First, for those who didn’t read yesterday, I got my COVID and flu shots on Saturday, prompted by Son#1 contracting yet another case of COVID at work. (Retail, even banking retail, maybe especially banking retail, is decidedly germy.) The vaccines were every bit as bad as they usually are. I do not recommend doing both at once… But I was not sick, as in “contagious”, just sick as in “feeling like crap”. Moreover, I could count on being fine, if tired, by Monday, so there was no chance of missing work — even if I could afford that, because I am out of paid sick days for 2024 (mostly due to COVID). So this week, I had my normal two days to accomplish all that I need to accomplish in order to support my life, regardless of how cruddy I felt.
It was pointed out that I managed to accomplish a good deal despite the vaccination cruddies. I guess that is true. I did manage to do a lot of work. But it was not actually a choice. Or maybe it is one, or the sum of many, that I made a long time ago…
You see, I have to do all this work, so I don’t really notice doing it. I would notice it more if I didn’t do it. There are consequences. Worse than vertigo and a headache, for sure.
I have to do all the marketing and prep all the meals for the week, or I don’t eat. I have to do all the cleaning and maintenance on the house, my car, my garden, and so on, or things break down. Some things I can put off until I am feeling better. Others, not so much. When the state inspection sticker on the car is expired, I have to go address that. When the cat is out of food, that needs to be amended. When there is a threat of frost and the garden is filled with tender plants that I’m not quite ready to let go, then I have to make sure they are kept warm. Similarly, if the storm windows are still open and it’s going to be near freezing overnight for the rest of the week, then I need to take care of that or I freeze. I can’t do very much with my two or three hours that aren’t sucked up by my job each weekday. So I have to get it all done on the weekend. Or pay some really steep costs… like not having dinner… like getting a citation on my car… like losing yet another bed of veg… or… well, we just don’t antagonize the cat in any manner. There are not words for her forms of retribution…
This is how much of the world lives. We work for wages for most of our waking hours at least five days a week. We get two days, at most, to accomplish all that is necessary to being alive, regardless of how we feel. Most of us work outside the home, so there is no doing double duty, keeping the laundry going while working on a loan package, for example. Most of us do not earn enough to pay for others to do our laundry or make our food or clean the house. If we have kids or partners, we might get help from them. Maybe. Though it’s often the case that the kids and partners just add to the workload. Some of us have actual houses that we have to maintain rather than a landlord who may or may not be prodded into fixing things. And even fewer of us are trying, desperately, to reduce our load on the world and not use disposable things, not buy from places that produce waste or sell poison, not support all these industries of convenience that are keeping us all shackled to our wage work while destroying the planet we call home.
For me this is a choice, albeit not much of a choice. I could not afford to buy take-out every day. I honestly don’t know how others can. I suspect the increasing hunger in this country is related to the increasing cost of a drive-thru burger and fries relative to stagnant wages. I also could not afford to take my laundry to the cleaners or pay for someone to come and fix the small things around the house. And I certainly can’t afford to just buy new rather than maintain and repair… Again, I don’t know how this is possible for others. I don’t make generous wages, but I’m not at the bottom of the income ladder, by any measure. I have to pay taxes most years, if that is any indication of where I am. Not rich enough to pay accountants to hide my wealth, not poor enough to get credits. There are so many who are below me. How does this country even work anymore! It seems to me that basic life needs are increasingly beyond the means of most people in this country. (And let me be clear, this is a “developed world” problem. Those who live outside of this system do not have wage work coming between them and necessity. They meet their needs directly, with their own labor, not with money to pay others.)
So, there is a certain degree of making a virtue of necessity for me. I can’t actually afford to live the life of convenience even if I wanted to, so it is good that all indications tell me that that lifestyle is morally bankrupt. Moreover, it is not going to last very much longer. It is crumbling under its own economic dis-logic as well as running headlong into a hard crash against planetary limits. It will not be a choice for anybody, affordable or otherwise, in the very near future. If you want to live in that future, you’d best be building ways to meet your needs outside of that system right now. And that is what I am doing. Though I do not have the wealth to focus on just that, so I have to do this building and maintaining what I have built on the weekends.
And this is where orthodoxy and orthopraxis come in.
First, what are these strange words? Orthodoxy is translated as “right belief”, to believe or espouse something that is generally accepted as morally correct (sometimes just factually correct, but we’re going to ignore those flat-earth types…). In religions, orthodoxy is accepting the tenets of a given faith system as truth. For example, in the Judeo-Christian traditions, the orthodox faith, the correct belief, is that God created the world in seven days. You can quibble on all the nouns and possibly the verb, but if you name yourself a Christian, you must believe in this statement as a statement of fact. If you do not believe this, then the Church, or whatever hierarchical body you follow, has the right to cast you out, to name you an unbeliever, possibly name you a heretic.
