“If we all do a little more than our share, then there can be abundance.” - Kyogen Carlson, Zen teacher and late abbot of Dharma Rain Zen Center (Portland, Oregon) “I’ve worked my @$$ off for everything I’ve got!” - a random, proverbial “Small Business Owner” The two quotes above express practically diametrically opposed views regarding the origins of prosperity. The first, like the second, while also emphasizing the importance of individual effort, nevertheless implies a lightly held expectation regarding any personal rewards.

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” Τhis aphorism from a classical Roman military text purports to express a dubious sort of truth that is more nearly the opposite of reality. Naturally, though, this does not prevent it from being a favorite chestnut of reactionaries everywhere. The broader truth, though, is that holding low expectations of others is a great way of assuring that they sink to them – or worse.

In many varieties of Mahayana Buddhism, there are said to be six distinct “realms” or planes of existence for sentient beings. They are: the God realm, the Angry God or Demon realm, the Human realm, the Animal realm, the Hungry Ghost realm, and the Hell realm. Whether taken literally or metaphorically (it is sometimes said that a person can pass through all six in the space of a single hour!), these realms figure prominently in many accounts of Buddhist theology.

In the bourgeois version of utopia, proletarians are meant to be shiny, happy people, cheerfully producing and consuming for the benefit of the master class. Or, failing that, there’s option 2, patiently and quietly awaiting their opportunity to do so in the reserve army of labor. Or failing that yet again, there’s option 3, quietly expiring and being promptly disposed of in an inconspicuous but utmost sanitary pauper’s cemetery. In the real world, of course, nothing unfolds with such immaculate delicacy.

An irrigated agricultural field needs to be level to produce an optimal yield. If it’s too uneven, then water won’t get to all the young plants that need it, but instead, too much will collect at the low points, uselessly and even harmfully overwatering them, while little or none will reach the higher points, starving those plants of the moisture they need to thrive. And as it turns out, one of the most promising modern technological tools for potentially saving double digit percentages of energy and water resources, and improving agricultural yields, is laser levelling.

Here are the fruits of a much lauded, purely “practical education”, aimed at equipping you with monetizable skills for the “job market” that can afford you a reasonable hope of paying off a mountain of personal college debt, and free of excessive, non-remunerative and “time wasting” dalliances in the humanities and the liberal arts and such subjects as history, political economy, political science, etc: At my neighborhood association’s last board meeting, a neighbor who showed up (not a board member) piped up in response to my proposal for the board to adopt a position urging developers to opt for heat pumps in place of climate killing methane gas hookups, saying that I “shouldn’t be so biased against ’natural gas’, because it can be produced with biodigesters that are 100% renewable energy!

USAnians view the rest of the world through a very narrow slit – often even those who indulge in a certain amount of travel, whether for business or leisure. And like a diffraction grating, the light that passes back through presents a very distorted picture of the objects it reflects back to the viewer. A recent debater discussing proposed reforms of Portland’s form of government admitted he had “never heard of proportional representation” (even though it has featured most prominently in high-minded debates for at least the past seventy five years, surrounding the defects of the form of democracy prevailing in the United States, since long before “Citizens United”).

Today, there are two “major parties”. They are the neoliberal capitalists, on the one hand, and the ultrareactionaries and neofascists on the other. Neoliberal capitalists are the party of the “bad old days”. Ultrareactionaries and neofascists are the party of the “good old days”. Reactionary, ahistorical narratives of “progress”, which attribute it to various kinds of semi-divine “providence”, or rational, meritocratic decisions by the economically and politically powerful, or the reliable prevalence of “enlightened self-interest”, are omnipresent in bourgeois discourse.

Slavoj Zizek once quipped about the supposedly recent emergence of a “lumpen bourgeoisie”, a riff on Marx’s observations about the sub-class he referred to as the “lumpen proletariat” (ie, otherwise working class people condemned to what more recently has been called the “informal” sector, who are chronically unemployed or underemployed, and serve as part of the “reserve army of labor”, even if they are never fully integrated into formal, wage-based capitalism and its working class).

From the capitalist standpoint, the beauty of the “lumpen proletariat” is, they are a strong disciplinary tool to use against the next upward rung of the working class, but, unlike the latter, without presenting a realistic demographic threat of subversion. To the extent that the indefinite growth in their numbers represents a threat at all, it is purely a security threat, not a political one! “Lumpen” are erased from political participation, even where they are technically “allowed to vote” (eg, leaving aside disenfranchised felons).