"We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us" - Pogo

Rich Dad Poor Dad

"They who have put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindnesse." - John Milton

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki was bought for me in the spirit of helpfulness, I suppose as a sort of primer for making more out of the money I make. About halfway through I'm still waiting for the practical advice. Kiyosaki writes from a strange place, from a semi-fabled history of two major influences in his life. Besides the thinly veiled disgust for his biological Poor Dad, who by all accounts seems exactly like the father I wish I'd had, educated and literate, socially concerned, eclectic and devoted to his job as a schoolteacher, but who never made his money blossom forth from a magical wellspring and was therefore a waste of life, "even though he was the one with all those degrees", there is a lack of critical reasoning here that I find disturbing.

I'm a little shaken that a book barely edited for typos made the New York Times bestseller list, but perhaps that's tangential. What's crucial is Kiyosaki's anecdotal and incredibly reductionist style, here is a man who never learned how to put forth a persuasive argument except as an appeal to greed. What lacks tremendously is an acknowledgment (a true acknowledgment, not a few words of lip service) of fundamentally differing value systems. Of what it means to be a meaningful human. The practical thing I've learned so far? Buy assets, not liabilities. Okay, well, great, after I buy groceries I should have enough left over to start saving for that rental property. And back in the day when I worked two jobs and went to school, all that time I spent in CVS debating with myself over whether hair conditioner was a luxury, I really should have been managing my investment portfolio.

Admittedly, Kiyosaki describes the psychology of the poor with some accuracy. He describes the fear that gets you up in the morning, plodding unhappily to a job that saps your energy and makes you hate life. He describes the strained human relationships, the weary soul, the tendency to spend all your spare time just trying to forget. The unbearable anxiety over bills that keeps you up at night, the panic that hits you suddenly in the shower when you aren't looking, the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, that huge Goliath structures might, with the slightest tug, bring your life toppling to the ground. I'll even concede his point that many poor people, when they do eventually start coming in to a little disposable income, have a hard time not spending it all right away. That's because poor people aren't used to money that lasts. They are structured to think only of immediate needs. They know how to be extremely thrifty, but they don't know how to save. They see extra money, and for them its a time to exhale. Of course, even in this wild state whereupon a poor person comes upon an extra hundred dollars, they still don't spend as magnanimously as a middle class person on an average day, so I have a hard time passing judgment. But I understand the impulse and it's something I have to control within myself. For someone who hates math, I think about numbers a lot. If I have more than I need to survive (a fairly recent status, believe me), some primal hounds within me start making noise. If I don't use it soon, someone will take it from me, they say. It makes me uneasy. This is an unexpected reaction, but a true one. Most people are slaves to money, the wealthy included.

But where Kiyosaki goes grossly awry is in stating that poor people don't know about this cycle of fear and desire. They are entirely unaware of their status as the enslaved, the vehicles of labor stringing their guts out for the pittance of the business owners. Believe me, if there is one thing poor people know, it's that they are slaves to money. Rich Dad (who by the way sounds like a complete asshole) underpays his employees and justifies it by saying that if they were smart enough they could get themselves out of that bind. He justifies the whole system this way, in what amounts to an outlandish assumption that poor people are only poor because they are ignorant, irresponsible, or unresourceful. He says that when they blame him, or other owners of capital, for their problems, they aren't taking personal responsibility. His responsibility to pay his employees a fair wage and to treat people with respect, of course goes unmentioned. Because he has no responsibility beyond himself. Rich Dad is the "self-made" man, making himself in the image of Social Darwinism, of the oversimplified doctrine of self-interest.

It is, to say the least, offensive proselytizing on Kiyosaki's part, and to say the most, a voluntarily blindness to more critical aspects of the human condition. So, frankly, bullshit. Why these systemic problems in the first place? As revolutionary feminist Frances Wright once exclaimed, "Let us inquire!"