These things carried more baggage in days gone by, but heresy, violating the norms of Christian belief from within the faith itself, is still the ultimate sin. There have been far more heretics burned than witches… and even the witches had to be brought within the faith before officials could mete out punishment on them. Note that they were accused of cavorting with the Christian devil, not local deities unrelated to Christianity. Until they were so accused, they were not violating orthodoxy; they were merely pagans and infidels and unbelievers. In fact, up until the Spanish Inquisition in the late 15th century, the official Church line on witchcraft was that it did not exist, that these people who followed different gods or worked folk magic were at worst delusional, not heretics, and so therefore not the Church’s problem. (Unless the deluded possessed something the Church wanted, of course…)
Our culture is based on Christianity, and so we put a good deal of stock in orthodoxy, this idea of correct thinking. This system only rewards those who toe the line, who are faithful. We are harshly punished if we don’t think in approved ways, from childhood onwards. Education is largely a quest for orthodoxy, unfortunately. It is also, not unrelatedly, the way we filter out those who will receive the highest rewards as adults… those who will get the “good jobs”. Only those who come from privilege get to question things. And those who come from privilege generally do not question the beliefs that got them where they are.
This focus on correct thinking makes us extremely pliable to propaganda and other forms of thought control. We know that to be unbelievers is to be cast out of the culture. We will lose our jobs, our friends, our homes, our lives. So we want desperately to appear to be orthodox — even if we don’t actually believe — and we will buy into whatever that dox might be, no matter how illogical or how painful — maybe all the more enthusiastically if we don’t actually believe and feel a need to cover up that lack of proper faith.
This is really the only explanation for wage work, by the by…
Orthopraxis, however, is correct action. It is doing things that are deemed good, either by a faith system or by practical application, achieving the most good in effect. The root of praxis and practical is the same. Praxis is practice. It is discipline. It is embodied act. It is work. Orthopraxis is doing the right work.
We don’t much like work. In fact, this too stems from the Christian faith, or rather the Protestant version thereof, where faith is the only important thing. All acts are superfluous. If you believe correctly (or if your name is on a godly list that you must fervently believe in) you will achieve salvation no matter how venal your life. Of course, you have to prove your belief to your god, but that’s a private thing, between you and your deity, not between you and the world. What you do in this world, what you do to this world does not matter. It’s what you think — particularly what you think of the immaterial “next” world.
Does this sound a little like the arguments around making lifestyle changes that might bring your consumption within planetary boundaries? Well, of course it does. This is exactly how we think. It is more important to espouse a belief, to talk about it, to defend it, to protest its detractors, to fly all around the planet proselytizing your faith, more important to believe than it is to actually do the things — or not do the things — that your faith might demand. We are a culture of orthodoxy. We don’t even know what orthopraxis is. (I should note that my spell-checker does not accept that orthopraxis is a word.)
And this comes back to why I work as hard as I do even when I feel like shit. I am not a big one on belief. I am an embodied creature. I don’t care much about correct thinking or influencing others to think correctly. I care about correct practice, about doing what will spread the most good and what will most curtail harm. I don’t care if you believe the world is flat. I don’t care if you believe in eternal life after death. That’s all on you. I do care about what you do. I care about what I do. I care about reducing waste, about eliminating toxicity, about creating justice and parity, about making people happy, making this world healthy. I care about doing the work, the actual practice that will lead to these outcomes. I care a great deal about those who talk a good talk and never seem to walk anywhere.
I have to clean the house and tend to the garden and cook all my food on the weekends because I can’t afford otherwise in either time or money. However, if I had time and money, I would still do those things — and NOT do wage work. Because tending to my own needs is the practice that will bring my body within planetary boundaries. I have found that the world does not care what you believe. It cares what you do. If you aren’t doing what needs to be done to bring yourself within planetary limits, then it does not matter in the slightest what you say or think about those limits. And that is the real reason I must tend to the garden and prepare my own food and so on. I don’t believe in proper belief. I believe in the work done.
Here is a bit more of the orthopraxy monster essay that just keeps sprouting appendages…
But then again… maybe these aren’t appendages, appendices… Really, I suppose the whole point of this blog is to say that we need praxis. There is work to be done and you, generally and specifically, need to stop dorking around in mind space and go do it. No matter your physical or cognitive abilities, there are things that desperately need doing and that you are able to do. Go do them. Now.
This praxis, this doing of work, is atonement, by the way… it is actual at-one-ment, becoming one with the world.
