Worth, Authority, Envy

What is “worth”?

More people pay more money in the aggregate, for example, as wages and rewards to Elvis Presley, an entertainer, than to His Holiness the Pope in Rome, a prince of the Church. But is Elvis truly worth more than the Pope?

By the same token, a housewife and mother receives no wage at all for bearing and raising children, thus saving the human race from absolute destruction once per every generation: indeed, a woman who copulates for pay is regarded as dishonorable. If a prostitute is less socially acceptable than a honeymoon bride, why is she paid less?

As I recall, Jesus Christ received neither wage nor stipend for this ministry work, which saved all human souls from hellfire, albeit some of his heirs and assigns are maintained by voluntary contributions and tithes, as well a grants from monarchs.

Likewise, the Buddha received no pay for his lectures and tutoring in the art of enlightenment; Socrates was slain by the city he helped to make the most famous seat of philosophy and literature in the world; the Founding Father lost their lives and fortunes in the revolution they engineered, or many of them did, and were not paid money to recompense them for the work.

The pay of even of highly skilled soldiers in war is generally far less than that of successful whoremongers, drugrunners, and racetrack owners.  The pornographer Hugh Hefner was able to buy a mansion with the proceeds of his empire of girly magazines and gambling joints, for example.

Yet again, John Milton received less than ten pounds for writing PARADISE LOST, a priceless work of genius. How is that fair?

There are at least three versions of the word “worth” at play here, and it is the deliberate ambiguity between them which allows the politicized devil-cult of envy and covetousness known as Marxism to exist.

The first is the worth of the thing in the grand scheme of things, as if seen from the point of view of an omniscience superhuman being, who no doubt places a higher value on acts of selfless love and heroism, diligence and industry, loyalty and prudence, than on such things as idle dissipation, vices, tippling, whoring, bear-baiting, and wagering.

This is worth in the moral sense: virtue is not rewarded in this life, and vice is pleasant, and things the world, the flesh and the devil reward as worthwhile are in stark contrast to their worth in heaven.

So when a country doctor named Elmo is paid in bacon for saving the life of the swineherd’s son, whereas Elvis is a millionaire for singing catchy dance-tunes, this offends our sense of worth, because the worldly payment — a few dollars’ worth of tasty meat product — is insignificant compared to the moral worth of a human life, which, seen through the eyes of a father’s love, is incomparable. What is that, compared to Jailhouse Rock?

The second sense of the word is the worth of the thing taken in the aggregate as opposed to the individual case.

All the gold in the world is not as valuable to mankind as all the iron in the world, as gold is too soft to be used for making swords or horseshoes or the support beams in buildings or bridges.

So it is a paradox that an ounce of gold can purchase for ten metric tons of iron ore, since gold is less useful.

This paradox is easily resolved: what gold is used for primarily, now and through all history, is currency. Several properties make gold useful to this purpose: it is fungible, divisible, readily identifiable, relatively scarce, always in demand, but also portable and easily stored. Unlike iron, gold does not rust.

This so-called paradox is actually a slight of hand: goldsmiths and minters, bankers and dentists do not use gold for the game goods and services that blacksmiths and engineers use iron.

This was also the thinking behind the droolingly idiotic idea the Jeff Bezos, whose service I have used both to sell and to buy every book I own over the past ten years somehow was not worth the money he freely and honestly earned.

It is not merely an idiotic idea, it is droolingly idiot, because the idea is simple enough that one can explain it to a schoolchild. Selling one cup of lemonade for a sawbuck nets less than selling a dozen cups for one dollar a pop, because ten is less than twelve.

Likewise with Dr. Elmo. The ten pounds of bacon he receives for saving the one life of the swineherd’s son is worth roughly fifty dollars. If Elvis sells a 45 rpm record at the record store for .50 cents, no one seems outraged that the doctor’s one day of work is being paid one hundred times what it took Elvis so many takes and outtakes to record.

But if five million teen-aged bobby-soxers buy this Elvis record with their pocket change nationwide over a period of a year, he is being paid one hundred thousand times the money Dr. Elmo received for saving a human life.

Outrage over this is a concoction, and illusion produced by metaphorical speech. If the swineherd (a very wealthy swineherd) gave Elvis ten million dollars for a dance tune, but only gave fifty to the doctor for his son’s treatment, we might well think him both stingy and extravagant, and be outraged. But the marketplace is not a person. It is not even a corporation or a kingdom, that is, fictional persons in the eyes of the law. We only speak of the marketplace as “deciding” the height of wages as a metaphor or convenience of speech.

This is merely a metaphor, which uses the word “worth” to refer to different categories, of things differing in number, time, scope, and so on. This is the proverbial apples and oranges, that are not actually being compared.

