If consumption was freedom then Upper East Side housewives would be the freest people on Earth.

So what is freedom if it’s not consumption? The next logical step here would be to look outward, not inward. We would not really be free if we lived alone on a deserted island. So freedom then would have something to do with others, with our social bonds. We can experience freedom only in relations to others. Freedom then would mean being or, more precisely, being able to be a good member of society, a good citizen. Sure there will be many who would not want to be good citizens. But the avenues to be a good citizen should be available and easily accessible to anyone who wants it. What are the available avenues for being a good citizen today? Voting, volunteering, charity? Yes. But these are supplementary not foundational. The economic foundation to be a good citizen is lacking. The current foundation is a barbell between cutthroat competition on one end and everyone else, the losers, on the other. One is made to oscillate between these two extremes without having a safe landing ground in the middle. One can’t be a good citizen if the available economic choices come down to either be a predator or to be a sucker. Such are current conditions. There’s no existing functioning framework where you can be neither. Even worse, we are required to suppress our good nature to meet the demands of the competitive framework.

What’s interesting to note here is that many of those who are winners in this game, those who rose through the ranks, went through this competitive hazing themselves. They became assholes, if you will, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Thus they are not inclined to allow others to have an easier path. The strong are the product of this environment. In a small-minded and petty way they expect others to replicate such moral degeneration in order to prove their worth. How can one be free under such social construct?

This is where the notion of nobility arises. The essence of nobility is in protection of those who can not protect themselves. Being noble in the olden times required risking one’s life on the battlefield. A lot more was expected of those of noble descent. If you were born into a noble family you were expected to protect your keep, to uphold some duties. Nassim Taleb actually touched on this theme in his book Antifragile. Today’s nobility is democratic, rarely hereditary. They won in the game of life, outsmarting others, fellow citizens, for self-benefit, but they act as if they slayed some great foreign enemy. They manifest their nobility, their elevated social position, not by courage on the battlefield (or, in our days, moral courage to call bullshit or to stop their own game), but by displays of status and one-upmanship. And at that point it doesn’t matter where you came from, it doesn’t matter how you got there.  In the current zeitgeist continuous self-promotion is the most logical thing to do. If, say, Jon Snow was living in a modern-day New York, he would’ve jumped at Stannis’s offer to help him run a hedge fund (to march on Winterfell and reclaim the North), rather than enroll with the Marines (stay behind and do his duty on the Wall).

Jon Snow, the one who stayed on the Wall, understands the now forgotten concept of duty, a concept that was originally inseparable from being noble. But today, duty is for suckers. Today, it’s all about black-tie events at Cipriani, filled with every Who’s Who of financial and political elite. Today it’s WHCD dinner, a grotesque event where journalists rub elbows, drink and laugh with the subjects they are supposed to rip apart. Who is there, aside from Taibbi and Bernie Sanders, to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted?

So in the current paradigm, since it’s almost impossible to do good and be good, what we can try to do is to be less evil. We should try, whenever possible, to advocate for and protect the weak. Try to, even on a small scale, call bullshit whenever you see it. Be respectful and polite to those below you on a social ladder: they wish they had your problems. I mean, literally, smile and say “Hello” and “Thank you” to a taxi driver or your cleaning lady. And if you can’t bear it anymore, make plans of escape and work towards them: downgrade your lifestyle, cash out your 401K, move to Mexico. Minimize the amount of small evil around you. When the critical mass of people unwilling to carry that torch grows big enough, when one by one we start breaking down that dehumanizing relay competition, then there’s some hope for us.

I’ve been a frequent reader of Brainpickings.org – the best website to find the insights on life and human condition from great thinkers – poets, philosophers, writers. Most of my forays into the metaphysical in my own blog, are usually originated by reading something on Brainpickings and then ruminating and expanding on those ideas. One of the recent articles was on Adrienne Rich, an American poet, describing her thoughts about freedom under capitalism.

In the vocabulary kidnapped from liberatory politics, no word has been so pimped as freedom.

Capitalism presents itself as obedience to a law of nature, man’s “natural” and overwhelming predisposition toward activity that is competitive, aggressive, and acquisitive. Where capitalism invokes freedom, it means the freedom of capital. Where, in any mainstream public discourse, is this self-referential monologue put to the question?

