Homo homini lupus?

It's never lupus, Dr. House always says.

I first discovered the phrase used for my title "Man is a wolf to man" by watching this video about monkeys and other animals and their senses of fairness, found via the incredible Pig Iron Theatre Co.'s 2013 production of Pay Up tumblr. It jives very much with this hour and forty five minute long talk I listened to before the holiday by Richard Wolffe called Capitalism Hits the Fan, which I'll link via New Paradise Laboratories' FRAME post, where I found it. I might've been involved with getting it there, and I'm sure I found that link via a much-more-informed-than-me Facebook friend or Tumblr follower. I don't remember exactly how, but you can see it on the hyperlink above.

I think I'm sourcing these materials very much out of a sense of fairness to the organizations that are drawing my eye to inspiring content. As someone who's in sales, and very much wants to learn not only how to live an awake, aware life about the consumer choices I make, I also want to locate myself in a net of interdependent thinkers and coagulaters of information that I rely on to make whatever kinds of conclusions I make. Sourcing material becomes a kind of currency, in a way, a good faith to give you all the chance to see what it is I've seen, and make your own conclusions on it.

I should also note that I'm interested in practicing a fair amount of transparency in terms of my process. Not quite sure where it's heading. It's having an impact on my play, which I'm happy to say has actually started to want itself to be written, and so I'm taking the opportunity to lean into as much candor as possible, fully aware that that is still a performance, and me talking about it, and talking about talking about it, is still angling myself to be seen in a certain light, perhaps to cast shadow against things I don't want to be seen, or talked about. Not sure, at this juncture, if I can offer much in terms of clarity or coherent thoughts on that. I guess we hide what we hide, whether we want to or not. I'm starting to recognize in myself a certain lack of interest or awareness in really hiding a lot, though. I am stronger when I'm vulnerable, which I learned from Pig Iron's Summer Session clown training. It might be part of why I'm returning to this blog project, and letting my voice hang out there in the wind.

One free radical thought before I get going, though. I've made a timer for myself today. I'm seeing World War Z at 8:10pm tonight, likely solo, and I have a feeling the whole issue of man being wolf to man may come up. So this blog post is sort of like a repository for thoughts swirling in my head prior to seeing it. I've not read the book the movie is based on, though likely will after seeing the movie. I'm excited to be getting back more into reading.

But anyway, the point, about transparency and fairness, is that the assumption the TED talk on animal instances of fairness & caring for the wellbeing of others, working together, altruism, is that animals DON'T do that, that men are at their most bestial when they only seek out for themselves, and at their most human when they help others. Acknowledge others. Me wanting to share where I'm getting my thoughts from, so you can watch/read them and can make your own decisions, is a way of gesturing to you that I think you're as smart as I am (or, at least, I hope you feel that way) and I care about you not perceiving me as claiming this knowledge for myself, as coming from myself, somehow making my status above yours, intellectually. I hope the knowledge helps, in whatever way it can, because I do think a lot of the knowledge is helpful.

To surmise and distill hopefully not too reductively the argument of the TED animal talk, animals aren't all selfish bastards. Capuchin monkeys don't like it when one gets fed grapes (a superior food) and one cucumbers. They have an innate sense of fairness, or at least of when things are NOT fair. Chimps work together to bring food in for the both of them. Elephants, too. And while humans are obviously not animals, in many ways, our caring about fairness, about equality, justice, is perhaps more engrained and emotional, and less rational and idealistic, than we thought.

The TED animal talk, an anti-venom to the notion that man is a wolf to man, though, is being counteracted in my mind by the Capitalism Hits the Fan video, which tore down some very important ignorances I've had as to what the state of the United States and its economy is in. Definitely worth the full hour and forty five minute listen/watch, especially if you care about the Great Recession and the plight of the American worker beyond the political rhetoric. Richard Wolffe has an annoying voice, I will admit that, but he clarifies for me a lot I only had a hazy understanding of, about the US' history in terms of work-force and wages and the flawed nature of capitalism.

