wars in vanity, sweet or sour

It seems like the “post-modern” world, such that it is, spends a great deal of time trying to define things that are well beyond the scope of definition. In fact, the post-modernist movement in its purist form is nothing more than bureaucracy from a philosophical point of view, as it is founded on the principle of studying the effects of an intellectual movement while simultaneously purporting to be one. I’m all for the pursuit of knowledge and clarity, but like many deconstructivist architects, I don’t really understand why you can’t build a weird-looking building without being labeled a deconstructivist by some pompous scholar of postmodern thought. Similarly, you should be able to have your opinions heard by others as your opinions and not the opinions of a postmodernist movement or some other body of nameless speakers; or to put it simply: just because you’re a grain of sand doesn’t mean you came from the beach.

As a realist, I have a hard time seeing any advantages or disadvantages to picking apart the human brain for the purposes of being able to explain it to someone else on paper down the road. This is because I’m about people and the effect that our work has on people. There’s no reason to invest more effort into something than you will gain in the end, but quite often, the end objective is either ambiguously defined or abstract in nature. You see this a lot in community services and public opinion when a large group of people will band together with some absurd goal in mind like “cleaning up the streets” or “cracking down on homelessness.” With goals that cover such a broad spectrum of variables, you inevitably require more people to administer them and the more people that get involved with any one project, the more you end up losing sight of the original goal. Of course, if the goal is unattainable from the git-go, losing sight of it isn’t really the issue and we’ve engaged in the ultimate futile exercise of keeping masses of people extremely busy for little to no gain except the satisfaction and pride they get from their own work. This applies to the study of philosophical movements quite readily too, but it is rarely studied (probably to avoid perpetuating the bureaucracy; the last thing we need is some guy writing an analysis of the effects of the effects of a movement on another movement).

Like I said, I’m a realist, so with everything in life, I like to see how it affects people on a personal level. I’m not about to sit back and write about how “people” behave and how they change as a group because I know very well that we are all individuals and although there are noticeable behavioural trends to be seen in numbers, announcing them and discussing them doesn’t really have any bearing on how we behave as individuals. I could draw up a pretty little line graph illustrating the decline in religious participation around the world over the last hundred years, but that doesn’t mean that a religious individual is any less faithful than he would have been otherwise.

For instance, there are legions of people devoted to studying postmodernism and debating its cultural applications, definitions and related concepts. When any one of those people wakes up in the morning, odds are they still brush their teeth, still tie their shoelaces, still lock their doors when they leave home and have generic introspective thoughts about all of these activities that all the postmodernist study in the world can’t get rid of. In fact, to refer back to the bureaucratic process, it may very well slow down tangible productivity in your day by spending a lot of time and energy on virtually nothing, overthinking the behaviour of others in a postmodern context and making decisions based on vague trends in thought process that other parties are not even privy to and quite frankly, don’t want to be.

The problem is that I am also an altruist, and to be altruistic and realistic at the same time is thankless work; whoever said that you only get what you give probably ended up getting a lot more than they actually deserved and didn’t realize how lucky they really were. Worse yet, I’m an altruist and a realist who works within the framework of a bureaucracy every day and it forces me to de-value nearly all of my work-related input and ride above the job, focusing instead on how the end result benefits me in my personal life. Don’t get me wrong, I do get a certain sense of job satisfaction out of completing the occasional project but it’s my nature as a realist that makes me feel a little bit deflated every time because I know for certain that there is little to no effect on individual people despite all the time I’ve put into it. Those that I work with seem to have been a little washed out by the red tape and they’ll see the completion of the project as the goal, whereas I’m stuck thinking that the “goal” is really to improve something for people—to make something better in the lives of those I work with, ya know.

So sure, you can draft a huge blueprint to renovate your kitchen and the presentation will be on beautiful new reams of paper with bulletproof organizational plans and reference material galore; but until you get to make a sandwich on your new countertop space some summer afternoon, I don’t believe the project is done. For me, my portion of the work is finished long before you even slice the bread and without actually seeing an end result (or more often than not having good reason to believe that there is no end result), the effect is erosive—it does something to you and I can’t exactly explain what it is, but this nameless sensation is really the feature subject of this article.

I was talking to my grandmother a little while back and she explained the same sensation to me in a different context, but I understood right away. She explained that while she was still in the work force, she paid into the federal unemployment insurance fund for 35 years, had a lot of hard times, moved to a province that had considerably fewer jobs available with the intent of collecting unemployment for some time, but was told that she was not eligible. There are reasons for this on paper and rules in place governing who can and cannot collect unemployment based on where you live, but whether what she was doing was right or wrong is not the issue; it’s the principle of the thing, and she said exactly what I said: “It does something to you.” When you’re so honest for so long and spend 35 years paying into an unemployment fund, never ever collecting from it and then being told that you’re not allowed because you moved to a have-not province, it just leaves you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Meanwhile, there are people who are self-employed or who have “arrangements” with their paying authority who will work for 10 months and then collect unemployment for the other 2 every single year. So who’s the real winner here?

She also cited another experience from a welfare office several decades ago after her husband had transformed into an alcoholic of home-breaking proportions but she didn’t nearly have the means to leave him with four kids in tow. One day, presumably when she realized she had no other choice, my grandmother walked her four kids down to a welfare office and stood in line armed with a resolve to be completely honest about the situation. She basically told the person behind the counter: “Look I’m sorry, we have no food, no money, my husband’s not working and if this doesn’t work, I don’t even know what I’m going to do.” They gave her nothing and she walked her four kids back home, but that’s not the part that is debilitating in the same thankless way that I’ve been describing. The thing is, the very next day, she went back to that very same welfare office, talked to a different clerk and lied: “My husband left me…four kids to take care of…no income…” And they gave her some money.

It just does something to you.

It shattered my grandmother’s reality, I think. When everything that you have been brought up to believe is right and ethically sound just gets mercilessly pissed on in a very real situation, I don’t believe you ever recover completely. She described her stunned and bemused disbelief at getting money for telling a direct lie and being turned away with four kids for telling the truth with a kind of resignation that makes me sad that she has, and maybe never will, live the life that such an incredible person deserves.

I guess this is why I’m an altruist but as the world becomes much more self-involved and independent, it gets harder and harder to convince people of this. Everyone is so suspicious of everyone else’s intentions that it seems like there’s not a soul around who would possibly do something that only benefits someone other than themselves. Is it really so hard to believe that you can gain some personal satisfaction out of helping other people? Is that not selfish enough to be true? What do I have to do to convince the average person that my intentions are sincere?

It’s an uphill climb that my grandmother has been trekking all her life, and I’m right on her heels wearing rollerskates without the foggiest idea of how to make it easier.