MXBZ

Each of us individually has an almost unlimited ability to do whatever we choose. We mostly ignore this power. We sometimes waste it, mainly through vanity and pride. More dishearteningly, we waste and disrespect ourselves by our complacency, by our willingness to sit rather than stand, shake our heads rather than object. We lose our voice and instead of standing on our chair in the auditorium of our Society, we sit down and can't be distinguished from those around us.

In any case, Society is the sum of our contributions to it, and currently our Society is in the red—we are a negative sum. We take more than we give and expect more than we deserve. All the while we sit. Our complaints rise as a groan for more, more, more.

Ayn Rand said:

"I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities."

And don't we blame it all on the world! "The world is wrong and we can't do anything about it," we say, "Society is corrupt, but we didn't do it and we can't fix it." Enough blame. We have nothing to lose by admitting we are wrong; we have everything to gain by laying our pride aside and replacing it with self-respect.

The world we live in is the sum of all of us. Each of us is born with undefined potential to increase that sum. But we are also born with the ability to give away our potential, and in some cases we give away more than our own. Our actions may steal the potential of future generations.

So stand up. Because this mess is no one else's fault. There's no playing hot potato with this. The world is not fair, but we've made it that way. Society is valueless, but we're silently consenting to that demoralization. Our complaints added to the groan rising in the auditorium don't help. They just make it harder to hear.

Karl Marx said:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living."

We are alive now.

We didn't choose our troubles and it isn't fair, but we are alive now and the world and Society we have now are all we have. It's never been fair.

But when our mom and dad called us into the living room because someone broke the lamp, too many of us said "It wasn't me." Some of us confessed and cleaned up the pieces, but most often we didn't confess and we didn't clean up. Now we have 14 lamps shattered and a few of the good natured among us are trying to clean up the rest even though they didn't break them.

How the lamps broke is only important so far as it will help us move forward without breaking more. If they were broken by playing baseball in the house, then let's not do that in the future. Or if they were broken because we were walking with our heads in sleeping bags, then let's not do that in the future. But the chances are that we have no idea why the lamps are really broken, because the truth is we were doing a million things at once in the living room.

That was a metaphor.

We must do something instead arguing. We're getting no where.