Creating an Other

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said that identity is formed through the creation of an other, and by placing one-self in negation with that other. This is not inevitable or irreversible, but a rather natural tendency of human behavior. Hegel developed the notion that human beings are comprised of two parts, the part which is the physical, static self and the transcendent, transformational part which observes the self. Respectively, the en-soi (it-itself) and the pour-soi (for-itself). This is important, and relates to almost everything I'm about to say.

The struggle for self-actualization and the anxiety of wasted time can really be understood as the struggle between these two facets. The en-soi is the human enacted, the state which is. The pour-soi is the state which is not, it lives in the future, contains a notion of the ideal-self, and tries desperately to embody itself in the en-soi. It is tied to the en-soi, relies on it for material, practical existence, but judges it also for not realizing its full potential.

Sartre says we put into the Other that which we like least about ourselves. "The Other is that which I make myself not-be" he says.

Josephine Donavan's paraphrasing: "Just as the pour-soi depends on the en-soi, so does the master or subject consciousness depend on the existence of the Other. For the pour-soi defines itself by the fact that it is not the Other. Unlike the en-soi, however, the Other exists also as consciousness attempting to reduce other selves to the level of object in order that it may exist as a pour-soi. So, struggle ensues when the self attempts to reduce the other consciousness to an object level, in order itself to become a transcendent free poir-soi. One thus comes eventually to see the Other as having all the negative qualities that one wishes not to have oneself."

That is not to say that the rich and powerful are the only ones who engage in creating the Other and then projecting onto this Other the qualities they fear most about themselves. The poor have just as much a culture of hating the rich, of reducing them to an abstract thing-ness, and trying to lend strength to their own identity by purporting that they live a more "authentic" life. It's exactly fitting that inauthenticity is their main critique of the rich when through a capitalist system, their self-authenticity is most at risk. However, the ideology of the ruling class has always been vastly more potent in terms of practical application. Let's break it down.

Wage-Slavery, Thing-ness

One of Noam Chomsky's major speaking points is the total waste of human potential incurred when the system forces the large majority to "rent" themselves to survive. An enormous thread in Marxist ideology is the degradation of existing solely as human capital, a thing, a vehicle of labor. Both suggest, as a solution, shared ownership over means of production (which obviously Chomsky took from Marx, but by virtue of being alive and still talkative on these subjects, he assumes importance in my mind).

There is enormous physical and mental pressure to let yourself slide into the status of thing. The extremely poor have no choice but to be a thing to someone. The real battle is whether or not they remain human to themselves. Remaining human, or exercising the pour-soi, is extremely exhausting when the entire world seems to think otherwise. The pressure is both practical and psychological. First off, the physical energy it takes to keep the body alive means that practically all of your attention is on the en-soi. Second, being cut off from higher education and told to leave your brain by the door 12 hours a day makes it rather difficult to mentally cultivate a strong and functioning poir-soi, an authentic self. Is it possible to stubbornly cling to your humanity despite all odds? Yes, always. Is it possible to escape wage-slavery on a practical level? Not always. And I would implore anyone who thinks otherwise to go be a migrant worker in South Texas and see how long it takes the powerful land-owners to sacrifice cheap labor by giving you any opportunity whatsoever. Or to see how easy it is to make any opportunity for yourself when you have neither time nor money.

Obviously this is an unsustainable state of the human spirit. The authentic self never really dies, smothered and subdued as it may be. It will always come back to haunt you. And when things reach a critical level, popular revolutions happen. The small group of the truly powerful are terrified of this.

Rhetorial Tactics of the Ruling Class

Unlike many other cultural and ethnic groups, the rich need not create the Other to develop their identity. They create the Other in self-defense, reacting exactly to what threatens their status. And if you can't control with violence (thank God), you control with rhetoric.