Are we really free if our freedom requires us to take advantage of the others? Does capitalism promote freedom or undermine it? And to wade even further into heresy territory, do we embrace capitalism in its current form because we are afraid of true freedom? Ask us of our definition of freedom and we’ll tell you that freedom for us is to do what we like. Fair enough. But what do we like? Ask you friends what they like and you’ll hear answers like travel, shopping, movies, some extreme sports for the advanced. But that only means that consumption is freedom. Capitalism encourages that kind of freedom. Even your adrenaline-inducing adventures are marketed to you and paid for. You go to Cambodia and picture yourself to be hardened Captian Willard on a classified mission, but in reality you’re a spoiled tourist on a guided air-conditioned trip to a third world country to make yourself feel good.

You will rarely find writing or thinking on that list of ‘likes’. You may find art, but mostly consumption of it.

Consumption of art is still consumption, however, it can work as a catalyst to creating. Creating art moves one closer to freedom. It involves the bringing out of thoughts, the ability to express a nagging idea in your head in precise and simple way. Whether on paper or canvas or on the stage. Once you start doing it you learn what kind of person you are and it’s not a consumer you’ll find there. And you don’t have to be an egghead to do this. Just pick an art that speaks to you. I’m indifferent to most of the modern art, for example. Some old redneck Southern rock song gives me more food for thought than art by Warhol or Koons, which only causes puzzlement. I think most of modern art is a calculated effort with the marketability in mind, not a product of overwhelming emotions that come out bursting. I guess when it comes to art I’m a conservative – something I would not have realized if I did not sit down and examine it.

Thus, expression is freedom. It’s not that we’re completely oblivious to this notion. We try, in our own clumsy way, to express ourselves – on Facebook, on Twitter, etc. We are humans after all, we were blessed (or cursed) with tools to analyze our own human condition.

Such need of expression is manifested, genuinely but awkwardly, by some random postings of birds or sunset or nature pictures on your Facebook, in some quotes of those long dead, or pictures of self, walking on the beach or in a jumping jack pose (hands up, legs apart) over some magnificent geological or architectural backdrop.  But those moments of awe are rarely examined. We have neither time, no mental aptitude to dwell on it, to examine why we find it beautiful. We think that mere sharing will be sufficient. And because we can’t contemplate on it qualitatively, this need for expression perpetuates itself in quantity of pictures and drive-by postings. We are like a teenage girl, for whom every experience is “OMG, this is awesome!” even though there are, certainly, gradations of that awesomeness, which she is unable to articulate properly. For her, “OMG, this is awesome” can be equally applied to her first glimpse of Grand Canyon, a description of a boy band or a reaction to a friend’s Instagram. We can’t deny that at least in one of those cases she was in a state of genuine awe, perhaps even in a poetic mood but without the tools to express it adequately. So, in her quest to convey her feelings to the public, she resorts to quantity or images, not quality of thought. Such examination, itself a manifestation of our culture that is obsessed with consumption and acquisition, doesn’t take much effort – all it requires is a camera and a ticket to an exotic locale. Our methods of describing the beauty or speaking the unspeakable are handicapped by our culture which demands us to be, constantly and unquestionably, on the market economy treadmill. To build our thinking around the potential material or social (in a sense of social media) benefit of our actions. We define ourselves not with what we think, but where we went and what we saw and what we ate. Not a surprising outcome in a culture that is ever-ready to sell us another tool of pseudo-expression. In such a culture even protest is commodified. And we comply, we are eager to comply. We are suckers for fake excitement.

My personal cure for this ailment is writing.

If we are writers writing first of all from our own desire and need, if this is irresistible work for us, if in writing we experience certain kinds of power and freedom that may be unavailable to us in other ways — surely it would follow that we would want to make that kind of forming, shaping, naming, telling, accessible for anyone who can use it. It would seem only natural for writers to care passionately about literacy, public education, public libraries, public opportunities in all the arts. But more: if we care about the freedom of the word, about language as a liberatory current, if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic justice.

