To be, or not to be a team player (Originally posted Jan 11, 2020)

If by team you are referring to the Unions of my brothers and sisters then, you should probably be a good union person.  Someone who knows their collective agreement and who is aware of conditions of the workplace which could lead to a conflict between management's and labour's objectives.

As a union person you seek to lift every worker's standard of living, not just those who pay dues, or those who work in your tidy little corner of the shop, but for all workers. There is a proposition for you; stop focusing on your group membership and start focusing on your species membership. It is not to say that socialism is the only way to make progress.  It is not as though we are strapped to this railroad track with the hoot-hoot of the capitalists racing in head long. But it is the union way. It is an ideology which is not bound by geographical space but acts like a liberating force, allowing people from all backgrounds to assemble under the sun.  It is an intellectual space, and it is in keeping with our better human nature. Our union aspirations are really a manifestation, a bringing into reality, our letting go and embracing the idea of a world without evil. What is understood without any explanation based in reason and evidence can be treated as evil. We do not need an event to rise from hostility or murderous anger to say evil is at the root, we only need actions based on beliefs that are not based in reality. BlackOxford at paragraph 3, provides this analysis of Alan Badiou's essay on the understanding of evil.

But there is an objective issue as well as this subjective fantasy in the defining of rights in terms of evil: “because if the ethical ‘consensus’ is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself.” This is a subtle but crucial point. The ethics derived from evil are at best a sort of “stodgy conservatism” much like the ethics of Christianity which has always found it preferable to enforce the ‘don’ts’ than the ‘do’s’.

Many people come to the subject of capitalism with the thought that the people at the top of the food chain belong there offering one or more explaination from a set of patent answers to why.  It is either because they worked harder, or they spend wisely on an education or it is a free world and daddy left enough money for sonny to avoid work altogether or some selection of the above. I am confused by this rush to protect capitalism. Is it possible that each of those doubters harbours a hope in their heart that someday they will have better luck and they will not have to swallow their ethics or to experience any guilt for the shame of not sharing what they have.

What is the difference between being poor and being rich: while poor you may welcome any small improvement to your standard of living.  You might even sell your soul so to speak.  It is the soul that gives us an excuse for every evil thing we allow into our thoughts. I say soul since it is an inclusive phrase not because I would vouch for the existence of an everlasting aspect of being. The rich are very busy exploring the culture of having. They can have a lot more than they consider, since they likely have investments and these are not fully conscious elements of the equation, or a member of the set of concerns. They do not feel any rush to address, maybe solve social problems through spending their money.

It seems the rich person has it better in many ways from the poor slob. The money the food the lodging and the perks, like foreign cars, vacations on watercraft, mountain skiing. Surely everybody wants to have those options. Surely there are many ways to come by money, to create a new product, or find a new use for something that exists. But we are always going to try to find a new way of looking at the economy, or economies, that will allow a new course to be set, one that benefits the masses.  It is not the ultra-rich who can find this new principal, although it might, it will be likely some poor slob who had to find a solution to their own difficult situation. Then he had to find a way to sell it and to become rich.

Another way of looking at it is that maybe I do not want something just because I am envious of the rich. Maybe I do not want it, maybe I do not care to own it. Maybe I recognize its value, but I do not need it. In this category I place collectible . Land also does not have a value, but we give it an address and a square footage or acres.

For some strange reason people who align with a group tend to take on the values of that group. In the same way that electrons may spin closer to the boundary of the molecule and drift off through an affinity with another substance, so too people can evolve out of group relationships and find new affinities. While your relationship with unionism may be fraught with disagreements and promoted through acts of evil, there is better that can come from such associations than harms simply due to the constituent causes being people and not values.