They have three major tactics:

1. Deny the structure.

Hence all these terms like "self-made" "bootstraps" and "American individualism". We don't live in total isolation from each other, but that's what the American doctrine preaches. We are part of a human ecosystem, and if there are vast social problems afoot then one must look at the whole picture for any real solution. But when this denial of the structure is disseminated down to the poor, they begin to self-inflict it. All of the blame for their poverty goes right into themselves, they are poor mainly because they are simple people who aren't working hard enough. This effects a "can't beat them, join them" mentality wherein the poor either actually succeed in becoming rich and thus assimilating entirely into the system of oppression (as Kiyosaki purports that he has done, even though he was never poor to begin with), or they string themselves out trying to reach that unattainable place. Who gets away scot-free in that environment? I'll let you answer that.

2. Create false alliances.

This is where we get extremely weird phenoms like cowboy presidents and soccer mom governors. In the days of Coolidge, simple farmers actually could become Presidents, but these days politicians have to co-opt a rather falsified culture of such.

3. Create false enemies.

Of course it goes back to the Other. The "liberal elite", "terrorists", "immigrants". The liberal elite concept always baffled me, because in my own bias the "elite" are snogbag Republicans who know enough to vote in their own interests. I suppose that yes, there are plenty of Kennedy-esque leftist bluebloods on the coasts, but I don't see how they are the enemy exactly for wanting to tax themselves more, you know?

Back in slave days it was black people. Plantation owners appealed to the vast underclass whites so effectively that they created a whole Confederate Army out of them, simply by saying "I may be rich and you may be poor, but we are both white." All of these things are redirects, a grand distraction of the fact that the powerful and the privileged absolutely do not care about the rest of us. Even Kiyosaki makes it pretty damn clear that Rich Dad has no stake in social responsibility whatsoever.

Internalizing the Otherness, The Poor Identity

Sartre calls it "bad faith", the drifting away from the authentic self, when an individual "takes toward oneself the point of view of the Other". Heidegger says that when subsumed by prefabricated identity, in other words, giving in to what culture tells you about your kind, the authentic self "drifts along towards an alienation in which its own-most potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it." The use of the word "alienation" here is a translation from the original German word Entfremdung. And I don't know what original word Marx used to describe "alienation", but the similarity of meaning is still notable. Marxist alienation is estrangement from ownership of one's labor, Heidegger's alienation is estrangement from the authentic self. I'd say that those are one and the same.

The question arises of how to attain power without being co-opted by the powers-that-be-already. How to achieve agency and comfort, but not accept the language and exclusionary brutality of the power. It's an issue that spans all cultural divides, race and gender to start. There is a hell of a lot of gender and race theory circulating that deals with exactly this issue. Feminist Julia Kristeva says that women face the dilemma of either becoming a man or relegating to the margins. "Becoming white" was sort of a buzzy term for a while in American black dialogues.

Personally I just never felt that dilemma as a woman. I have no idea why. The more masculine the realms I enter, the more feminine I feel. I see my gender as fixed, and therefor not threatened. But I have felt an identity crisis immensely in terms of class. It's problematic, and yes, an Achilles tendon of sorts. Let's get one thing straight. I don't consider myself "poor" right now. All of my base needs are being met. I am able to both support myself and mollify the people I owe for the privilege of getting an education. But emotional memory remains. I fear nothing more or less than slow death, underneath it all.

To me, class identity is thornier than gender identity because it is not fixed. How do I behave now, that I am within sight of infiltrating that tenuous thing called "middle class"? Who does that make me? I never expected this reaction, but yes, there it is. The culture of poor rural Texans that shaped my early mind think very differently from the philosophy of capitalism, ironically. For them, money is a direct result of function. Money for free is immoral. I still deal with that. I still feel like a faker in a lot of ways. The burden of coming into political power is how to define your identity that is outside the language of oppression and yet not subsumed into existing powers. So that is a problem and I admit it tints my thinking.

