dear leader's daily thought: a simple meditation or anecdote to bring the principles of revolution into better focus.
day 619 of the revolution
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many who follow the path and ponder the nature of revolution are sincere in their pursuit of knowledge. their belief is robust and though they question to seek knowledge, they do not question their fundamental beliefs concerning the relationships between society, work, bikes and productivity. this forms the backbone of an important distinction: those who question to seek knowledge and those who question to debase an argument or insert doubt where none should exist.
just the other day, while engaging in a vigorous debate with some capitalists outside the chicago mercantile exchange, one of them attempted to set a rhetorical trap for me. having read the recent puff piece on my life and thoughts in esquire magazine, he observed that my course of studies as a student had a heavy focus on evolutionary biology. he further posited that my college experience had been wasted, or that i was not up to the task of understanding the material. his argument developed from a thesis that charles darwin sought to communciate: that nature is a vast optimizing system. relentlessly cruel, ruthlessly efficient, life is a constant struggle. slight variations on a genetic motif compete endlessly, and over what seems like an infinite number of generations, those with slight advantages should produce more progeny and squeeze out the those who are considered less fit.
this man went on to imply that financial markets are very much the same. many individuals are involved in constantly re-evaluating the market: pricing stocks, paying for goods. only those companies that can most effectively compete, can succeed. and in that sense, they must be the most fit. his point elliptically came around to the view that one could not simultaneously support a view embracing evolution and denigrating the free market. this man must be assumed to have had some formal training in debate, for though his argument were shot full of holes, he delivered them with stunning eloquence and a great many passersby were convinced by the mere tone of his presentation. but true revolutionaries always validate any message they receive against a simple set of principles. one need not fall down the rabbit hole of circumlocution.
the most obvious problem with the man's thesis is that evolution and markets operate on a completely different basis and scale. to help illustrate this, one need only investigate possible analogs. One might, for instance, compare the concept from wealth of philanthropy and the biological concept of altruism. the similarity seems paradoxical to someone who has not pondered the true nature of each activity. when dealing with wealth under a truly capitalist mindset, any loss of capital is a loss of "fitness". however, under the dawkins model of the level at which evolution occurs, altruism can actually benefit the gene at the cost of the individual. revolutionaries true to the manifesto must realize that anyone arguing from the principle that maximizing personal return at the cost of others will be doing so on the backs of something else or someone else. without getting too far into the complexities of distributions, there are clearly finite resources to go around, so anyone seeking to maximize their own share is by definition seeking to alter a distribution from approaching equality. the more they seek to extract, the more inequality results: inequality is a direct function of greed.
what's needed is a rising tide that truly floats all boats, not just lip service about the benefits of an ownership society. once the basic needs of all have been ministered to, other expenditures can be contemplated. but to bring this back to the original analogy, capitalism is better understood, though biological metaphor, as parasitism: where attempts are made to extract the maximum which does not kill the provider. avoid this kind of thinking at all costs when those who are not supportive of the revolution push it on you.
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