The Kings of America
Pt. 2-The state of ownership
“I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources. As such, size is not grandeur and territory does not make a nation. The great issue is what are you going to do with these things? What is the end for which these are to be the means?
-Thomas Huxley speech at John Hopkins, 1876
“The doctrine {is} that you can do anything with your fellow-man provided you do it in the name of the market.”
-Henry Demarest Lloyd, 1894
Of course to own is to lose ownership of oneself. One becomes obsessed with what owns and only owning matters. Spiritualist Thomas Merton would write: “In hell, there is no recollection. The damned are exiled not only from God and from other men, but even from themselves.”
Whatever one owns leads to this hell and by being presented with a society of owning we have descended into an exile from nature and the world; we have become mercenaries in battle with society and existence that’s very madness drives us to lose all recollection of the existence we came from and the cultures we were as we came into existence.
This madness distorts actualness and we feel superior to what was that gave itself to us to be. I would suppose, if you believe as I do, that man created his gods, mostly in his image; then the need to become superior to others leads to the madness of believing we can own existence itself.
The absurdity of history is that the more one owns the more one needs to own. The very first cultural decline of ownership is the opposition to kings within their own cultural units…son against parent; husband against wife; sister against sister, cousins fighting for supremacy. All reflected in the actions of their gods.
Monotheism is only seemingly different; but demanding the abandonment of foreign gods,implying not monotheistic worship,but monarchtheisticism, or my god is better than your god.
But besides conflicts within the family conflicts continually arose with others and dynasties were overthrown and memories only recalling the unity of kingdom presented by the kingdoms as if they were not new governments and new kingdoms; the monarchs themselves serfs to their own kingdoms.
Democracy, American-style, but similar to other modern democratic-kingdoms has been very insecure for its owners.
Not just the slavemasters who had to “free” their slaves, but the powers of the financial kingdoms have throughout shifted in its dynastic princes. The Morrises and Clintons and Adams no longer control American wealth—nor do any of the great robber baron families;though the Morgan bank still exists in name, it is a kingdom whose original dynasty has been overthrown.
But kingdoms, including the kingdoms within America are always in jeopardy of collapse and therefore their propensity for continuously expanding their own authority is boundlessly continuously imperative to insure their own survival.
They therefore dominate by creating a collective lack of memory in order to perpetuate both their invincibility and their inevitability to maintain all that they wish to own in a hell that is unable to disassociate one baron from another.
And a desire by those who don’t possess as much to emulate. Ah! woe is the emulator of those who need so much because possession is the domain of total insecurity.