Here is another weird archetype. In debates between socialization and privatization, an example of the lazy good-for-nothing comes up quite often. "Poor people expect the government to solve all of their problems" says Kiyoki, who is apparently five years old. I would argue that the welfare queen is a much rarer occurrence than cultural memes would have us believe. There certainly isn't an army of them pushing for audacious services like health care. To sit like a lump on a log and expect money to come to you for absolutely nothing is a pretty specific neurosis. It's voluntary denial of the pour-soi, which I don't think is a natural state. Besides, government assistance doesn't exactly make your life comfortable. Every economic structure has the burden of how to deal with ne'er-do-wells where they do exist. The specifics of that can be debated, but I'm not talking about them. I doubt greatly that a few lazy people in the lowest echelons of society have dragged this entire nation to its knees. I've got a pretty good idea of who actually has done that, and they aren't poor. No, I'm talking about people who get up every morning and go to work and still don't have a means of fulfilling their most basic needs, much less build a savings for retirement. This is all too common, and entirely unacceptable.

On Personal Responsibility

I demand more personal responsibility than the capitalists. Kiyosaki would have you believe that personal responsibility is solely acting in your own self-interest. In doing so, you hoist yourself up from the masses and cease to be a burden on society. But all of us depend on each other. To begrudge anyone a living wage, or social services if their wage cannot afford it, is to ignore the fact that you depend on their labor for survival.

Personal responsibility is educating yourself about the things that have held you down, seeing past rhetoric, having a critical understanding of the values at the core of all rational thought. Yes, personal responsibility is carrying your weight in society, but it's also addressing the larger foundations which put people in such compromising positions in the first place. Personal responsibility is social responsibility.

Follow the Money

"Well, what are some major things, say, today? There are some things being addressed in a way. The feminist movement is addressing some. The civil rights movement is addressing others. The one major thing that's not being seriously addressed is the one that's really at the core of the system of domination, and that's private control over resources. And that means an attack on the fundamental structure of State capitalism. I think that's in order." - Noam Chomsky

It's not that capitalism is inherently evil, it's that private interests are inherently suspect. We've reached a point where the government is the servant of corporate interests. Does that mean that government is behind our failures? Yes and no. We had no place propping up sagging corporate structures. But whose interest is at work here? The government's interest, as they continue hemorrhaging money? No, it's private interests, who through a little thing called deregulation have managed to get "Too Big to Fail". Find the beneficiary of a corrupt system, and you find the perpetrator.

In a functioning the democracy the government acts to protect consumers from corporate abuses through regulation. How you want to organize economically has some room for interpretation. There are examples of well-functioning socialized nations (Uruguay) and examples of privatized but highly regulated nations also doing well (Switzerland). But I can't think of a single example of a country where commercial interests have no government oversight and there is not also a broad swath of the population living in total poverty and income inequality is sky-high. Seriously, give me an example if you think of one.

Freedom-to-Have versus Freedom-to-Be

I'll keep it simple. If you want to boil it down to core values, liberty for some means the freedom-to-be, for others it is freedom-to-have. These are two philosophies of liberty. Nobody realizes that we are talking about two different things and so we just yell back and forth a lot. Personally I think all this deference to Freedom-to-Have is responsible for a lot of human suffering, and I don't think consumption is real freedom. I don't think people necessarily have the right to get rich. Everyone has a right to health care and to education, as they do safety and legal rights. I think that in a nation as developed as ours, denying someone adequate health care is crime by neglect. When a mother doesn't feed her kid, so the kid starves to death, she gets convicted of child abuse. It's treated in exactly the same manner as if she had murdered her child through positive actions. People who are out of the power, god, even if they somehow could muster the Herculean effort to pull themselves out of destitution, need to not fear their lives. The punishment does not fit the crime.

This is essential to freedom-to-be, which I would categorized under the "pursuit of happiness" and I think is the only real freedom.

