people complacent with their own laziness and inadequacies. It's inherent within the capitalist system. The reason for this is that the people on the bottom, the have-nots as they are called, are considered outsiders. Furthermore, these outsiders are presumed to have inherently criminal elements in their character—this is why they are so often thought to be guilty until proven innocent. This now gives you two classes: the member class and the criminal class. Now, let me ask you a question: Do you want a smart criminal, or do you want a dumb criminal? Smart criminals are difficult to catch; they can learn the vulnerabilities of the system, and, if they score, they typically score big. Dumb criminals, on the other hand, are easy to catch, they don't bother studying the system, and most of their crimes are committed because they appear easy or convenient, as opposed to difficult or capable of producing a high yield. The matter is simple: You want dumb criminals, and, therefore, you want a dumb criminal class that will fill up that big space at the bottom of the economy as unemployed, since you need unemployed people in order to keep wages low—more people without a job, more people who will take yours if you think you deserve more money. The way to get this is simple: cut funding to inner city schools, watch test scores plummet, and then demand that more funding needs to be cut in order to give to schools that perform better. You end up with a group of uneducated people, who are lazy because they live in horribly squalid surroundings and have been brainwashed by a media that glamorizes criminal activity, easy money, and, at the same time, sticking it to the man while buying all of the shit the man tells you to—on credit!

  “But what really bothers me isn't just the fact that there are more and more people in this class of criminal have-nots; it's rather the fact that the super-rich just keep getting bigger and bigger slices of the pie. And the more problems that come as a result of this process, the more adamant the acolytes of the Chicago School get. Reagan deregulates, Bush deregulates, Clinton deregulates, Bush the Second deregulates. What happens? We keep getting bubble economies, which produce huge yields for some; then, when the bubble bursts, we end up with a greater recession than the one we had before. Do they ask for some type of regulation or restraint to keep this type of shit from happening? No. They demand more deregulation. They're like the priests of Cahokia and Tenochtitlán demanding more sacrifices in order to appease the silent harvest goddess. Just look at the numbers. The more the government deregulates or privatizes what used to be public services, the more severe the gap between the rich and poor gets. Furthermore, the number of rich people actually diminishes. What does that tell you? They're conditionally linked. The more the government privatizes or deregulates, the greater the number of people in this country who get screwed. The rich tell the population wonderful lies—of a society of owners or a society with more freedom—but, in the end, the people who prosper from this type of paradigm, with rare exception, are those who are already on top.

  “See, what the oligarchy wants is simple: the continued exploitation of the environment and those who are not within their ranks. The reason for this is very simple: they benefit from this system immensely. And though this trend may be more obvious in terms of the world, in terms of imperialism and the disparities of wealth between first- and third-world nations, it is becoming increasingly evident within the domestic realm, too: the middle class is evaporating; the wealthy not only have more wealth, but more power; the poor not only have less wealth, but less power. So we do not live in a democracy or a republic. The accoutrement of power into the hands of a limited minority is an oligarchy. And when wealth determines the chairs of the oligarchy, it is called a plutocracy.

  “Lenin believed that the so-called vanguard of the proletariat would serve as the leadership against the powerful minority, but the majority of radicals in today's society exist within the insular culture of the university, a culture which prides itself on being leftist and progressive, but fails to mention the obvious fact that it is elitist, and the less obvious fact that its pacifism is nothing more than apathy in drag.

  “So they are not the vanguard; they are their own class with their own class interests. This is the difference between an academic and an intellectual. An intellectual lives outside of the university. And such people have become harder and harder to come by. You can forget this, living in New York, but it's true. According to Rushdie, they all went into marketing and advertising. I’m hoping it’s a joke, what Rushdie said, but I can’t help but notice that, ever since the sixties, it keeps getting worse. So there's fewer independent intellectuals, the academic community has become stagnant, and the student movement contains nothing but students.” He notices a look. “The students used to be a huge political force. During the Russian revolutions—the one in nineteen-oh-five, especially—the students played a primary role in organizing strikes and demonstrations in the factories. The American student movement, however, abandoned the workers in the sixties because they considered, and still do consider, the workers to be socially regressive—we have done nothing to repair the Wallace/McGovern divide that existed thirty-five years ago. And the movement suffered as a consequence. They are no longer taken seriously because they are a demographic so distinct from the one whose interests they claim to be fighting for. It's not that I'm saying that student radicalism is completely impotent; an active, radical underground does still exist. The problem is that it's influence, even on college campuses, has diminished significantly, and its inadequacies were very obvious after the invasion of Iraq, when virtually all of the kids simply threw out their NO BLOOD FOR OIL signs, and went back to class.

  “The labor movement, on the other hand, has not only diminished in strength, it has pretty much imploded on itself because it lacks competent, uncorrupted leadership. Just look to Chicago. The place is a fucking cesspool of corruption, and it seriously hinders the credibility of leftists or anyone claiming to be pro-union.

  “This divide has devastated the progressive movement. And this decay has allowed a new form of leadership to take the reigns—not just in terms of unions, but in terms of the people, or, if you want to sound like Jack Reed, the masses.

  “Don't you think it interesting that the growth of the Evangelical movement, which really took off in the seventies, coincided with the fallout of the sixties, the decline of the labor movement, and the exponential growth of the lumpenproletariat, or, if you want to just call it what it is in English, the criminal and fascist class? A vast ocean of surplus humanity. Fuck, man, Huey P. Long stepped off the soapbox and found himself a motherfucking pulpit.

  “Now, I don't have the typical hatred for religion that most think I do. I can understand why people are religious. I can understand why they have faith. However, I have a real fucking problem when people tell me that they’re Christian because they believe Jesus had some good ideas. Seneca had some great ideas, too, but you don't see people worshiping him and referring to him as the Son of God.

  “That's what's paramount in Christianity.
You are a Christian if and only if you believe that Jesus was not a prophet, but the physical manifestation of God in man.” He pauses. “Well, Patrick may disagree. Apparently, there were some Gnostic sects who didn't think this way, so I guess the premise isn't entirely sound. Still, the point I'm trying to make is that this belief is not hereditary. It requires real faith, and faith is not passed down. This is why Jesus said he came to divide people, brother against brother, sister against sister…or whatever he said, I don’t really remember. Look, the point is that being a good person is not good enough to get into heaven, according to the New Testament. You need more. You need faith. For example, the wafers and the wine—these are not metaphors for Christ's body and blood, provided you’re Catholic, of course. For them…are you Catholic?

  “I’m not really anything.”

  “Okay, well, for Catholics the wine and the wafer are both the living tissues of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. But you don't often meet people who believe this—even Catholics. They cannot completely abandon themselves to faith—or cannibalism for that matter. It's simply too much; too contrary to the material world they have come to know and accept. Consequently, they're going to be left to suffer with the rest of us heathens after the rapture—that five- or six-generation-old idea.

  “Look, everyone looks for an explanation as to why life isn't perfect. Some say that it is perfect, but that we are too self-absorbed to acknowledge it. If we had the perspective of God, then we would understand this. This is not Panglossian; it is more oriental in nature, even if such beliefs do have occidental precedents. To sum it up: the world is a vale of tears. Those who abide by this basic outlook on life are probably the happiest of the bunch; they accept that life necessitates suffering even if this is an implicitly nihilistic stance to take, and, as a result, they don’t become enraged and forlorn when bad things happen to good people.