I guess that’s why I don’t call myself a ‘fiscal conservative’ anymore. Fiscal conservatism is like a polite society’s mitigator of one’s ‘socially liberal’ stance. It’s meant to parlay your “reasonableness” to a respectful audience. Like, see, he’s for gay marriage, but he also wants to cut taxes. That’s what I thought I was, until I started unspooling that and came to a conclusion that economic justice – that is economic protection of the weak, is impossible under the agenda of ‘fiscal conservatism.’

If we, as society, oscillate between two extremes – total government control of media and thought, and a laissez-faire feel-good media-as-entertainment thought-killing culture, then which one of those extremes should we consider to be more detrimental to our way of life? Is it Orwellian totalitarianism of Huxleyan anything goes?

The book I’m reading now, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman makes the compelling case that it is the latter. The author argues that in our current culture there’s no need for a total government control; we will voluntarily give up our citizenship by being immersed in entertainment and trivial pursuits. There’s no need for state machinery and thought control and Ministry of Truth – it would give us too much credit as citizens. The need for such institutions would imply that we are interested in politics on a deep level, that we know our history, that we can put current events into historical, cultural and philosophical context and that we can discuss matters using intelligence, reason and perspective. Thus they would seek to suppress it, or to give us false information. But the point is that there’s no need for that.

“What Orwell feared were those who ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned  in a sea of irrelevance…As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984 Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”

Like the author, I’m similarly amused and puzzled by libertarians (especially ones from former Soviet Union) who see censorship and totalitarianism and Big Bad State creeping up on them and infringing on their rights. I guess they were conditioned to feel that way and they were deeply affected by reading 1984 in their youth. But no Soviet Politburo, no KGB goons, no Ministry of Culture could ever have dreamed of having such total control over the minds of the population as, say Fox News or Entertainment Tonight have in modern-day American democracy. People seem to want to be given distractions and gossip; they seem to want to be riled up one minute by a gruesome image, only to forget about it the very next minute, when the weather or sports news comes up.

What’s peculiar about this book is the fact that it was written long before the internet age, in 1985. The author laments the dumbing down of television and actually argues that it is the medium itself – TV as a transmitter of images – discourages discourse the way it used to exist in pre-TV era, in print form. In 19^th century, at the height of the print culture, the public discourse was more intelligent and more involved with the issues of the day. This is because a reading populace was not distracted with images that fade from the screen and memory the next moment and because reading itself involved an act of thinking. This is because during a discussion there was ample time to make an argument, then to make a counterargument. Even presidential debates back then lasted for 5 to 7 hours and were attended to by a well-informed audience. Now imagine such a TV show, where a bunch of guys sit and talk for hours, uninterrupted by commercials and breaking news. No sane TV executive would ever green-light such a project.

So the book was written 30 years ago, and most of its ideas are still relevant today. But TV as the medium is on the decline as we now watch our movies on Netflix and get our news from the internet. Will we change with the medium, I wonder? And if yes, then for the better or for the worse?

A few more awesome and thought-provoking quotes from the book:

“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”

“Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

“For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there’s nothing “Orwellian” about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”

“The Constitution was composed at a time when most free men had access to their communities through a leaflet, a newspaper or the spoken word. They were quite well positioned to share their political ideas with each other on forms and contexts over which they had competent control. Therefore, their greatest worry was the possibility of government tyranny. The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.”

 “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

 “Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”

“And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”

For decades all the self-help books and all the commencement addresses and all the motivational speakers told us to just go for it because we’re worth it. And so we do. We have internalized our own specialness and thus are looking for ways to show it to the world. And sociopaths do it better than the rest of us. You see, when we’re not doing anything, we’re nobodies. If you do nothing there’s no hope, no updates to post on Facebook, no one liners for Twitter, no cool pictures for the Instagram. No stories to tell. Without stories you do not exist.

Thus the concept of NOT doing things is anathema for many, especially when they have access to tools that enable them to do those things. Moreover, let’s not beat around the bush here, we are actively looking for such access. Once we get access, the idea of restraint then becomes obsolete. We didn’t spent all that time and effort on acquiring access to just sit around and do nothing with it. For similar reasons a poker player can’t lay down pocket aces when he’s obviously beat. It took him such a long time to get it. Power lays in doing things, not in restraint.

