One Free Kill

I feel a calamity may be upon us. I fear that this house of cards is collapsing in slow-​motion, a crushing Emperor Has No Clothes kabuki drama.
Were I to review this play I’d be able to give it no stars at all (and, as you know, that would mean I couldn’t review it). The stars are for the original concept and how handily it serves as a vessel for the news of the day.
Think about the nature of work, just for a second. At least in our Western frame of consciousness, think of how many people you know or with whom you interact that do no meaningful work. I use «interact» in the broadest sense. I interact, after a fashion, with my television set as it tries to sell me things that chop or pills that do nothing. The people that brought me these public service announcements do no meaningful work. My own work, on occasion, is meaningful and important. But more and more often it seems the problems I’m paid to solve are problems of another person’s invention. We both exist because of an anthropomorphism, not a non-​human natural reality.
Think of the cuts being negotiated in DC. A reduction in the size and scope of government means a reduction in the bureaucratic labor pool. What will these people do, if reduced? They have no transferable skill!
When we farmed or made things we truly needed our labors were worthwhile. Now, certainly too, as we still we support ourselves and our families, but we do so in a vastly different way. We labor to invent new needs then labor to fulfill them. Engineers stay busy inventing 5G and marketers toil to make it indispensable. Up and up and up we spiral. We print the currency we’re paid for our marginal contribution, we print it out of air, backed with little more than the full faith and credit of the government in DC.
The government that just finished the first act of what I truly hope isn’t its swan song. The markets spoke today on what they think the full faith and credit is worth.
There’s still a chance, I believe, to pull out of this nosedive, but it’s going to take a change in the way we place ourselves in this world. Particularly those of us so fond of consumption. It’s because of us and the strings to which we’re connected that the puppet show turns in the direction it does.
The review this updates doesn’t apply in totality, but to a certain extent it may. I tie to it largely out of convenience.
And to give you a double dose of how things look from inside my head. Because I’m in a sharing kind of mood.
Thanks for listening. Now go do something good. Please.