Once the argument is distilled down to those principles, it's very hard to go from there. They are intrinsic, and entirely opinion. So if you disagree with me on that, you probably won't agree with anything else I say. I do think though, that you might accept the argument that our current system allow neither freedom for a lot of people. Okay, so lets work on that first.

Conclusion

As Noam Chomsky says over and over again, this is not a functioning democracy. That's another problem. Maybe a more fundamental one.

I think the way we prevent abuses by an overwhelmingly privileged few is through a strong and functioning democracy. Large or small government is not the problem. Who controls the government is the problem. When government is the natural extension of the people, as it is intended to be in a democracy, it is no overlord, but a mechanism by which the concerns of many are manifested in a body functioned to address those concerns. Corporations inherently have no such obligations. As such, I'd rather put my energy into resurrecting a functioning democracy than in ensuring corporations the right to go on unsupervised.

The Third and the Seventh (and then some)

Watch this: http://vimeo.com/7809605?hd=1

Two ideas of art, which are superficially contradictory, are, speaking broadly, formalism versus abstraction. Sometimes it’s rephrased as content versus form. These characterizations have the handy flexibility of being able to stretch over almost any medium. In film, it’s kind of crudely construed as what the movie’s about versus how pretty it is. In painting, or in plotless filmmaking (I’m starting to think that there is no such thing as “non-narrative”), the visual style is seen as the definitive trait which differentiates formal from abstract.

For example, early European paintings doggedly pursued realism in form, even if the content was lushly fantastical or religious. This came from a fundamental understanding of what art was at the time. Art was not a outlet of the marginalized or a pursuit of new avenues or even personal fulfillment (not to say this wasn’t a byproduct). Art was generally commissioned by a monarch or religious leader to depict specific ideas. Namely, religious anecdotes or the glorification of the state. That’s what it was, and that was fine. The point is not necessarily that the content was realistic, because it often wasn’t, but that art subscribed to certain rules, and those rules had the agenda of furthering the mainstream ideology.

So the popular understanding of subversive or critical art is that which fiddles with form. In this country that was comics, which still has the stigma of being un-intellectual, and then the abstract expressionists of the 50’s like Pollock, Motherwell, Krasner, Kline. Music did the same thing with people like Coletrane and Davis. But that’s just America – it was happening everywhere.

That’s why the art that I really find interesting is work with abstracted content, but a rigid adherence to form. Magritte was big on this. Sure, his stuff was stylized, but it was stylized into a kind of smoothness, a sterility. His paintings look like early computer animations. They lack the dust and the scuffs, the wildness present in other avant-garde artists. It was his content that got you. It was the subtle play on light, the painting dissolving into a field, the macabre transmutation of the human face, therein lay the subversion.

So I find the Third and the Seventh interesting in the same way. And this must have been conscious on Alex Roman’s part. I scoffed inwardly the first time I heard someone say that this film visually references Magritte, but on second though, yes of course it does. And true to form, it’s entirely computer generated.

This allows the “camera” to enter impossible spaces, and then later to create spaces which are impossibly constructed for use by humans. It depicts a serene and almost lifeless hyper-modern landscape, where life is preserved but not lived, like a beta fish frozen in an ice cube. Humans, where present, are only glimpsed. They are distant machinations, shadows and sounds softly overlayed with the slowly breathing orchestral score.

“arquitecture as art”, solid letters suspended in space, give us the only verbal cue. Split screens reveal parallel movements, as if searching for something. The camera that is not a camera pulls further and further back. It roves over the ledges and vertiginous curves that we glimpsed as children, looking skyward, wishing we had wings to play. It is a city, vast and emperial and lonely, but beautiful.

The content grows increasingly surreal. Now we are in nature, which seems to exist in a utopian balance with mankind. Old wood framed buildings have Bauhaus rigidity. Enormous water droplets crystallize over floors and fields. The one human depicted, much less a protagonist than a fellow observer, calmly unfolds a black umbrella.