“Why do you need to wreck this company?” Bud Fox asks Gordon Gekko. “Because it’s wreckable!” he answers, frustrated with such a stupid question. SAC hedge fund manager Steve Cohen displayed a similar mindset when he famously wondered: “What else is there to do?” And that’s it in a nutshell: you’re either doing something or you are a bum. When the music is right and you got your dancing shoes on, well, you go dancing.

Of course, the men of action don’t view themselves as bad guys. Wall Street banker selling high-yielding crap will tell you that he was providing services to his clients who were supposed to know about the product and that he didn’t break any laws; besides he’s on board of several charities, so will you please leave him alone already.

George Zimmerman will tell you that he was standing his ground against a thug and acted within the Florida law.

The Russian rebels will tell you that that all they want is peace, to go home and to cook borsch. That they ended up shooting down a civilian airplane is something that is beyond their control, besides we’re in a war, so shit happens. It’s a plane’s pilot fault that he chose to fly this route, anyway.

I’m trying to think what was going through the mind of a Russian rebel who pulled the BUK trigger that brought down the Malaysian Airlines MH17. Oh, surely, he wasn’t thinking “Let’s shoot down a civilian plane”. No. He was more likely thinking, with a trademark Russian abandon: “This device is some cool shit! There’s war going on so we can pretty much do whatever we want. Eh, fuck it. Let’s shoot and see what happens.” Obviously, it sounds more colorful in Russian. That the war is of his own making and that “what happens” can take an unexpected and grim turn is not part of his consideration.

None of them will stop and think about the true reason for their actions. But I sense a lot of similar thinking. They were looking, actively seeking for the opportunity to demonstrate their potency to the world. For them, such a demonstration is a subconscious message to the rest of us: Behold! I’m here, I exist, look at my footprint. It’s a dark, deadly version of “Look, ma. No hands!”

And yet, all of them had a choice of NOT doing things. What would take that Russian rebel to NOT press a button on a missile? What would take a banker to refuse to sell crap to unsuspecting clients? What would take a George Zimmerman to go about his business? It appears that not doing things requires the possession of qualities that are out of fashion, like humanity, consideration for others, emotional maturity, conscience and restraint. Even putting down those words makes one sound like a loser – it’s embarrassing to have “consideration for others” in your vocabulary these days. It makes you sound like some kind of social worker or a weak-minded hippie. A person with no power in other words. Instead, great value is attached to self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, search for heroism (however dubious), and winning at all costs. It’s all about you, about your personal brand. You do therefore you exist. Do what exactly? Who cares if it puts your name into history books.

We were conditioned to “act”, to be “pro-active”, to crush the competition. Thus very few of us are capable to stand next to the “button” and do nothing. We just don’t have that kind of mental fortitude, we have never developed those qualities and were never encouraged to possess them. One has to be able to NOT take the ring. And if he possesses the ring he has to be able to lay it down. And it is very hard to do. I know this.

The calls for restraint carry a measure of anti-progressive flavor. I realize that. Perhaps that makes me into a small ‘c’ conservative. So what? I have a problem with such progress. I have a problem with those who seek destruction for the sake of destruction. A revolutionary and an asshole usually go hand in hand. If progress means self-determination of assholes, fuck such progress.

Why is the baptism scene from The Godfather so powerful? Why do we connect and empathize with Michael Corleone but not with his victims? While you might cringe at the violence, deep down you cheer for Michael taking down his enemies. Perhaps because we know that those opponents would do the same thing to Michael if given the chance. They are formidable opponents. We can appreciate that. We like ourselves a good Godzilla vs Muto, Rocky vs Ivan Drago smack down.

What does it say, then, about our morality, if we approve of such violence? I think the answer is that morality is malleable. It lives in some curved space-time, in some undefined superposition, and it depends on the tools we use to measure it. The context of violence is important to us. We know it was justified, we know it’s just business. We also learn that The Mob, with all its flaws and violent tactics, actually cares about the community it is operating in. Not out of some benevolence, but out of simple understanding that it needs an environment, a functioning community to operate. Sure, it could ask you to do things, but in return you got protection. You knew you had a recourse if someone fucked with you. Furthermore, we see that the Mob’s rivals and antagonists are on equal footing. The rules are clear, the participants are well-equipped and well-informed of the rules of the game. “Senator, we’re two sides of the same hypocrisy,” Michael Corleone would say.

