“We do owe one another a living”
January 9, 2022
By NZB3
The idea of having to earn a living implies that we don’t deserve to have our needs met simply by virtue of having these needs. To break it down a bit, we don’t deserve physical fitness or quality friendships or wealth or a long life or shelter or clothing or any values unless we embody the appropriate virtues. This is basic Aristotelian ethics as handed down by the likes of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy yet far from understood or accepted even today.
A New Zealand Millennial named Jonathon Hagan tackled this question yesterday under my notice. Don’t know him, never heard of him, yet his thoughtful processing of this issue is worth exploring. Here are some very useful insights into what some of his generation think about New Zealand and the world right now. He expresses his state of Atomisation, Marxian Alienation, and r-selected drive to Collectivisation in the following passages…
“I grew up with a really strong feeling that all the technology and convenience around me would be gone one day, maybe it was a dream, maybe its because The Tribe was showing on TV at the time. Weirdly I found the idea comforting, all this was too much. Even knowing that i wouldn’t survive without it; I’m acclimated to warm indoor environments and I’ve never had to hunt or gather to survive, and i probably couldn’t even if my life truly depended on it. Still, the inescapable convenience left me feeling as if none of it was real.”
The Tribe (1999) was a NZ/UK TV show featuring Antonia Prebble (image left) in a post-adult, post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic, dystopian world. Kids like Jonathon identified with the young people on the show because, evidently, it connected with a puzzle that generation was struggling to solve. According to Wikipedia The Tribe is “constantly being repeated and has a fanatical fan base” and was created by a man with Asperger Syndrome.1
Our Millennial, Hagan, elaborates on why the collapse of civilisation is not only not strange but weirdly comforting to him…
“..I’m thankful for the supermarket, my job and my car, because hunger and exposure truly suck. But now i’m seeing the global machine of trade grind to a screaming halt, runaway inflation, worsening relations between and within the superpowers, the idea that the bracken might be making my bed sometime soon doesn’t seem so strange. In the sense that the world is hard dust and radiation, it doesn’t owe us a living, but in the sense that the world we live in is one we have made for each other, from our labor and from plants and animals, we do owe one another a living. I don’t know how to build a house and yet I’ve had the privilege of sleeping in one every night of my life except on those nights I chose not to. I think the de realisation comes from not knowing the builders, the shoe makers, the factory workers, the delivery people, the foresters, the miners, the engineers who make all of this possible.”
This is Millennial Atomisation from the horse’s mouth. That generation has long had a great hunger for what Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs puts at the 3rd base step: Belongingness and Love Needs. These include family, affection, relationships, work group, etc. Despite a healthy respect for the ‘supermarket, job, car, hunger, and death by exposure’ (Maslow’s steps #1 and #2: Safety Needs and Biological Needs) the Millennial craves that missing 3rd step. It was desperately under-supplied during the last 20 years of the C20th² because of the very low demand for it from the Boomer generation who preferred conspicuous materialism. Hagan and his tribe feel Atomised rather than connected and belonging and appreciated and impactful in a similar way to those displaced by the Industrial Revolution many generations before…
“In a time more consistent with the conditions mankind has lived in for millennia I might know the person who built the house I live in, the person who brought food into the village, I might have been one of them. Modern work feels impersonal, I don’t know the people I’m helping when i do work, I might know the shape of what i do and how it fits in to others lives but its different from helping your cousin thatch his roof or setting fishing nets with a brother. Instead there’s a paycheck, and all the meaningful labor gets crammed into the few hours we have between knocking off and turning in, or it happens on the weekend. The food we eat could well have fallen out of the sky for all most of us know about how it reaches the table, and that breeds a terrible insecurity; the machine that feeds us is inscrutable and we have no real hand in its working unless we work in agriculture or distribution, and even still the scale of it is so much more than what we can account for as individuals. To say nothing of being under paid for it. Its easy to feel as if the machine owes us nothing, it doesn’t seem as if it is made of our relatives, they are all at work behind closed doors or a uniform and an approved script for customer interaction.”
This passage reminds me of passages from Karl Marx’s Estranged Labour or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or any number of other periodic grasping for Maslow #3 throughout our history. I don’t think the Millennials are very self-aware that they are re-describing a wheel as old as civilisation itself. When they read Marx or his imitators they’re likely to get a burst of serotonin, that ‘click’ moment, from hearing someone articulate how they feel and then go ahead and swallow the rest of his doctrine in the same mouthful. The solution, the Millennial seeker will think, is anti-individualism and pro-collectivism. Here’s our correspondent right on cue…
“We evolved (or were designed) to care for each other, to do labor for each other, to face each other. Have you noticed we are the only mammal with visible sclera? the white part of the eye is hidden most species, this hides the direction of visual focus, yet we have evolved to present this to one another, because if you and I are facing one another and I see a lion behind you, you will know immediately and no words need pass between us. In every way I owe those around me a living, and my living is owed to me by them in return, because we are not lone bears wandering the woods, we are human.”
Rank assertion that an individual’s effort is not his but is “owed” to the tribe to which he belongs. Why? Because he is “human” and that apparently means only one thing: A unit in a collective. The sovereign individual is reduced to a caricature: ‘lone bear wandering the woods’. A limp Darwinian argument is offered about the human eye as if the only interpretation of our anatomy is that we are Communists by ocular physiology!
As Bowie (1971) said of my Generation X, and as quoted in the film about Gen X, The Breakfast Club (1985:) “And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. They’re quite aware of what they’re goin’ through.” Aware, if not conscious, our Millennials are seeking Maslow’s 3rd and now they are adults and mainstream it has become a the global project (Ref. 2020: Millennial Fetal Contentment.) In their pursuit of the 3rd they’re quite capable and open about the fact of being willing to let 1st and 2nd hit the wall. Television and toymakers to the young Millennials detected this which is why they green-lit the TV shows they did. These included The Tribe (1999) and Beast Wars: Transformers (1996) where a new generation of robots were cast back into a primitive post-war post-civilisation world to survive in primal nature. The art our youth consume and the toys they demand is never an accident.
This has been an exercise in placing a Millennial’s very interesting passage into the context of a framework rather than a rebuttal. Briefly, my answer to the Millennial Atomisation is not to neglect or wreck our civilisation or Western heritage but to rediscover it. So you don’t know how to build a house or catch a fish or grow a lettuce? Learn. You feel like an over-specialised insect rather than a well-rounded Renaissance Man? Neitzsche’s “the ugliest man” rather than Gilbert and Sullivan’s Very Model of a Modern Major-General. You’re sick of having healthy organic tissue cut off and replaced by government prosthetics? You want to keep your civic energy and be active in your community beyond marking a government tick-box every 3 years for suited proxies be you for you?
Come to Anarkiwi! Exiting the Statrix is what it’s all about.
—
Quoted with permission from Jonathon Hagan, Evidence Based Memes For TOPs Landlord Loving Teens; Facebook (January/2022)
2 ie The Unravelling/Third Turning for those following Strauss-Howe Generational Theory
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