Aim At Something High

I’ve been continuing with my reading of Walden. Thoreau spends about ten pages complaining about fashion and how people waste time and energy chasing the latest trends.

On the issue I think he overlooks is the social function that clothing serves. It is simple to dismiss clothing as mere materialistic waste unless one considers the necessary information it conveys about the wearer. That isn’t what I want to get into here, however. What interests me is how he closes:

[A]s far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Thinking this area, I wandered around for a while asking people:

Imagine that you somehow come to have $500 million. What would you do with it?

The problem is I kept getting answers like, “buy real estate” and “invest it.” Answers that essentially were about taking a bunch of money and making it into even more money. So I started telling an old joke about a guy who walks into a bar with an ostrich.

I’ll not take the space to tell the whole joke, but one of the pieces of setup is every time he reaches into his pocket to get the money to pay for something, the exact amount he needs is there. Be it a piece of gum or a new car, he can buy whatever he wants whenever he wants it.

This idea fascinates me. I wrote a while back about being King of the CVS and the idea that letting go of scarcity puts a person in a fundamentally different frame of mind. The form of the question I like now is:

Imagine that every time you reach into your pocket there is the exact amount of money to pay for whatever you want. You can have whatever you want, what do you do?

Would you go to your job tomorrow? Would you just go sit on a beach somewhere? Would you give bunches of stuff away? What would you do with your freedom?

I went to see Batman tonight and really liked it. I want to talk about it for a bit, so if you’ve not seen it and want to be surprised, you best stop reading now.

My favorite part of the film was the Joker. One of the things I really dislike in more movies are the villains. The screenwriter needs some yin for their yang, some conflict to push their story forward, and so they make something up, but most of the time they end up being mere caricatures of real people.

Take Obadiah Stane as played by Jeff Bridges in the recent Ironman movie. Why does he go around cheating and stealing and murdering? As best I can tell it is because being a capitalist has turned him into a giant douchebag. (Seriously, the guy’s name is “Stain.”) He is apparently so complete in his douchebaggery that he has given up any pretext of selflessness whatsoever.

How many people actually live like this? How many rich people revel in the huddled masses that starved so they could drive around in a $500,000 car? Pretty much none. No one wants to believe that they are a part of the problem, and Bridges character falls flat because he leaves behind that very essential quality.

Not so with the Joker though. Consider the dialog between Batman and the Joker as he interrogates him in the jail:

Joker: Those mob fools want you gone so they can get back to the way things were. But I know the truth: there’s no going back. You’ve changed things. Forever.

Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?

Joker: [Gleeful laughter] I… [laugh] I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No. You… You complete me.

Batman: You’re garbage who kills for money.

Joker: Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not. Even if you’d like to be. To them you’re just a freak. Like me. They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out… like a leper. See, their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these, uh, these “civilized people” they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve.

In particular it was that line, “They’re only as good as the world allows them to be,” that stood out for me.

If I say, “yeah, if I didn’t have to worry about money then I’d devote myself to working on a big problem like poverty or disease prevention or something like that.” What am I saying other than essentially, “I have this picture of what a really moral life looks like, but I’m not living it because it’s too inconvenient.” Am I not only being as moral as the world will let me be?

This issue is one that I find myself continually coming back to: when does one know that they’ve given enough? For example, whenever the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s order, moves into an area to work on poverty one of the first things they do is disconnect their hot water. The thinking is, “what right do we have to the luxury of hot water when the people around us don’t have access to it?”

We all do, to some extent, have inconsistent moral positions. The character of the Joker is simply bent on revealing this fact to everyone forcefully. The anarchist visionary gone bad is the same sort of character you have in Dr. Horrible.

So the Joker isn’t just a bastard. He doesn’t simply kill people for fun. The issues that he sees with the world are ones that do exist. His method for dealing with the problem though is just completely sociopathic.

When he says that Batman completes him though, I think he is getting at more than just “you give me something to do.” His thesis is that people are fundamentally frightened fighting animals. The things that he does aren’t to make himself rich, but rather to show the world this truth. Batman’s thesis is essentially that opposite that people are basically good and drawn astray by violence. The movie is cast as these two moral titans fighting for the soul of the city.

I liked the prisoners’ dilemma scene with the boats because it brought the conflict down to normal people and away from this moral battle by idealogical powers. I think at times the complexity of individual lives can get ground under in the large-scale philosophical considerations.