A mob boss understands that he acts outside of law and when he chooses this path, he’s aware of and prepared to deal with the consequences. He’s prepared to go to jail or be killed. Such a choice should be respected. It’s a mensch-y thing to do. He made his choice. The instruments of his trade are understood: bribery, intimidation and murder. The game that a mob boss plays is on even terms with his opponents.

Because the terms of such business model are understood by all, a trust in the system is not broken when a drug lord does his business. A trust in the system is broken when the elites – the best and brightest among us – undermine the system within the law. Today, labor and ordinary citizens are not on equal footing with capital. Walmart doesn’t care if you scrape by. An investment banker has no qualms about saddling some small town with loads of debt. A credit trader has no qualms about shorting a municipal bond that will spell doom for a bunch of country bumpkins in a flyover country. A hedge fund has no qualms about stiffing a municipality of taxes it owes. A private equity firm has no problem “unlocking” someone else’s value.

The game between labor and capital today is happening on uneven terms. Capital, like the Mob, also asks you to do things, but instead of getting protection, you’re then asked to try harder. Today the weak, the unaware can’t protect themselves because they don’t know, have no way of knowing what’s going on. They have no recourse.

Thus a crafty and clever hedge fund manager, exploiting the loopholes but operating within the law is worse, in my moral universe, than a drug lord operating outside the law: a hedge fund manager targets the weak and the unaware – those who can’t fight back. In such a scenario, a revered libertarian notion of free will carries no value: To have a free will one must first be aware of the circumstances in which he needs to use that will. Drug lord’s customer base are junkies, who, while addicted and chained by their habit, knew what they were getting into. Drug lord’s rivals are well-informed and well-armed. Labor and working class, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. They don’t have the luxury of knowing the new rules of the game and thus are not in a position to say “no” to such a game. A retired public worker whose pension fund is being raided can’t fight back because in most cases he doesn’t even know that his fund is being raided. And even if he knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because the raid is carried out within the construct of the current law. The raid is kosher, even if it smells bad. The courts won’t care if it smells bad, they will care that it’s kosher.

The tools and means of those who act within the law are murky. This kind of game is played very subtly: there’s no shooting, no bloodshed. The target audience has no way of knowing whether they are being fucked or not. There’s no face to face confrontation with those whom you fleece; in fact you don’t even think you’re fleecing them at all. In a remarkable act of self-delusion, in their air-conditioned offices, the elites actually think they keep the wheels of commerce and growth well-oiled and spinning. They think that to take advantage of the unwashed who don’t pay attention because they are too busy surviving or too exhausted to do anything about it is fair game. It is legal, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that you fight a cripple and then have the balls to declare yourself a rightful winner.

The metaphorical cripple is a laid-off factory worker, or better yet, to taunt my liberal friends, an illiterate redneck in Appalachia. We should be equally concerned about both. We should do our best to protect them. By “we” I mean spoiled, self-righteous, self-absorbed, overeducated bi-coastal liberals. We have to protect, or at least to speak for even the most depraved trailer trash out there, simply because they don’t know, they can’t do it themselves. If not us then who? If they can’t engage in this game, then we should do it on their behalf. We shouldn’t care whether they like us or not, they probably won’t and that is not our concern. But we have to become their advocates. If they notice – it’s an added benefit; if they don’t – it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to agree with those we seek to protect and they don’t have to agree with us. This is more important than guns and gays. This isn’t about holding hands and singing kumbaya.

Next time you see a Tea Partier spewing illegible nonsense on some website, don’t wallow in your superiority and laugh at his spelling mistakes. Remember that he’s hurting and upset and lost. Remember, no one is coming for his rescue. Don’t laugh at him for buying gold coins and fearing inflation: that’s what Fox News has been telling him to do for several years. How can we expect him to know what’s going on? What, you think he’s reading Krugman’s blog or knows who Bernanke or Yellen are?

Protecting the most vulnerable member of society is the right thing to do. The welfare of the weak is a buffer against a gated-community type society. Many don’t think it’s a big deal, because they think if it comes to that they will end up on the right side of that gated community. I know I would. But I also know I wouldn’t enjoy it.