The Daily: 13 August 2024

This is just a short complaint. If you’re in a good mood, stop reading.

For several weeks now, my whole state has been dealing with advanced externalities. A couple towns might just be wiped off the map after this. My town has a sandbag budget now, along with constant employment for anyone who can drive a front-loader to scrape up the mud. We have one neighborhood, houses that date back to the 19th century, that probably will never be rebuilt. Even the poor garden club is suffering from climate change. They may have great tomatoes, but the medians and the small memorial parks all around downtown — little landscapes that they voluntarily maintain at some expense to club members, not to say their labor — have been wiped out twice this growing season. Futile is starting to sound like an objective statement of fact round these parts.

All these things do cost money, and that is a limitation, especially when it comes to rebuilding the Victorian houses of the North End. There may be some limits to ideas as well. It’s hard to keep coming up with plans to fix something that will insist on breaking down again as soon as you turn around. So there may be some need for what we normally consider political involvement, to dredge up funds and to lead the exhausted sheep into the next rehab project.

But you know what we really need? What the entire world really needs? We need help doing the work. We don’t need money. We need laboring bodies. You know what made the front page of my town’s paper the other day? Not the FEMA announcement that, yes, we do in fact qualify as a disaster zone… again… No, it was the Mennonite group that got themselves up here from Pennsylvania (not sure how that happens… can they do cars?… I can’t remember) to help put Plainfield back together. In actuality. As in, wielding nails and saws and sanders and large jugs of sun tea. They are rebuilding the houses of complete strangers merely because that work needs to be done. Makes me want to become Mennonite… well… okay, not really. But respect! You know?

How many leaders, how many of those who have time and resources, how many people who tell us all what should be done — even of those who are concerned about the damages that this social system is wreaking all over the planet — how many people are coming to Vermont to help put peoples’ lives back together? How many are lending a hand in South Carolina and Georgia? How many are even paying attention to Houston anymore? I’ll give a pass to the elders in leadership roles. You folks just concentrate on keeping yourselves on track and maybe drumming up some funds to help move labor and resources to where they are needed. But any able bodied person really should be shamed by the Mennonites who are taking time out of their lives — which, because they are largely farmers, means time away from some really crucial tasks at this time of the year — to help mend the ills of this world — ills that they, of all the people in this country, did not cause.

And if you have an able body and wealth, then what the hell are you doing that is so important that you are not able to go help clean up the messes you made!

And no, we don’t want your money. We want the work done.

I’ve talked about the uselessness of money in emergencies, but really, money is useless all the time. Or maybe we’re in the long emergency now. What is necessary is work, actual physical labor. Because you can’t buy that work done if there are no more bodies available to do it. The garden club is made up of some fairly wealthy older people, as most garden clubs are. They have the funds to buy new plants. What they do not have is people who can clear off the mud — repeatedly — resuscitate what can be salvaged, put more plants in the ground, and then tend to the garden plots until all the plants are assured of survival. That’s all actual work that has to be done, and it can only be done with dollars if you can find someone who is not already working hard to keep their own lives above the floodwaters.

I’m using my town as a specific example, because it’s laid out in advanced states of dishevelment all around me just begging to be used. But this is a general problem. This is not Vermont. This is not even disaster zones. This is everywhere. All the time. This is the ground state of our culture.

The world needs work. Physical work. It doesn’t need your dollars. It certainly doesn’t need your ideas or leadership. It needs hammers and nails and shovels and trowels and chisels and probably quite a few people who can drive front-loaders. It also needs people who can grow food. It needs people who can make and mend clothes. It needs people who can salve and heal bodies and minds. It needs people who can clean up messes at all scales. It needs people who can mind the wee ones and the elders while everyone else is working. And none of this can be automated through extracted labor. That pushing all the necessary work off onto enslaved bodies and machines is what created this catastrophe. But in any case, machines can’t do most of the work that needs doing, and leaders spouting ideas do nothing at all.