It is also cleansing. Of ourselves and of our culture and of the messes we’ve made of the world.
In any case, here is a brief look at the power behind the praxis… I think it sounded much better at 3am when it sprang out of my dreams and, imperfectly captured, onto paper… but still… make of it what you will…
It is said that power corrupts. What we mean by that is that power over others tends to remove moral boundaries. We usually do not mean that powerlessness is corrupting. But it is. The lack of power is just as corrupting as a surfeit. Because when we talk about corruption, we are not talking about power…
Power is ability. It is efficacy. It is the capacity to effect change. Power is potential work, the ability to take care of needs and wants. In the real world, not the world of ideas and labels, power equals the capacity to do work in a system. Taking that capacity from others, taking their power, does not make you powerful, does not make you more able to do work. You don’t even get their power. You are still an ineffectual parasite. You are not powerful if you have no ability to do work.
I have seen philosophers struggle with this because, well, they don’t work. But also they can’t see a world without hierarchy, without rank, without unequal distribution of the means to meet needs. They don’t understand how this lens of inequality distorts what they are able to perceive on the world. They talk about power over being corrupt but power within is what gets things done. Power within is ability while power over is forcing other people to use their own ability for you.
But they’re not describing power. They are talking about hierarchy, about the unequal distribution of means in this culture. You can be someone who can do nothing, who is unable to effect any sort of change or work, but if you have arrogated all means — all resources, all tools, all time, all lives — if you have stolen these means from other lives, then you are able to withhold what they need and force them to do your work. However, this does not make you powerful. It makes you a good thief. You are good at stealing the work of powerful, able people.
This is not power. This is hierarchy, rank, inequality. This is theft. Parasitism.
The corruption that we are talking about is this theft. We have, I would say intentionally, confused power — ability — and force — theft — and this is the corruption. And it corrupts both sides. Obviously, taking labor, taking time, taking lives is corrupting. But having your life stolen is also corrupting. It forces you to act in desperation in order to meet your needs, to wrest back whatever life you can by any means.
But it’s worse than desperation. This system is an inversion of morality in general. It is a general and pervasive perversion. This system is designed to reward the thieves — the elites who steal work from others. Those who we name the best of us are those who do the least good. The people who do the most good are scorned if they are seen at all. Good is bad; bad is good. Good is punished; bad is rewarded. Work is stolen and the thieves name themselves powerful, the effectual agency behind all change, when they have done nothing and can do nothing, when they are, in fact, powerless. In this topsy-turvy system, we’ve lost all ability to sense right and wrong, good and bad, benevolence and harm. After all, if the thieves are high status, then theft must be good. And everything in this twisted system is tainted by this corruption of values.
Those with high status in this system are the least able to do anything themselves. They are powerless within themselves. What they have, by virtue of their rank and inheritance, is control of resources and the ability to withhold resources from others. They have property… And by controlling that property — all the means to meet needs — they can force us to do their work. This does not make them more able. It might make them less able. They are certainly not effecting any work themselves. They are taking work out of the system. They are reducing the work done because they are not doing anything. Additionally, because they are not doing anything, they are not in practice at doing anything. The less they do, the less able they become, until even if they try to effect work, they can’t. All they can do is steal our work, steal the effects of our our own powerful abilities.
This should be shaming. Instead, we reward these people with wealth and respect. Or at least the system rewards them with wealth — because they made it that way — and we pretend to respect them — because we are forced to. But this is the corruption. An elite in this system can not have a conscience— or even much conscious awareness — and a propertyless person can not be honest.
I’ve always deplored the phrase “rich and powerful”. The rich rarely have any power at all. But they want us to believe that they do. And we do believe… We give them our belief along with all our powerful abilities. What the rich have is property. Which is really just another sort of belief that we have given them. They have what we need to make our lives and they keep it from us in order to take our work. And we give them this. We allow this theft. But what if we were to take it back? The work. The belief. The means to make our lives. What if we stopped believing in hierarchy and inequality? What if we stopped believing in property? What if we remembered that power is the ability to do work? What if we remembered how powerful we are? And how weak are these parasites that name themselves rich and powerful!
We have the power. Because we do the work. And there is nothing anyone can do to stop us from walking away from this system of thievery and working for ourselves. Even force loses its effectiveness. They might kill us, but that doesn’t get their work done… However we leave the system, they lose wealth and status… Think on that. Does that sound powerful to you? It is not. And, deep in their subconscious, they know it is not. At the root of all their brazen force and blathering propaganda is the knowledge of just how weak, how powerless, they are. And they fear us.
Because we have the power. We can do the work. And our work is the change this world needs.
© Elizabeth Anker 2024