Basically, until the 1970's, America had been in a hundred and fifty year growth period in terms of both worker productivity and worker wages. Working Americans enjoyed a rising standard of living as they also became more productive at their work. It's an entirely unique situation in the history of the world, and it makes a lot of sense as to why we have the sense of American exceptionalism that we have. Before the 70's, you truly could come to the States and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, at least in terms of being paid better wages as you worked. China, too, had a revolution in the 70's, though, and with the new power of American distribution brought by the advent of Walmart, it became a cheap-goods producing powerhouse. I'm not exactly clear why this happened, but America stopped paying its workers more for more productivity, they instead were paid the same, even as Americans worked more and more hours, they were essentially paid the same wages, they didn't rise with costs of living, etc. etc. America became a huge debtor nation, because capitalist corporations figured out how to take the money they would've spent paying people more, and sold it to them as credit, which they could earn huge amounts of interest on, further bankrupting and burdening Americans with more work to do, for more hours, for no more pay.

A key moment for me, emotionally, was when Wolffe talked about the American worker having this kind of private reaction to the hard times, of blaming himself. He didn't get into the right school or get the right job, he isn't working hard enough. It really struck me how rigged the game was, getting us as a population to become overstressed, overworked, using the one thing that was sure to soothe us when we weren't working: by buying stuff, cheap crappy stuff, sold to us by the people who own our debt. For the first time, I felt like maybe my own senses of being overworked, underpaid, in over my head in debt, and just now starting to crawl an infinitesimal bit out of it, weren't my own fault, like I'd truly been lead to believe. Maybe my enjoyment of Apple products and Starbucks coffee and Hollywood movies and Netflix and the internet weren't solely because I'm a lazy, worthless consumer, wasting away at jobs that don't use my skill sets and underpay me for my time *(Definitely way less the case now, and I have to say, this doesn't apply to teaching when I was doing that, because I absolutely did not have that kind of soul-draining experience then-- rather a soul-enriching one.), that my values of hard work and excelling at everything that have been engrained in me since birth, are actually a response to a growing desperation in the system of capitalism itself. And we're living in a time where all that shit is hitting the fan, and maybe it's not MY fault, but ALL our faults, and actually more accurately mostly the decisions of the top tenth of a tenth of a percent of us, who profit most from the way everything is as it currently is.

These thoughts are very preliminarily sketched. I mostly took away that emotional relief, that I wasn't the only one feeling like I was overstressed and underpaid (though, again, now I'm doing much better, magically, in a very unique situation for someone my age in the field I'm in), and how surprised I am that I'm not surprised our system is actually rigged to do that. I thought it was just a theatre person reality, that the capitalist realities of play producing meant that our idealism and passion and love for what we do was going to take the place of actual payment and ability to focus on ONLY doing what we want to do, that we NEED a focus-splitting day job because theatre is about art, but needs commerce to survive, so you will not be paid much and will need to focus-split, but you'll still get to be a part of ART, which needs all of you to be done the best it can. So feel bad about not doing it your best, while you're scraping away at your crappy day job. But don't complain, because that's weak, and your fault for not being hard-working enough.

I actually do believe very strongly in the value of hard work, and I can take long hours and little resources like the rest of us. And I'm sure there are plenty of times where I am definitely being lazy and defeatist, instead of hunkering down and powering through. Not to diminish my human weaknesses at all. But maybe, just maybe, the story is a little more complicated than that, and I'm being set up, like we all are, to fail a little bit more than we would if we were given the right management, the right incentives to work, the right kind of job that gave us the right sense of ourselves. Maybe the mission is as important as the pay day, when you get down to it. Maybe believers make better workers.

There's a lot more to unpack in all this, but that's surmiseably what has been going on in my head. We've got an animal sense of fairness built in, actually, we aren't all wolves to each other, but we're also not living in the pack we thought we were living in, and we're very slow to realize just how rigged the game now is. I don't think it's the America we want to have, or want our children to be in. But the big question, of course, is how to change it, when it's keeping us just sated or distracted enough to keep itself alive. For now.

There's obviously much more to say about everything, but that's it for me for right now.