But what interests me more than anything is the focus on cameras. The camera as the subject may seem masturbatory, and maybe it is. In this case though, we can’t even call it self-referential. The camera is a tool for seeing, but here it is being seen in isolation. It can’t even look back at you. It’s not real. It was created by a staggeringly complex system of vectors and algorithms. It has been separated from the herd and hunted down.

The Third and the Seventh is one of the most painstaking efforts I’ve ever seen to delve into those impossible angles and heights through CGI, to render visually possible all that was previously constrained by physical limitations. I mean really, just to see. The film alludes to this with one shot of an old and unmanned film camera perched intrepidly on the precipice of the long and dangerously sloped rooftop of an ultramodern building. Who put it there? Or was it always there, finding the edges? Maybe this is a film about seeing. I think it is.

And that’s really why I’ve brought it up. The Third and the Seventh is a perfectly clear example of what art should be, not in terms of aesthetics or of content, but of purpose.

Someone told me once (in the middle of an argument about Avatar, of course), that “if you want to send a message, write a telegram”. In other words, it is not for movies or art to tell us things. I would go so far to say that this guy was implying that movies should be for entertainment value only, and that’s a beast I’d like to brutally slaughter on another day. But for now, yes, I agree with the idea. The purpose of art is not to send a message. In storytelling, good art is a hypothesis. A hypothesis is really question. A hypothesis is a truth on trial. Scientific method aside, there is no better way to explore our ruts, our habits, our prejudices and culture neurosis than through fiction.

But zooming out, the purpose of art, if there can ever be one, is to reflect the latent world of inner life, of subjective vision. Even if it is about outside events, say, in the famous Guernica, it is still about the seeing of those events. And that is monumentally important. Art need be neither entertainment nor a message, and even that is no dichotomy. Art is the pursuit of that monarch butterfly, that magic moment when the brain acts of its own accord, departs from the eyes, overrides the senses and becomes a thing called the Individual. It has been happening all your life. Art is an attempt to externalize that, so that we understand each other.

It is sometimes the feeling, the taste of another’s life in your own mouth, communicated in synchronistic forms that nearly every human understands without words. Words, those silly, limited things, get closest to the truth when even grammar is subverted. That’s poetry. The truth is that language is never translated correctly, and people have even less trust in wordless communication. In my mind that mishap of meaning is both the beauty of life and the reason art is undervalued as part of society. It is inefficient, and therefore seen as a useless frivolity.

I vehemently disagree, and I will all of my life. Art says that life can be seen and understood in ways you have not seen or understood it before. That is absolutely, practically crucial to the development of a critical consciousness about oneself and the world. It assists the development from solipsist to participating human being. Because if one can get so close to the subjective consciousness of someone else, one is forced to recognize a sentience in the “other” that is similar to that of the self. And that if we deign intrinsic value in ourselves, we should logically deign it in others.

The examples are clear. Societies without art, or for whom art is relegated to another purpose like entertainment or propaganda, are ethnocentric, intolerant, exclusionary and incapable of critical analysis. The United States has devalued its own culture to the extent that the only surviving threads are those which bring in profit, so it’s no wonder that Americanism means consumerism. It’s no wonder that the world sees us as fat and cheap and stupid. Not that we should run around in fear of what everyone else thinks, but if all your friends things you are a jerk, it is at least worth a moment to beg the question, am I a jerk? We think that freedom is the pursuit of bang-dash imperialism. We think nothing of claiming the natural resources of unwilling nations, of making completely impractical value judgments, squandering our domestic resources by mere provocation of the fear of the other. Is it really that much of a surprise? Given that we clearly don’t think it is important to experience the “other” at all?

We could start by looking at the Other right here at home. I think in many ways, marginalized groups in this country have the most to contribute to American art. Not only can they provide a subjective vision that is ancillary to the common narrative just by virtue of living outside it, but it is they from whom we’ve not yet heard. Mountains of silence waiting to move at the slightest noise.


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