Doers and Bureaucrats
Out of the billions of people who comprise the human race, a few actually do something. They are doers.
The rest spring into action once a doer does something—to follow, criticize, study, rank, label, catalogue, legislate, anthologize, punish, reward, or interpret, and in most cases collect the proceeds. They are bureaucrats.
Anybody who tells you that what you think, do, write, or feel has already been thought, done, written, or felt is a bureaucrat, because they keep up with that shit. Everybody knows it’s all been thought, done, written, and felt.
And anybody who in any field of endeavor—for example, art—tells you always do this, never do that, avoid this, imitate that, is a bureaucrat and doesn’t realize that when you can list rules of creativity you are dealing with a dead art form. Bureaucrat intelligence is never original but primarily the ability to detect a match, or the lack of one. Thinking like a bureaucrat turns the continuous flow of reality into compartments and consigns the meaning of life to the superficial. The joy of life, sometimes its terror (can’t have one without the other), is discovering something for which there is no compartment in your mind. Bureaucrats will have none of that.
And speaking of technological utopianism, it is the illusion that life is essentially composed of segments, and that we could live forever going from one to another; that, as long as we have the elements we want in a situation, life will be full and good. But who could have foretold that the heart grows old? In fact, our existence is an arc—like everything it moves from a beginning to an end, which is the source of its meaning. The idea that technology can change the terms of life (cure death!) is as vacuous as any utopianism has ever been. Life as we experience it is impossible to continue in an unchanging state. Nature kills, and tries again. This is why most older people, if you ask them if they would do it over, say no. They would prefer their progeny to do it for them because this is how nature works: death and rebirth. Even if that creates horrors of its own in the Little League bleachers.
But can people living on planets untilted on their axes, and therefore without seasons, conceive of rebirth?
October 3, 2018