Conditions of Speech
You know those moments when you have let the words slide from your tongue and wish you could grab them and haul them back inside, push them deep down until they disappear? I had one of those moments yesterday, a moment that shows how far the conditioning goes, a moment where I failed, if only briefly, my values and perpetuated a system that needs to be radically changed if we want a better world for ourselves.
My new neighbours across the back are a lovely, youngish couple, with two small children. This unusually fine weather on a Bank Holiday weekend meant I was outside under the parasol writing when the father and children were unloading some firewood. I said a friendly ‘hi’ and they all said hello in return. The children were proudly helping their dad carry chunks of wood from his van to the firewood holder.
“We’re helping, look,” said one, showing off the length of what looked like 4×4 pinewood as he carefully and clumsily carried it.
I congratulated them and said about how it was lovely that they were helping their dad. And then …
“I hope he’s paying you well,” I laughed.
The moment the words left I could feel their ugliness hanging in the air around me. A bubble of shame rose in my stomach.
How could I, a person who almost devoutly believes in helping others, say something like that. They were helping their dad, an act that is what families and communities do – they help each other. Yet here was I putting a capitalist monetary value on it.
The first reaction is your conditioning. The second is your learning.
It bugged me all afternoon and into the next morning — so I wrote about it.
Why?
Because we are not all perfect, because sharing failures helps us all be better humans in the end, and because that one sentence showed me how ingrained capitalism is — I was truly horrified. I believe in sharing and helping, I believe in the ethos of the Star Trek universe. I am an idealist.
But.
I am an idealist with a healthy dose of realism. I know that we need money to survive. I know the money-free society of Star Trek is but a pipe-dream. Yet I also know that not everything needs to be so obviously transactional.
Of course, this transactional approach, our bodies and energy and time for money, has been around for centuries. Only now it is becoming more unsustainable, the ones paying the money are expecting more while we are almost at a point where we (as a collective) have barely any more to give.
How can we change? How can we change a system so unwieldy? It will be like trying to turn an enormous tanker against high winds and tides. There’s been talk for a while about Universal Basic Income, about 4 day weeks — because humans need to rest, humans need to have time to create, to play, to ‘be’. However, I feel as long as we have this capitalist and protestant work ethic where we are only as useful as our contribution to the machine, we will not progress. And that work ethic has seeped so far into our bones that it will be a challenge to eradicate it.
I read somewhere that the first reaction is your conditioning, and the second is your learning. So I have hope for myself at least.
My therapist once described trying to change your way of thinking as akin to attempting to move a stream from its well-worn bed. Everything takes the path of least resistance. So I practise daily rerouting that stream, working against the resistance, creating new thought pathways.
This means thinking about my words, understanding why I say and think the way I do, and then — if I have failed — noting it and promising myself I will try to do better in the future.
So, that is what I will do, what I am doing. One word, one thought at a time. Will you join me on this endeavour to change our words, our thinking, and ultimately the system that has surrounded and shaped us for so long?
With kindness and coffee, Sharon