The third use of the word is worth in the scientific sense, as a category in the study of economics. When the discussion is about economics, this is the only sense in which the word makes sense. To begin a conversation with the economic observation that an hour of labor from a physician is worth fifty dollars, whereas a year of sales from a popular 45 rpm record is worth ten million dollars, and then to end the conversation with the conclusion that the marketplace has decided that the dance tune is “worth” more than the life of the doctor’s patient is merely the informal logically fallacy of ambiguity.

The marketplace is not judging the worth of a human life, since those are not for sale. In the moral sense of the term, the marketplace is not judging anything at all.

Scientifically speaking, the market, by allowing for indirect exchange via currency what would otherwise be rude barter, discovers, but does not determine, through the aggregate buying and selling actions of all parties in the marketplace,  what is the currency exchange value of the one service, physician, over one period of time, an hour, for one customer, a swineherd, versus another service, pop singer, over another period of time, a year, dealing with a different group of customers, a nation’s worth of bobby-soxers, record stores and juke boxes.

Since both the doctor’s services and the pop singer’s were exchanged for currency rather than direct barter, the exchange rates can be compared.

By the scientific definition, the “worth” of a good or service is what a given person or a given group of people are ready, willing, and able to give in exchange for it.

I suppose there is also a fourth sense of the term, which is neither moral, nor metaphorical, nor scientific. In all human activity, there is an element of good or bad fortune, factors leading to events over which no human has control nor influence. Some farmers prosper when the weather favors them, some fail. Some bankers loose money while others gain. Singers as skilled as Elvis, or more so, happen not to be in fashion, or suddenly no one wants to see tapdancing in musical scenes in movies any more. Some children are born into wealth families, some to poverty. Some babies are blessed by good fairies or by the conjunction of beneficent stars, others are cursed.

I am not sure what to call this. A man who makes more money than expected, because a change in fashion or change in fortune makes his good or service to be more in demand, hence higher in price, in the specific sense that he only controls the factors of production he controls, and by definition does not control what he does not control, can be said not to be “worth” what he makes, in the rather limited sense that, if life were a game controlled by an umpire, and all the factors of fate and fortune were deliberately minimized, and all athletes separated by sex and weight class, so that even those factors nature bestowed at birth, not the product of athletic training, are reduced insofar as possible in their influence over the outcome, in that limited sense, yes, a fortunate businessman or entertainer did not do work “worth” his reward.

But life is not an athletic contest where you only go up against competition of your sex and in your weight class, using standardized equipment on a level playing field. Life is not fair. Life is not evenhanded. Some are given five talents by the master, some three, some only one. One invests the talent as best he may, lest the master be angry when the day of accounting comes.

The free market is not a god, and has no ability to ameliorate the frightening ever-turning wheel of the blithe, blind goddess fortune. She raises whom she will and throws down whom she will, and if you wish to complain that life is not evenhanded in the distribution of the blessings given at birth or thereafter, please summon up the shade of Job of Uz. He will listen to your whining with gravity and sympathy.

Hence, in this final sense, the green-eyed envy monster sense of the word, the whining sense, a man is said not to be “worth” his good fortune because he did not earn it. By definition, if he earned it, it is a wage or work product. We call it “fortune” when and only when the reward, good or bad, is unearned.

The argument that one should not reap the benefits of one’s good fortune on the grounds that it is not earned is akin to the argument that, since no man asked before birth to be born, his life is not earned, hence not his, and so he can be enslaved or slain like wild game or livestock. It is not an argument worth refuting, save by a hoot of laughter.

So much for the ambiguity of the word “worth.”

The fundamental logical errors of Marxism are a separate question — basically all Marxism can be summed up by saying “Blame firemen for arson.”

Modern post-rational secularism is critical social justice Marxism or social Marxism, also called Barking Mad Marxism. Classical Marxism blames the free market for the market failures caused by government interference the market, using this as an excuse to demand more and more disturbing interference in the market, allegedly as a cure. The post-rational secularist which grew out of this bankrupt notion is parallel.

Barking Mad Marxism blames Christendom generally and America specifically for evils that spring from and afflict all mankind in all history, but which only Christendom or only America has ever ameliorated or cured. And, as before, these complaint are used to justify demands for more and more disturbing political injustices or social customs whose effect is to aggravate, deepen, and expand those very evils.

Most Marxists, either Classical or Barking Mad, never examine the argument Marx gives, and cannot be induced to do so.

Such a blind, deaf and dumb partisans are easily found. Such Cloudcuckooland creatures state, without even trying to argue rationally, that fairness is unfair, therefore unfairness is fair, so that those who earned nothing should get everything, and those who earned anything should get nothing. If questioned, the creature from Cloudcuckooland changed the subject, launches another accusation, or leaves.

Most Marxists take the conclusion as a given, and take on faith that there is a sound theological and metaphysical argument to show how history can be reduced to a science which predicts the inevitable revolt of the masses against an utterly imaginary plutocratic overlord, who dresses like Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly Game. No, most Marxists join the cult of hate because of the addictive pleasure of hate.