Grand ideas are great when we have leisure time to test them out and scale them appropriately and work out the kinks. But this is not that time. And it probably won’t be for… forever… Ideas are useless when there is immediate work to be done. Same for leaders. Leadership never accomplishes anything. To the contrary, leaders are a drag on society. They are doing nothing and yet must have all their usually copious needs attended to, taking work out of the system. We, in Vermont, do not care what you think we should do. We want you to get off your ass and do something useful. The least you could do is give your lackeys paid time away from servicing your needs so they can go do real work. Better yet, give us all paid time away from useless jobs so that we can attend to the necessary tasks in our own lives. And then maybe make that permanent.

Because that’s the only real solution to this equation. Work is not going to get done by talking about it. No budget ever accomplished anything. No leader ever did anything for any body… not even his own… maybe especially not his own.

The other day I read some panic piece about AI. It was another one of those articles worrying about the dreaded machines who will come for our jobs (not that this hasn’t been a problem for centuries… go read up on the Luddites, my friend…). Or maybe it was worrying about the billion-trillion joules of energy an average AI computer bank uses every week (apparently, mostly to draw human bodies in advanced stages of LARP). Or maybe it was worrying about the loss of privacy when all the machines are watching your browsing history… and judging you… I really couldn’t say now… I also don’t really care… these things run together. Because they mean nothing. The people who write this drivel are so disengaged from the world around them that they don’t seem to realize that AI is not real. By definition! Moreover, humans are in charge of these machines. All you have to do is turn the damn thing off. (Or, you know, stop spending so much the planet’s finite resources and your even more finite time keeping them running.) This is not a problem. It would vanish if you stopped talking about it, turned off your computers, and went out into the world to lend a hand with some real problems — not least of which is dealing with the messes made by computers.

This is the kind of myopia that is bred from having others do all your work, while you lead or manage or come up with ideas (that probably mostly revolve around you not doing work…). The same sort of blindness causes the privileged to natter on incessantly about economics (which is not a thing) and political theory (not a thing) and social philosophy (nope) and on and on and on. These are not concerns. Where your next meal comes from… that is a concern. And if you aren’t taking care of that concern, if you aren’t doing that work, then someone else is having to do your work in addition to their own — and usually this means they must stint themselves.

These ideas don’t help us at all. They don’t even explain our actions all that well or we’d not be so continually surprised by what we do. Over three hundred years of economic theory and we still haven’t figured out that production is based on available material resources and actual laboring bodies… so you’ll forgive me if I don’t put much stock in the theories. But what is worse is that these ideas suck up so much of the oxygen on this carbon-cloaked planet. They consume so much time and energy and, yes, material resources. How much wealth we throw at trying to justify the wealthy! Among other preoccupations of the privileged, that is. Just imagine what we could do if all the university economics departments shut down and sent their students to go learn something useful — by doing it.

But even better, imagine if all the useless busyness were eliminated. If there were suddenly no FIRE industries, no administration, no professional-managerial caste, no industrial-scale entertainment or hospitality… Imagine all the bodies who would be freed to do real work! For others and for themselves. Even if we find that those on top of these paper towers are so unskilled in matters of real work that they remain useless drags on society forever, there would still be billions of people able to help rebuild lives. Maybe even be a little proactive and work to prevent some of the obvious looming catastrophes. (Obvious to those who are looking at the real world anyway…)

I have imagined these things… What’s more, I’m pretty sure we’re heading exactly in that direction, no matter what we think we are doing. These paper towers are not going to withstand repeated flood and fire and failure. Because money doesn’t clean up the actual disasters… and soon people are going to put down the busyness and pick up their real lives. They won’t have a choice. Maybe the power goes out. Maybe there’s no more childcare. Maybe their house is now floating down the river three counties away. Whatever the final straw, they’ll find that they need to do real work and no body else is going to do it for them. As more and more working bodies find themselves in this plight, the world as we know it will quietly crumble away, gradually, one disaster at a time, steadily bleeding out, until finally some critical threshold is breached and it all just dissolves into the nothing that it is. Then people will be free to go back to taking care of their own needs.

And that thought is immense comfort in these muddy days…

But I’m still a bit put out by talk and ideas from people who are not contributing at least as much as the Mennonites up in Plainfield. Just shut up already! Get off your keyboards and zoom sessions and podcasts and go pick up a shovel. I am sure someone will show you what needs to be done with it…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024