Resource Allocation

The idea was first put in my mind by a girl I lived with at college who commented on the regimented rows of houses that make up suburbia. I could see what she meant but didn’t understand. That thought has grown.

Here is the view from my window this morning as I stay with my cousin. Beautiful in one sense but completely absurd in another. Mathematically exact delineations of space everywhere. This is the beautiful part until you realise what it means – every single identical patch of land is a single human being (or genetic line i.e. family) marking out its territory. As though we were barnacles on a floating stump of wood in the ocean, is this only as far as the human race has got?

I don’t understand it yet but what has got into us that we who share a language, a conception of the world, a culture, a knowledge, we even look the same; that we can’t even work out how to live together and default to rigid absolute cut boundaries that mark out the influence of neighbours. I saw myself and my family as dysfunctional and unable to resolve conflicts and reach agreements – it seems it is a pathology that is assumed in the fabric of our very culture!

Maybe I ask too much but I' don’t accept second best. We want the best mp3 player, car, house, wife and kids, why not start with the best way of life?

Have been arguing further on the “culture of violence” on facebook. Logically it follows that man needs to put Peace before all other delineations. Thus at its limit Peace requires that we put people before even family. It makes sense intellectually: what reason have we to put our wife and children, mother and father “before” another person who is also a mother, father, wife or child. True we owe the debt to our parents – but everything is interconnected and we owe that debt really to everyone. If a friend were to repay some of my debt to my parents on my behalf and me to his on his behalf is anything the less? Maybe some egos are dented because “my” son didn’t respect “me” – my mother might think – but this is exactly the thinking that founds the culture of violence. So my mother gets resentful at a friend helping instead of me and doesn’t see the human value of that person. And so it propagates throughout the culture right up to the Nations. The hidden violence that comes from affiliations and organisations. I commented in Facebook on the absurd situation we have internationally where US senators have a mandate only to their own people and yet whose actions affect the whole world. Precisely because we are all inter- connected it is meaningless to delineate so absolutely as we do. Above all must come the value of Peace that lays over all delineations. Like the churches of old: if a man is thirsty and needs water then give him a drink before you ask who he is, what money he has, why he is there, has he a passport, is he a criminal etc. If you believe in God isn’t it Him who does the judging and we who are reminded not to judge lest we be judged ourself?

Argument went towards “Ubuntu” – that African concept of friendliness and the observation that there is a pathology in being “sociable”. I mean that in the sense that famous, popular, high profile people have something wrong with them if they seek objective measures of their sociability – like being members of groups etc. A sociable person is just friendly to the “people” they meet irrespective of what societies they have joined or belong to. In this sense, exactly, societies are actually antisocial because they exclude as well and include people (been argued before). Social delineation is actually an antisocial structure that puts a barrier between men and women that doesn’t need to exist. Looked at like this our organised modern “society” is actually the most pathological and unnatural structure of mankind. When you meet someone there are so many layers to get through before you see “them”. The job, class, sex, race, family, politics etc. All these are trivial compared with “them”.

And so returning to the picture; altho there is no easy alternative, to comprehend there is a pathology also in this exact replication of unit of living one for each person as though we saw ourselves as replicates of each other with boundaries around each other rather than the more realistic view of us all living together in an inter-connected world where we share everything from the sky above us to the air we breathe and the language we think and write about all this in.

I should use the words on this page as a metaphor for the notion of individuality, separatedness and interconnectedness. True the page can only become a page of meaning because each word is separate and occupies its own place in each sentence and on the page. It is that separatedness that enables the words to come together as a whole… and I need join the others down stairs for breakfast rather than be separated up here with these words… shall think about that more.