Marxism, and, indeed, all modern thought springing from it, springs from the axiom that, in a Godless universe, no authority is legitimate, and no human relationship, parent-child, man-wife, lover-beloved, master-servant, client-patron, subject-king, citizen-lawmaker, laity-priest, patient-physician, tutor-student, no human relationship, none, no one, zero, have any legitimate point or purpose.

All are remorseless Darwinian struggles for despotic power one against another, or, what Hobbes called the War of All Against All.

In that universe, no one earns any wages because no one deserves nor merits anything by any means. If you have money, it is because you use the despotic “economic power” at your command to wrest it away from others with an equal claim to yourself: justice is merely the will of the stronger.

Without this as a basis, such absurd claims as that a wealthy man who earned his wealth earned more than he is “worth” is merely a logical contradiction: it is saying his customers and clients and patrons did not exchange with him what they exchanged with him.

With this basis, however, saying the wealthy man’s work is not “worth” his reward is a tautology. There is no such thing as “worth” in the Marxist worldview. There is merely power. Hence, if no one’s earnings are legitimate, then the earning of Elvis are not.

In the Marxist worldview, there is no legitimate use of power, either. There is no god, all morality is subjective, merely an ideological superstructure meant to justify class interests, or the by product of arbitrary cultural constructs, or the product of unadmitted race hatred or sexual dominance, &c.

In the Christian view, things are opposite:

King Arthur, stricken by mortal wounds after the battle of Camlann, commands Sir Bedevere to take his far-famed sword, Excalibur, and hurl it into the lake whence it came. According to Tennyson, Bedevere twice disobeys the order, thinking the sword too rare and wondrous to cast away. Arthur wages, but is too weak to rise and compel by blows of fist Bedevere to obey him.

But Bedevere on the third command, feels the pang of shame, and, bound by oath and lead by honor, not understanding the meaning of the order, obeys, returns to the lake, whirls the sword aloft and throws it. Because he is obedient, he beholds a wonder: a fair lady’s arm clad in shimmer samite rises from the waters, catches the shining weapon by the grip, salutes thrice, then descends into the deep, never to be seen in middle earth again, not until Arthur’s return.

The modern theories springing from Marxism have no explanation and no understanding of such things as honor, fealty, authority.

There are neither citizens loyal to the law, nor subjects who vow fealty to a king, nor students who honor teachers, nor  no wives who love, honor, and obey their husbands, nor sons who obey their fathers, nor is there peace, goodwill, and harmony between equals, because there are no equals.

There is only exploiter and exploited,  conqueror and conquered, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed, master and slave, sadist and masochist, forever.

These modern day Gnostics think they have penetrated through all the illusions of unscientific thinking, and discovered the Hobbesian and Darwinian struggle for dominance underpinning all human psychology, economic activity, history, society. This one idiot theory explains everything, because it reduces all human motivations to one motivation: powerlust.

By this theory there are the sleepwalkers and the enlightened. The enlightened are also the ungrammatical, and refer to themselves as “the woke.”

Awakened to the truth of Darwin, they now penetrate all the illusions of honor, love, fellowship, morality, religion, and goodwill, to realize these are all masks to hide a lust for power. Children, students, faithful employees, obedient wives, law-abiding citizens, and loyal subjects are all self-deluded fools who have not “woke” to the cold and scientific fact that they are victims of age-bigotry and class-bigotry, misogyny, and reactionary thinking.

Indeed, every disagreement with your roaring emotions and the meaningless clamor in your brain can be only and solely motivated by mental ignorance or moral deficiency. Your self righteous sense of screaming wrath is the sole oracle of infinite, invincible, unquestionable truth; the truth that there is no truth; and any who question or speak against you are partisans of the wicked world system, the benighted, and they are all them jointly and severally liable for any wickedness the world, or the laws of economics, or the mechanics of the physical nature, or the events of history, or the nature of logic, or the limits of the human condition, have ever done.

If one cannot spin straw into gold, it is due to their cruel oppression. If a man cannot be a woman, it is due to their cruel oppression. If the weather is hot in summer, it is due to their cruel oppression.

Everything, good or bad, is bad, and so can be blamed on them. Every evil you yourself are doing, you can accuse them of doing.

This idiot theory excuses any vice and any crime.

Neither loyalty nor gratitude nor dignity is owed to anyone, anywhere, but an infinity of whatever your raging heart of greed demands is owed to you. You have a right to health insurance, education, medicine, moonrockets, paid vacations, harem girls, golden mountains, palaces aloft on clouds, and fruit of the trees of paradise. Indeed, you even have the right to castrate yourself, don a wig and a dress, and become a woman. Reality itself will and must bend to your will. It is your right, damn it all! YOUR RIGHT!

All historic wrongs done to long dead strangers, you may now demand recompense from the Jews, or any other weak but wealthy victim of your blind and pointless hate.

Such is the worldview of men who seek, by bloodshed, to produce a heaven on earth. It is the black banner of Anarchy and the inverted pentacle of Sathanas.